The Best Websites Power Recruiters
We design staffing websites integrated with technology, driving staffing agency growth. Simple right? To design super functional, high performing websites that convert and drive ROI is a process we know well. It’s not always that straightforward. Some staffing agencies see their website as means of validation for existing prospects or a ‘vanity showpiece’ rather than an integral driver of their business. Your website is part of your capital expenditure as well as your operational expenditure – but understanding why your Cap-ex should should give you great ROI, a meaningful uplift in revenue and increases in productivity. Usually, small to medium sized agencies have very little experience, expertise or time to implement new staffing technology. That’s where we help. Everyday. Whatever the issue is with your staffing business, we go can usually recommend a technology solution to make that issue go away. If you like the sound of it, we go through a rigorous and thorough review to outline an achievable, affordable and effective technology led strategy to achieve your business goals and update your business and recruitment process.
Focused Staffing Website Design
Your Candidate Sources
Most recruiters use tools such as LinkedIn or job boards to search and mine quality candidates to headhunt for their active roles. Indeed or Adzuna as well as thousands of other niche job boards to source candidates and quality resumes. Meanwhile, job posting and aggregation tools, such as Broadbean, idibu, are used to send out job adverts to several job boards.
This used to work and work really well. However, for many sectors such as digital, professional services such as accountancy, healthcare or legal, it’s currently an employer driven market, meaning there are lots of candidates but not enough good jobs for them to start in. However, quality always wins, the cream always rises to the top and so do the best staffing websites in their niche.
Through regular, scheduled conversations with our clients, we routinely discuss how they drive traffic to their website and exactly where the resumes and applications they receive are coming from. Which channels are the generating interviews and placements? We routinely optimize different channels such as search engines, performance media as well as technology, driving productivity and return on investment. We push all our client jobs up to a score of job aggregators such as Talent.com, Indeed or Adzuna. Truth is, each aggregator works well for different roles… some have fantastic response rates and strong quality candidates consistently for specific sectors whereas others, shine in different sectors and locations. One aggregator is not really much better than the other, just the audiences that use them are different, there are nuances and slight differences as to the audiences targeted.
Some staffing websites might show strong performance with job applications via ‘organic traffic’ in a month, that’s great. (Google classes any non-paid for ads as organic traffic) However, Google often places traffic via indeed.com in with the organic traffic results. It does this because Indeed ‘scrapes’ all websites with jobs on them to pull through on to their website. While it’s great that indeed.com gives staffing websites the exposure, it also means the website isn’t performing as well as you thought it was.
The majority of goal completions or conversions on client sites can come through different channels such as search engines, Indeed or Adzuna. In fact, after looking more closely at your applications, there may be far fewer organic or direct applications via your website than first thought. We track the performance of all your channels in our staffing website design portfolio, split out your traffic with different goals and filter them to help us understand what traffic is really making its way to your site organically. We set up all your goal conversions and tracking for you too, as we have a vested interest in making sure your staffing website performs and has a great ROI. We constantly review activity, site metrics and disavow toxic links or clean down critical errors. This proactive maintenance helps your website work harder and means we can iterate your staffing website design forward. We want you to stay with us beyond your initial contract period and for our team to be considered an integral part of your mission critical technology and infrastructure. We do what we can to service staffing agencies by being proactive and responsive, offering considered solutions to drive your business forward. We want your business to grow organically, sustainably and substantially.
The Power of Performance Analytics
In an unprecedented market like we are in now, post-Covid 19, you’re only as good as the candidates on your database. But you’re also only as good as the advanced technology solutions you’re using to find those candidates and mine your database effectively. How much “gold” is there in your database that your consultants just can’t find quickly enough? Are candidates you’re harvesting off job boards already in your database but their information simply out of date? The beauty about harvesting your own data better, smarter, and faster is that they are less likely to be part of the search that your competitors are screening to win your candidate submission with your client.
Working with technology, you can do a lot more with your existing data using automation. Technology such as Recii takes care of all the repetitive and time-consuming recruitment processes, so your staffing team can focus on what they’re best at – building relationships and placing more candidates.
General feedback on the quality of applications to advertised jobs on job boards is “The quality of the resumes are poor”, “resumes and job seeker profiles can often be out of date” “The job seeker has already been contacted several times by other staffing companies” or worse, “My client has already seen the resume via another staffing agency”.
The only way to beat your competition is to have a strong and unique database. You need to mine and discover candidates that others aren’t finding. Staffing Future believes the route to market for staffing agencies is changing, becoming less reliant on job boards, and more reliant on staffing technology and a technology solution to allow your business to grow revenue. To do that, recruiters need to harness technology, implement them effectively, and let technology do a lot of the heavy lifting previously done by your recruitment consultants.
