Most recruitment agencies asking how to get more candidates from their website do not have a traffic problem. They have a leak. Candidates arrive, look at a job, start an application and disappear, and the fix is almost always in four places: a job search that returns nothing useful, a job page too thin to decide from, an application form that asks for more than it needs, and a mobile experience designed on a desktop. Fix those and the same traffic produces more applications. Buy traffic first and you pay to fill a leaking bucket.
That is the opposite of the advice you will find on this subject. Search it and the first page is numbered lists of ways to get more people onto the site: social posts, backlinks, paid ads, Google Business Profiles, community groups, retargeting. All acquisition, and almost nothing about what happens after somebody lands.
Start by finding out whether you have a shortage or a leak
Before changing anything, get two numbers out of your analytics.
How many people reach a job page. Not sessions across the site. Job pages specifically.
How many of those start an application, and how many finish it.
The gap between starting and finishing is the number that matters. If people are reaching your jobs and abandoning the form, no amount of traffic will help, and every pound of paid spend makes the waste bigger. If almost nobody reaches a job page in the first place, you have an acquisition problem and the second half of this piece is where to look.
Most agencies have never measured the second number. GA4's enhanced measurement will record a form start and a form submit if the toggle is on, but it misses multi-step forms, forms inside an ATS iframe and anything built in JavaScript, which covers most recruitment application journeys. Assume you need to set this up properly rather than assuming it is already running. If you cannot answer the question today, that is the first job.
Where candidates actually leave
The job search that returns nothing
A candidate searches "warehouse" in Leeds, gets zero results, and leaves. They do not try "warehouse operative", and they do not browse your other 40 roles.
Usually the search matches the exact job title and ignores the description, so "warehouse" never finds "Warehouse Operative (Nights)". Usually the location filter is keyed to a named town rather than a radius, so Pudsey returns nothing while Leeds returns everything. And usually there is no fallback at all: an empty result should offer nearby roles, close matches, a job alert signup or a phone number, never a dead end.
Watch someone unfamiliar with your business try to find a job on your site. It takes ten minutes and it is usually uncomfortable.
The job page that is too thin to decide from
Recruitment job pages are frequently a title, a salary band, a location and three lines pasted from the client's brief. That is not enough for anybody to decide with, so they leave to research, and mostly they do not come back.
A job page that converts answers what the work involves day to day, what the pay actually is, whether it is remote, hybrid or on site, what happens after they apply, and how long the process takes. The last one gets forgotten and it is the one candidates ask about most.
The application form that asks for everything
The form is where the biggest single loss happens, and it is the cheapest thing to fix.
Every field costs you applications. An account, a password, a covering letter, availability, right-to-work questions, a diversity survey and three referees, all before a human has spoken to them. Your consultants can ask all of that on the call. Ask for the CV, the contact details, the role and nothing else.
If your ATS forces a long form, put a short one on the website and pass what you capture into the system. Making the candidate use the ATS interface directly is a decision that costs applications every week.
The mobile experience
Most candidates search for work on a phone, often outside working hours, often mid-shift. Tiny tap targets, a CV upload that fails, filters that need a mouse and a form that scrolls sideways all cost you the application.
Test your own site on a phone, on mobile data rather than office wifi, and apply for one of your own jobs. Time it. If it takes longer than two minutes you have found your problem.
Then fix acquisition
Once the site converts, more traffic is worth buying. Two sources do the work for recruitment agencies.
Google's jobs results. Google surfaces roles directly in search, and it takes them from valid JobPosting structured data on your job pages. Get the markup right, keep it current, and remove expired roles promptly, because stale postings damage the whole feed. Most recruitment sites either have no markup or have markup that fails validation, which produces the same result as having none.
Content that answers what candidates ask before they apply. Salary guides for the sectors you cover, what your process looks like from first call to offer, how to prepare for the interviews your clients actually run, and honest answers about the parts of the job people worry about. This is slower than paid traffic and it compounds, where paid traffic stops the day you stop paying.
Paid search and social both work for hard-to-fill roles. Neither fixes a site that loses people at the form.
What to do this week
- Set up tracking on application starts and application completions. Without it everything below is guesswork.
- Search for a job on your own site as a candidate would, on a phone.
- Count the fields on your application form, then delete the ones a consultant could ask on the call.
- Run one of your job pages through Google's Rich Results Test and see whether the JobPosting markup passes.
None of that needs a new website. It needs somebody to sit down with the site as a candidate rather than as its owner.
Where this usually ends up
Agencies that do this find their applications rise without their traffic changing at all. It is the least popular answer to the question, because buying traffic feels like progress and deleting six form fields does not.
If the site is fighting you at every step, that is a different conversation. A site built around a job board that cannot search properly, on a platform that will not let you change the form, has a structural problem no amount of tuning fixes. We wrote about what a recruitment website actually needs and what one costs if that is where you have landed.