Recruitment website design for UK agencies

A recruitment website has to close two markets at once, and the design is where most agencies lose one of them. Candidates arrive wanting live, searchable jobs and a painless way to apply. Clients — the hiring managers who pay the fees — arrive wanting evidence that you know their sector. Most agency sites are designed for neither: a stale jobs list, one contact page for everyone, and a tagline about "connecting talent with opportunity" that says nothing.

Here is what the design should actually do.

The pages a recruitment site needs

• A job board, not a list. Live roles with sector, salary band, location, contract type and remote options, each on its own page. A list of jobs on one page is a noticeboard; a board with search and filters is a product.
• A job page that ranks. Every role carries the details Google for Jobs reads — title, location, salary where published, contract type and how to apply. This is the biggest free source of candidates most small agencies never use.
• Candidate registration and CV upload. A two-minute sign-up that records consent and sends the CV into your recruitment software. The registered candidate pool is the agency's most durable asset.
• Employer pages, kept apart from candidate pages. Hiring managers want evidence of specialism; candidates want jobs. They should never share the same landing page.
• Named consultant and desk pages. A consultant page with twelve live roles beats any "meet the team" grid. It is how a five-person agency reads like a fifty-person one.
• Salary guides. Free research that ranks for the searches candidates and clients both make, and gives you a reason to email your database.

The design decisions that do the work

Design is not decoration. Three decisions decide whether the site fills roles:

• Mobile first. More candidates apply from a phone than a desk. If registration takes more than two minutes on a phone, they leave.
• Speed. A job board that takes five seconds to load loses candidates before they see a role. Fast pages are a ranking factor and a conversion factor at once.
• Two clear paths from the home page. "I'm looking for a job" and "I'm looking to hire" should be the two most prominent things on the screen. Everyone else can find the rest.

What to ask any designer before you sign

• Does the job board feed my recruitment software, or do I update it by hand? If the answer is "by hand", the board is stale within a month.
• Will jobs appear in Google for Jobs? If they cannot answer, the roles will not be found.
• Where do CV uploads go, and is consent recorded? If the answer is not "into your software or inbox, with consent", it is a contact form with a file field.
• What does a text edit cost after launch? The build price is half the total; the change model is the other half.

For what a recruitment agency website costs, see how much a recruitment website costs in the UK. For the builder-versus-designer decision, see recruitment website builder vs a web designer. The full list of what a recruitment build includes — the job board, candidate registration, consultant pages and the Google for Jobs setup — is on the recruitment agencies page, with pricing on the pricing page.