Not Business As Usual
Usually, staffing websites might be used as a job board, perhaps with stale jobs or jobs that aren’t visible on search engines with poorly indexed URL. They’re either poorly optimized, badly written for bots and not visible, not submitted to search engines and probably don’t reflect the candidate flow that your staffing agency needs. Job boards and staffing technology providers constantly invest in their own technologies, marketing and audiences, engaging with them on a personal level at scale, Unfortunately, if you’re not proactively working on your website constantly, you’re probably going to see very little return on your investment. It’s a tough call to shift away from this set up but the rewards can be considerable.
Optimize Your Staffing Website
Job boards are still a viable route to market for candidate sourcing. Your website can be a whole lot more than a poorly performing job board. Your website should be your own branded candidate and client prospecting tool and lead generation machine. Staffing websites need to be integrated with the right technology and at the heart of everything you do online, just as your ATS is at the heart of everything you do internally.
Staffing Website Design
Our in house design and staffing website build team have found the best ways to attract both active and passive candidates, and help you fill your vacancies faster. There’s a lot to this and it’s a challenge to do this well. It’s an art to blend the science, data, users and technology with your business goals. That’s precisely what Staffing Future are great at. We look at your business issues and propose staffing technology, experience and expertise to solve your most pressing business problems.
Attract ‘Active Candidates’ To Your Website
We class active candidates as those who are actively looking for a new role. You want to be found by these candidates as they’re ripe for a career move and can bring revenue fast. To satisfy this need, we carry out detailed search engine research and can spin up hundreds of “job landing pages” similar to Indeed, targeting “long tail” searches and specific jobs and locations that you continually need talent for.
SEO For Staffing Websites
Optimising your website for search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and Job Aggregators means your staffing website is found where your ideal target candidates are looking for jobs. Targeting passive candidates and new business / new client leads is also possible by creating blogs for SEO to attract, engage and convert desirable traffic on your website.
We research the search terms everyone is looking at, tell you how many searches there are over 12 months, how competitive those search terms are and how much it would cost if you were to advertise for that click. That’s smart because it means you can start to assign value to your traffic, establish an ROI for your staffing website design and you know what traffic you’re chasing and why. This helps answer the “So what?” question about traffic, website performance and why staffing agencies should do content marketing for example.
Technical SEO for Staffing Websites
Most staffing business owners don’t really care if something’s not working if they don’t understand it or they don’t understand how it impacts their business. This is where we help. We set up all your goals, analytics and proactively clean down errors as and when they appear and disavow toxic links for you. We run your tracking and site performance monitoring so we can see where site errors are, how many toxic or broken links are on your website and any missing files. often before clients are even aware there was an issue. This routine and proactive maintenance of your website positively influences your domain authority, search engine ranking and improves your website performance. Your site is accessible to search engines, in great health and we push all your pages up to Google automatically so you don’t have to wait for the bots to crawl your site. We submit all your newly published jobs, content and site pages to Google instantly too. This means your content marketing is relevant, fresh, visible and converts. Ask us for a free website review.
Great content helps quality and relevant candidate flow and new business leads. Depending on client requirements, we can also set up a reverse job board for your team, integrated with your ATS – pulling active data out of your ATS and distributing it to your prospects and clients. This is where you use profiles and blank out certain data fields like contact details to use as a prospecting tool for lead generation with your clients. It’s letting the technology do all the hard work for you and engage with clients that you’re unaware of and are actively considering a new hire.
We take project lead integrating your staffing technology stack and setup with your website to ensure higher productivity, data integrity and reduce errors. This helps drive efficiencies in your recruitment process to harvest more leads faster and make more money. By developing and working up progressive apply processes for clients, not only are our staffing websites designed beautifully, they are also highly functional. Conversion rates run between 15% and 30% and for some clients and as we are targeting specific keywords to attract passive candidates, and new business leads, website ROI is really strong. All your site content combines to create a positive brand experience and allows you to create the foundations to build your brand, your business, generate website traffic, convert visitors, improve productivity, increase speed and accuracy as well as to increase revenue. Google isn’t just a place filled with your competitors, it’s usually the start point for each and every job seeker to begin their job search. How many page one positions does your website have? How about your competitors? We can track all of this and share this data with you to inform your decision making.
Google for Jobs
All our jobs are formatted correctly in the Google for Jobs schema and your site will start to see traffic and applications off the back of this.
