Designing a Recruitment Website: 5 Essential Design Tips To Keep In Mind

Need a new recruitment website?

Designing a recruitment website can be a daunting task. How do you even know where to start!?

When designing a recruitment website, it's important to focus on the three main types of users you'll have, mainly candidates, prospects, and then the smaller audience of users who may want to work with you at your recruitment agency.

How do you go about doing that? Well, one primary method is to use very clear calls to action, or CTA's, to channel the user right from the beginning to the correct section of the website - be that the job search or the services section for example.

It's important for recruitment websites to be attractive, intuitive, and user-friendly so that potential candidates can easily find job postings and submit their applications.

We always talk about having to answer three main questions as the prospective user:

What do they do?

How does it benefit me?

What do I do next?

If the user can answer all three, then there's a chance they might just stick around long enough to find out more.

To help ensure that your recruitment website, or staffing agency website is successful, there are five essential web design tips to keep in mind. These web design tips include creating a visually appealing design, optimising the recruitment website's searchability, making the application process easy, ensuring the website is mobile-friendly, and taking advantage of social media. By following these five tips, you can create a recruitment website that will attract and engage potential candidates and help you find the best talent for your organisation.

A recruitment website is like a product brochure and job board all in one. It’s designed to showcase your recruitment agency and its benefits to potential candidates. As well as why employers would want to engage you to help them find the best talent in their sector.

Designing a visually appealing design for a recruitment website is, therefore, super important.

When designing a recruitment website, it’s best to keep it simple. Don’t use too many colours, images, or fonts. If you use too many design elements, they could end up distracting visitors and take away from the main purpose of the website.

Don't clutter the website interface with too many options or CTA's - if you confuse, you lose!

To create a visually appealing design for your recruitment website, start with the background colour. You can use a colour to represent your organisation. Or you can use a neutral colour like black or white to keep the design simple. Next, focus on the font and font size. Use a font that’s easy to read and consistent throughout the website design. For example, use the same font for headings, subheadings, text, and links. And finally, use an image (or images) on the website to help convey your organization’s culture and values.

When designing your recruitment website, it’s important to keep searchability in mind.

Firstly, visitors to your website are likely to use a search engine like Google to find your recruitment website. If your site isn’t optimised for search for Google, it might not show up in the search results.

When visitors arrive at your recruitment website and not be able to find what they’re looking for. To optimise your recruitment website’s searchability, make sure to include a simple-to-use job search feature. Next, make sure that your job postings include the job title, the type of position, the location, and the compensation. Also, make sure to include a “Apply now” or “save” button on each job posting so that visitors can easily access the application or save the job for later.

Recruitment agencies often overlook the application process when looking at their recruitment website design. When designing your recruitment agency website, think about how you want to collect and store applicant data. Do you want to collect their name, email address, phone number, and other contact information? Do you want to store information about education and work experience? Or do you only need candidates to provide an email address so that you can send them a confirmation email once they submit an application?

You are a recruitment company! It’s important that you make the application process easy. If you make it difficult for candidates to apply, they likely won’t follow through and submit an application.

Make it simple and easy to apply and upload a CV and potentially a cover letter as well. If possible, adding an integration to social media platforms such as LinkedIn, can make it easy to apply with a simple click - and apply using their LinkedIn credentials.

Bear in mind when they do this, you'll likely get the very minimum of contact information from them apart from the LinkedIn profile URL.

The easier the process, the more candidate applications you will have.

As discussed in the previous section, it’s important to make the application process easy for potential candidates. When designing your recruitment website, make sure to keep in mind the different ways that people may visit your website. For example, not everyone visits your recruitment website from a desktop computer.

Some candidates may visit your website from a mobile phone or tablet. In fact, Google has reported that 2.5 times as many searches are conducted on mobile devices as opposed to computers.

If your recruitment website isn’t mobile-friendly, it will be difficult for candidates to apply for jobs on their mobile devices. To ensure that your recruitment website is mobile-friendly, start with the homepage.

Make sure that the homepage is quick to load and doesn’t contain too many images or graphics that can make it take longer to load. It’s also important to make sure that the homepage is responsive and easily visible on mobile devices.

It’s also a good idea to create a mobile-friendly version of your “Apply now” button so that it’s easy for candidates to apply for jobs on their mobile devices.

Visitors to your recruitment website will possibly want to share the job postings on your website with their social networks. The easiest way for them to do this is if your recruitment website has a social media presence and makes it simple for them to share.

It’s important to have a social media presence for two reasons. First, having a social media presence makes it easy for candidates to share job postings on your website with their social networks. And second, having a social media presence makes it easy for you to communicate with your target audience.

You can use a social media platform like Facebook or Twitter to communicate with your target audience and share job-related news and updates.

The best social media platforms to use depend on your organisation and its target audience. For example, if your target audience is millennials, it’s best to use social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat.

If your target audience is Gen-X or Gen-Y, it’s best to use social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. If your target audience is a mix of different age groups, it’s best to use a combination of different social media platforms.

Recruitment website design doesn't need to be overwhelming. You have a lot of options and varying levels of web design agencies that can help and guide you through the process.

But be warned, web designers of all different sizes and abilities are out there, with service levels to match.

Make sure you do your due diligence and ask the right questions, and make a call on whether they are a good web designer for your recruitment agency or not.

If you'd like to read more, check out our guide to the 8 Things Your Recruitment Website Needs to Succeed!