I've looked at a lot of recruitment websites, and it's easy to get carried away with what a website is 'supposed' to have. Jobs. About page. Client page. Candidate page. Blog. Testimonials. Team profiles. Social links... The list goes on.
But you don't actually need that much.
A good recruitment website needs to answer a few basic questions: who are you, what do you do, are you active, and how can I get in touch?
A clear homepage
Someone should be able to come to your homepage and understand what you do quickly.
Who you are, what sort of recruitment you do, where you operate and what someone can do next.
You don't need paragraphs of corporate copy to explain it.
A proper jobs page
If you're a recruiter, I'd expect to find your jobs easily.
Your jobs page also says something about your business. Current vacancies show that you're active. An empty page, broken links or jobs that clearly haven't been updated for years damage the impact.
Individual job pages
Each vacancy should have its own useful page rather than just being listed on a single jobs page.
That gives you somewhere to send candidates when you share a role, and gives search engines a page they can understand as a job posting.
An About page
People want to know who they're dealing with.
If you're an independent recruiter, I'd use the About page to explain who you are, how you work and what people can expect from you.
A real person, a photo and some straightforward information can do a lot.
A way to contact you
Make it obvious how someone can get in touch. Include an email, phone, a contact form, or all three.
Some basic trust signals
You don't need to cover your website in testimonials and badges.
Clear contact details, current jobs, a real person, useful information and a website without obvious errors all help people feel confident that they're dealing with an established business.
And the technical basics
Your website should work properly on mobile, load reasonably quickly and be accessible to search engines. Page titles, descriptions, sensible links and the right structured data for your jobs are worth getting right too.
So, what do you actually need?
If I were starting a recruitment website from scratch, I'd get these things right first:
- A clear homepage
- An About page
- A jobs page
- Individual job pages
- Clear contact details
- Useful information for candidates and clients
- A few genuine trust signals
- The technical basics
You can keep adding over time when you see what people are finding useful.
A blog can be useful. So can testimonials, case studies, team pages and other extras. But I'd rather have a small website that does the important things well than a big website full of pages nobody uses.
If you're curious how your own recruitment website is doing, I've built a free Website Health Check that looks at some of the common problems I've found when reviewing recruitment sites.