Google lists the original publisher of your job first , and other places you are advertising your job on sites like Indeed or a job board after your “original job” listing. Google likes original and relevant content to serve up in searches – so if you’re posting regularly, in similar job titles, your site should start to see a Halo effect on relevant traffic and rank higher for similar terms. If your pages are converting visitors and Google thinks they’re finding what they’re looking for on your site, that will help with your ranking too. If you’re including a job title and location as well as salary in the site meta data and page structure, your site will also rank well for the “long tail” and local searches that are most relevant for your staffing agency.
Google is constantly looking to find a quicker and more efficient way to help their users and ensuring you’re featured on Google for Jobs means that you can capture candidates looking for a new job. This may be monetised at some point, but in the meantime, you should do all you can to ensure your jobs are found on the world’s biggest search engine.
Job boards and Job Aggregators
You shouldn’t forget about job boards and job aggregators. If you can see that a job board is working well for your brand by driving traffic and converting well, this should be a part of your candidate acquisition strategy. Job boards, as well as job aggregators are key to driving strong applications to fill your vacancies faster. We integrate with a score of job aggregators such as Neuvoo, Indeed or Joblift or as well as all the multi-posting tools such as Broadbean or Idibu staffing agencies use to advertise their jobs.
Staffing Future believe in building your brand equity or brand value and directing candidate and client traffic to your website. This means they could apply for other jobs on your site and they register with your business, sign up for job alerts or we can target them with “in-browser notifications” when other relevant jobs appear that they were looking at and they’re not even on your site. They don’t even have to be on a job board or a job aggregator anymore for us to target passive candidates when they’re thinking about a new role. This “retargeting” and “remarketing” activity is driven by advanced technology solutions specially developed for staffing agencies.
Attracting ‘Passive Candidates’
We know from working with the best staffing agencies and recruiters, the best candidates are not usually those actively searching for a new job. The very best people for your role may be ‘in the market’ and not ‘on the market’. Recruiters need to take a different and proactive approach to get in front of these desirable, fee generating candidates.
Content Marketing
To put your brand in front of passive candidates you have to talk about something of interest to them. You need to know their sector and their industry inside and out, have a great content to generate an audience and engage with those in and around that sector.
Adopting a Content Marketing strategy puts you in front of the very best candidates and positions you as a thought leader in your niche with clients and prospects.
An example might be if you’re working in the healthcare industry and you run regular meet-ups and events with leading industry partners and clients. In the run-up to, during and after the meet-ups recruiters and staffing agency leaders would generate a piece of content around the event topics to drive both candidates attending and those who couldn’t attend to the website. This creates “evergreen content£ you can use to rank for specific traffic and positions you as an expert. You can also re-purpose this to create lead magnets or help your site rank for different search terms. You can then push this content, videos, articles, webinars etc… to your database using marketing automation tools such as Herefish, Sense or Force24 and enrich the data in your ATS for your teams without them lifting a finger.
This is smart marketing, with marketing and sales teams collaborating closely together, using the resources at your disposal to compete with the established job boards and aggregators such as Indeed and Google For Jobs. Using social media automation tools and pushing your content out to your networks also makes you different and stand out. This marketing activity makes your business visible and attractive. Consistent digital marketing along these lines also helps position you as the experts in your niche. The “Go-to-Guys”. Add in branded jobs, 3rd party news articles automatically shared to your company pages and profiles and you start to get an idea of what you and your team could be doing. Using technology correctly, your jobs are visible, consultants save time, your ATS has better data, you increase productivity and make more money. Jack Copeland, CEO of Staffing Future comments “Staffing agency owners have better visibility of how their business is performing, see an uplift in productivity, resume submissions, interviews, placements and profit, whilst reducing time to hire and administrative burden for their team.”
If you want to become the go-to place for insight and opinion in your sectors you are recruiting for, you need to do more than just advertise jobs. Crowdsourcing content from clients and candidates, running polls, sharing data and deriving insights from the data at your fingertips (lifted out of your ATS) highlights your unique understanding of your sector. Your proposition is a lot more interesting and your website more productive than just listing jobs. It’s more than a validation tool. By creating great content that appeals to your desired clients and candidates means website statistics improve. Unique visitors, time on site, pages per visit all go green (increase). Our clients typically see the time on the site increased as well as the number of pages visited increased. Visitors invest more time in your content, your brand and your people than ever before and take action. (Resume submission, Inquiries, Comment, job submissions) rather than consultants aimlessly publishing jobs for the sake of it to get the task off their to do list.
