How to build a brilliant recruitment website

We’ve just finished work on a new site for Pure Resourcing Solutions. And without blowing too hard on our collective trumpets, we have to admit, we’re pretty proud of the result.

‘Cooperative, supportive, positive, creative’ was how Senior Operations Coordinator, Nadia Mullins-Hills described her experience of working with us.  

We’ve had years of practice building this type of site - and that helps. But what really enabled us to nail this one, was Pure’s commitment to building a new site that puts the candidate’s needs front and centre.

While this sounds easy in theory, cutting content that doesn't serve your target audience can generate some lengthy internal debate. (As the late, great Steve Jobs once said, ‘simple can be harder than complex.’)

So, while we could bore you with a blow-by-blow account of everything we did to get the site up and running, we figure that if you really want to find out about the science bit, you’ll get in touch with us anyway.

Instead, we thought we’d share 5 things we think every brilliant recruitment site should deliver on:

1. JOBS

It’s all about the jobs.

But giving your visitors the best chance of finding a relevant match, without overwhelming them with too many results, is key to your site’s success.

Pure’s site allows job seekers to search, browse and filter results across a range of different criteria, such as salary or job type. Visitors can even type in their own keywords to see a dropdown list of any roles that match - or part match - what they’re searching for.

2. AUDIENCE

Visitors to your site aren’t looking to set up home with you, so be brave and ditch the lengthy ‘about us’ sections on your values and charity work.

Tell them enough to reassure them that you’re a real organisation with professionals who can get them a job - and that’s it.

If your website is slick, they’ll assume you are too.  

3. SPEED

No one wants to waste valuable job-hunting time figuring out if they’ve come to the right place.  

For Pure’s site we used the same software used by Facebook (React) to load pages with lightening speed. And to help make the process even quicker, visitors can create a shortlist of favourites and apply for them all at the same time.

4. MOBILE

Half the folks looking for a job do so on their phone or tablet these days. What’s more Google will punish you with a lowly ranking if you don’t go responsive, so we always start the design process with mobile first.

5. DATA

If you’re a recruiter you’re probably paying a ton of money to external job boards each month.

To work out if you’re getting value for money, you'll need to know who’s looking at your site, where they’re coming from and what they’re doing when they get there.

And of course, any information collected by your website should feed back to your in-house database without duplicate data sitting in two places.

Pure’s site new site does all this and more, does yours? If not contact us and see how we can help.