You’ll typically have three groups of people visiting your website. First, current and potential clients who are looking to learn more about your business. Second, recruitment talent looking to work for your business. And third, current or potential candidates. It’s important we break down our candidate group into their subsections, based on their motivations for visiting your recruitment website, the amount of patience they have, level of engagement, their loyalty to your brand, how serious they are about their job hunt, their seniority and so on. These will all differ and so will their subsequent journeys. 

Irrelevant Candidates

These are the type of candidates you see have applied to 15 of your live vacancies over the weekend and you instantly see they’re not at all relevant for anything you tend to recruit for. Or maybe their experience is vaguely relevant but they’re not likely to be suitable for whatever reason. Or possibly they don’t have visa sponsorship to work in the job’s location. We still need to consider these candidates and provide them with a good experience whilst visiting your website but make it clear, in no uncertain terms, that we just can’t help them. 

New & Relevant Candidates

This group has been driven to your agency website through jobs ads, social media posts, events, referrals, etc. They’re unfamiliar with your agency, the roles you offer, how good you are and basically everything else. They’re more likely to spend a long period learning about your business, they will take longer to make a positive decision & take affirmative action and they are harder to engage with. 

Lapsed & Relevant Candidates

These are candidates that we currently have in our recruitment CRM and are not marked as active. It’s possible that we’ve placed them in roles several years ago, received offers for them but never placed them, had them out for interviews or we’ve spoken with them about specific roles. I’ll also include any candidates that are in our CRM that we’ve reached out to but we’ve never spoken with. These candidates are familiar with your brand, know your offering, the roles you recruit for and maybe still have contacts within your recruitment agency. This is such a valuable group. They’re coming back to you as you’ve previously shown them you’re great at what you do, they’ve bought into your brand and offering and they’re “ready to buy”. 

Current & Relevant Candidates

Candidates that you’re currently working with, as in you’ve spoken with them recently, briefed them on live roles, have sent them out on recent interviews or generally they're just marked as “active” in your recruitment CRM. This group knows your recruitment agency, the jobs you offer and the consultant they’re currently working with. They’re coming back to your website to check out any new roles or maybe for your contact details. 

Clients

Worth mentioning but often candidates can be clients and vice versa and it's an important point to make and bear in mind. A candidate may find your website with the mindset of looking for a new role for themselves, maybe not find anything quite right for them but may buy into your offering enough to contact you about a current hiring need they have within their organisation. Or maybe a hiring manager has used your services for years and is now looking for a role and has decided to reach out to your agency as you’ve always provided excellent service and candidates. 
 
Finding You

Before we even begin the journey we need to make sure your candidates and potential candidates can actually find you. Let’s ensure your website is properly indexed on Google (and other search engines such as Bing & Yahoo!) by using the Google Search Console. This completely free tool will let us see which of our websites pages are listed and aren’t listed on Google. Make sure all relevant candidate pages are indexed and listed on Google and make sure you regularly post links to candidate related pages (blogs, job posts, etc.) to your social media channels. 

Starting Point

There are likely to be dozens of entry points (pages) to your website, however candidates are likely to enter your website through the home page, jobs pages (either the full list or a particular listing) or the candidate page. Other likely pages could be blogs, testimonials, team and contact us but it could be pretty much any pages indexed and listed on Google or posted to social media accounts. So it’s best to ensure each page caters to candidates in some way and is set up to take them on a specific and guided path. 

The Journey

Each candidate’s website journey will be slightly different but we need to work out the typical patterns of which there may be 10-20. We need to work out how we want to guide each particular candidate group through our website and it needs to be a deliberate, laid down path so we receive full buy-in from them, which leads to a positive action. Conduct hands-on research by landing on each website page, separately and one at a time and work your way through with a candidate mindset. Are you presented with an appropriate path on each page or do you feel lost and find yourself searching for the navigation bar? 

At the end of each page we should present our users with a call to action (CTA). This CTA could be directing them onto another relevant page, a blog they may find interesting, a specific and relevant job post or a full list of vacancies, the contact page, signing up to our newsletter or whatever goal you may have for them. 

When it comes to your individual blog & job posts try to add a category for each one and at the bottom of each blog / job post give three suggestions of similar blog / job posts (based on the category), which the reader may find of interest. 

Journey’s End

The objective for each candidate journey should be a positive action for the most part. So this objective could be persuading a candidate to…

1. Register as a candidate on our website candidate portal. 
2. Sign up to our newsletter.
3. Sign up to email job updates. 
4. Contact you via your contact form. 
5. Follow your social media accounts. 
6. Apply for a vacancy.

Conclusion

Spending time thinking out the candidate’s journey and laying down specific routes for them will result in a lower bounce rate, a better user experience, higher engagement rates, longer “on page” and “on website” times and better conversion figures - basically a positive uptick to all metrics! 

Guest blog written by Robert Garner

Rob has been working within the recruitment industry since 2006, selling recruitment advertising space, working within recruitment, running his own recruitment firm, launching job boards, working for in-house talent acquisition teams and creating enterprise level recruitment software. He now runs Abstraction Labs, designing and developing websites for recruitment agencies.