The quality of the candidates generated from the best staffing agency websites is usually better than job boards. Job boards tend to attract the most active candidates on the market. Applications are usually high in volume but lower in quality. Although some folks might not be applying for specific jobs on your website, (mainly because they can’t find them) once you begin to optimise your jobs and targeting desirable traffic, staffing consultants begin to have more meaningful interactions and conversations with your candidates. Typically, these applications have a higher “customer lifetime value” when converted into an interview and a placement. It’s the new digital headhunting. This indirect approach means a cooperative and symbiotic relationship between sales and marketing, consultants and management.
Direct, inbound leads from clients usually also increase from those who have seen your content and respect what you’re doing. They’ll be keen for you to fill their open positions. Showing you care, understand and interact with the communities you recruit for is of a much greater value than having a load of jobs advertised. The successful recruiters and staffing agencies do both.
Social Media (Owned and Paid)
Creating great content, staffing agencies need a way of publishing that and getting it in front of candidates. By building up your social following on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram as well as interacting consistently in Groups, Lists, Forums and Communities gets you visible.
If you don’t have a strong following yet, don’t worry social media is still an option. It’ll just take a little time to yield a result but your target audiences are there. You can use technology and automation to help build your following too. Paid advertising or performance media across each of these social media platforms allows you to target your desired candidates and clients. Advertising options and targeting across these performance media channels include:
Location, Job title, Age, Interests, Income, as well as other audiences you can download from your database and they’ll copy them and look for similar “look-a-like” audiences. Although you wouldn’t usually associate some of these channels with your typical ‘job search journey’ getting your brand, your vacancy or your proposition in front of the relevant people before they even begin to look for a job or when they’re hiring can have a massive result. Targeting and remarketing can get quite technical but it’s all about reaching your potential candidates at the right time, in the right place.
Our experience tells us most recruitment companies don’t leverage alternative media channels, meaning they’re missing out on a huge pool of ideal candidates. There is a lot of media out there and programmatic buying allows you to target specific audiences proactively and aggressively. Useful if you have client deadlines.
Email & Text Outreach
Your outbound email activity has surely evolved from blasting your database from time to time. Technology allows you to create inbound campaigns, nurture talent and automate a lot of repetitive tasks to enrich your data and maintain the health of the data in your ATS. Your emails should be personalized and relevant. Using technology such as Sense, Herefish or Force24, often yield a huge return for recruiters if set up correctly. Gone are the days of doing huge, dumb email blasts to the database and hoping someone will reply. you can be more progressive (or aggressive) with other outreach technology such as CloudCall as well. Personalized, relevant content, using context and knowing what stage they are at in their customer journey is key now. Email and Text and real time messaging for recruiters is a fantastic way to generate and engage candidates. it’s now really easy to stay in touch with candidates you’ve worked with in the past. Same for your clients. When was the last time you emailed the person you placed a role with 14 months ago? What as the last piece of meaningful outreach you did that helped them and improved their perception of you and your staffing business?
How To Track Website ROI
If you’re going to build your brand and invest in your website as a stand-alone channel, not just a job board, you need to make sure it’s delivering a return on investment. Tracking of your website activity and traffic is key to creating a decent ROI.
Your CRM – whether you use Bullhorn, JobAdder, TrackerRMS or Vincere you should be tracking what candidate resumes you receive and where they’re coming from. This is sometimes a manual process for your consultants uploading them to the CRM and tagging them, or they may feed and tag directly from the source. If your data onboarding and data enrichment is not automated, you’ll be getting errors and poor data, using resources unnecessarily and won’t be efficient.
Using Data, Analytics & Insights
Your ATS should be recording all your data sets automatically and you should be able to track and trace candidates back to the source. Using Google Analytics on your website can help you figure out how your website converts and which channel they came from. e.g. how many jobs have been applied for, how many candidates have registered with your agency. Your Content Management System, like Futurebuilder and your staffing website designer should collect all the data via the website to allow you to review which candidates have been placed and from where.
Staffing Agencies Websites Drive Business
Having your own website in this digital first age is essential to grow your staffing agency. It’s central to growing your value in your business, positioning you with clients, being discovered by candidates and engaging with your target sectors and audiences effectively. If you’re thinking “Where shall i start?” get in touch with the staffing website design experts. We “walk the walk” and “talk the talk”, cutting all the BS and get to the point. Watch this video presentation from Staffing Hub live where Jack Copeland, speaking to 200 or so staffing business owners in the room, walked them through “How to Scale Faster With Technology and Automation“.