This guest blog from Volcanic will help you to make the decisions you need to make when choosing you start up website builder platform.
There are several things to take into consideration when choosing a suitable website builder platform for your start-up recruitment business.
Your agency will need to establish itself in a crowded marketplace and build its online presence to help you connect with candidates and clients.
With this in mind, it can be helpful to work with a dedicated recruitment website platform that is likely to give the biggest impact for your initial investment. Whilst you build your candidate database from scratch it is important that you are able to maximise all the visitors come to your website. The inbuilt features developed with industry expertise will be designed to optimise the candidate journey, helping you convert passive jobseekers to placed candidates.
Here are our top tips for choosing a website builder platform that will help your start-up recruitment business take off.
1. Decide on the right features for your startup recruitment agency website
Before you reach out to website platform providers, we recommend thinking about the scope of your project and the needs and challenges of your start-up business.
Some questions that you might consider are:
Design
– What are your brand values that can be digitally conveyed?
– Do you have some photography of your people and office, or will you be using stock photography or vector type imagery?
Database Integration
– Do you need your website to integrate with your recruitment CRM?
– Will you need any other integrated technology such as a recruitment cms, multi job board posters or Apply with LinkedIn?
Job Applications
– How can candidates sign up for job alerts?
– Can you SEO-optimise open roles to increase the impact of your posts?
Candidate Portal
– Can candidates self-manage their application to decrease your admin time?
– Will candidates have one place to interact with your jobs?
Social Sharing
– Can consultants share jobs easily from your site to social channels?
– What candidate attraction methods can be built in?
- Choose a provider that specialises in building recruitment websites
We recommend looking at providers that specialise in recruitment websites.
Some of the providers you’ll probably find in your search are:
- Us here at Access Volcanic
- Staffing Futures
- Bold Identities
- RecWebs
- Strategies
- Reverse Delta
- Shazamme
Not all of these will build your website on a recruitment platform. Some will use WordPress, for example, which means that you will not benefit from functionality upgrades that are rolled out automatically to all platform users.
Here’s what you might want to think about when choosing a provider:
- What level of ongoing customer support do they offer? Is this included within the cost of your website, or monthly fees, or will there be ad hoc additional costs when you need help?
- Will the templates suit your project? Is there an opportunity to go for a more bespoke design if this is what you ultimately require?
- How long will it take to build your website if they are having to start from scratch every time?
- Does their portfolio show work with agencies like yours (size, specialism, geography)?
- Does the platform have the right integrations for you?
- How and where will your website be hosted? Are there any additional costs for this?
- What is the scale of their organisation?
- Can they offer you other recruitment technology to help with your start-up, such as a recruitment CRM so you can minimise the number of suppliers you need to deal with?
- Are they able to support multiple languages if you have this need?
If you’d prefer to go with another website builder that’s not specific to recruitment, popular choices are:
- WordPress
- Umbraco
- Wix
- Squarespace
- Weebly
These website builders are likely to lack some core functionality that will help address an agency’s needs and may need some extra tweaks to work as recruitment websites. Consider asking how these providers will handle:
- Candidate attraction
- Candidate portals
- Application forms
- Integration with your CRM
- Content management
As a recruitment start-up, your business has unique challenges. Other people in the same boat will be able to share their experiences. Reach out to your networks or ask your chosen recruitment website partner to provide some recent examples of websites they have built for start-up agencies.
- Choose a platform that provides exceptional candidate and client user experience
A phrase you might have heard is “recruitment is about relationships.”
One part of that relationship is how people interact with your recruitment website design. User experience (UX) means everything that someone would see, click, or think on the site.
You may not have considered this part of your business strategy. But as website designers, we think that being considerate of candidates’ and clients’ user experience will make your brand stand out.
Some things that we think help recruitment website UX are:
– Job boards and job feeds to get updates with no extra clicks
– Candidate application forms to fill in data easily
– Social media sharing to simplify posting new roles
– Candidate portals to help onboarding
– Responsive site design that works on any device
Accessible website design helps all the people involved in your business. It could be a consultant increasing placements with social share. Or maybe a candidate finding the right role with a saved search.
No matter who it is, the right website features can make your agency easier to work with.
Book a demo of our recruitment website platform today
Read more from Volcanic on How to Choose the Right Website Platform for your Start Up Recruitment Agency.
