When considering a redesign of your recruitment website, be careful that your company site doesnât become a tired, recruitment cliche. Itâs easy to do and we understand how it happens; you have a nose around your competitorsâ websites to get an idea of what you like and dislike in a website and after looking at recruiter after recruiter you start to see a pattern emerging in their design. Before you know it, that pattern has become a checklist you hand to your designer because if almost everyone else is doing it, you should be too, right? Wrong.
Below weâve listed the three most common mistakes recruitment companies make when it comes to their websites and we guarantee youâll set yourself apart by simply avoiding them.
1. Forgetting the Target Audience
The information that a client wants to read compared to a candidate is vastly different, yet youâd be surprised how many recruitment websites lump everything altogether. Decide what content on your website is best suited to different segments of your target audience and separate them on your site so that a visitor can easily identify with one or the other. Ensure that your layout is geared toward encouraging the visitor to get to the pages you want them to see. This could be a free download or simply just the contact page; make it obvious what you want them to do and theyâll be more likely do it
Visitors to your website need to identify themselves as being the type of person that you specialise in helping, so that they donât immediately click away from your website. Donât be afraid to highlight the most common problems that candidates or clients face and be as explicit as you can in how you can help them to solve those issues. Once you think youâve done this, simplify the message so that it is even more succinct.
2. Using Stock Images of REALLY Happy Business People
Weâre not sure how this one became a trend because weâre yet to find anyone who is convinced by the extreme levels of happiness portrayed in a stock photo, but theyâre easy to get hold of, theyâre inoffensive and they fill a gap on your website. What they donât do, however, is contribute anything to your website in terms of helping to convey a message, giving it an authentic touch, or simply being any different to the last recruitment website your potential client or candidate just visited.
Always use any space on your website wisely and never resort to sticking a stock image on a page just because you canât think of anything else to fill it. A well-thought out design should mean that every aspect of your website helps the user to reach your goals in some way. Try using the image space to highlight an important message that you want your audience to notice straight away. You can also use images as calls-to-action that lead a user to a more important page where they input their details or get in touch with you directly.
3. Information Overload
Similar to using stock images to fill a space on your website, itâs common for websites (recruitment ones in particular) to let their keyboard run away with them and fill every inch of the page with text. Itâs great to be informative and even more fantastic that you have so much content that you want to share, but is it really working most effectively by sitting on one page? Will a client whoâs just doing some initial research on recruitment companies even read it?
Before you design your website, think about the content you want to feature. Then consider at what point a user might want to view that information when they visit your website. By doing this youâll start to decipher what content is best suited to your homepage and what would work well on your blog. You can even start thinking about collating large chunks of related information in a free download that your clients and candidates can download and read at their leisure (plus, you can ask for their name and email address in exchange for the content â win, win!).
