// Development
How to Build a Recruitment Website?
// Development
It’s widely believed that the profession of a recruiter is going to be forgotten soon. Allegedly, everything became much clearer; only a few people, who selected by the algorithm’s criteria, make it to the interview. The hirer can communicate with the candidates directly then. In the real world, this may not always be the case because human control as well as real-life communication are required in the area of recruiting since this is a job with people.
Recruiting like any other future-oriented profession keeps up with the times. Nowadays the specialist really doesn’t have to drag around every suitable professional because the site will make this process as simple as possible. Our article will reveal how to create your own recruiting site from scratch, how much it costs, how to make the site not only competitive but also the best among similar ones. But first, we’ll answer a few frequently asked questions.
The agency always gives certain assurance of the quality of the services provided. «Lone wolves» can’t provide this assurance due to resource insufficiency. In addition, a recruiting agency, as a rule, can handle a bigger amount of work than an individual recruiter can. Consequently, it can execute it quicker, which is an incontestable advantage.
Its main task is to represent the agency and its services on the internet properly. There’s a big variety of ways of looking for a job or staff in the world, but what do the official statistics suggest? The most popular searches :
- «work» (17571031 searches per month);
- «looking for a job» (420718 searches per month);
- «vacancies» (947804 searches per month).
Once you create the site, these searches will lead job seekers right to it.
A strong argument in favor of choosing site over personal communication is statistics of We Are Social and Hootsuite, which clearly demonstrates that about 3.5 bln people made their choice for online communication last year. This means that a modern recruiter should navigate this niche like his home.
The site will be able to display all the interesting information that users need. It will also tell about your agency’s history and advantages and it will describe services and methods of employee search or vacancy search in detail, etc. Moreover, the site will make it clear what service besides the employee search and vacancy search your agency can provide. This might be a set of educational courses and training, which will improve job seekers’ skills and employability in the labor market. The website will provide essential information about these services such as their availability, cost, and timing. If such additional services as personnel consulting and marketing research of the labor market are available to the client, then there is hardly a better place for this information than the official website.
The next advantage of the site is its accessibility. Every Internet user can obtain necessary data anytime and anywhere. A perspective of such access is a remote collaboration and respectively a further reach of the audience.
In addition, the site gets ahead of other mass media communications in such a necessary and annoying aspect as advertising. Seemingly, there is television, radio, printed publications after all. In reality, the math is pretty simple: TV advertising and radio advertising require large investments; advertising in newspapers and magazines for all its cheapness loses when it comes to effectiveness. Your own site is the golden mean because it’s effective and hereby inexpensive. Advertising on the internet isn’t limited to the possibilities of vehicles, so its appearance, beauty, and other things depend solely on the sense of style and imagination of those, who do advertising. It gives the opportunity to select an optimal and most profitable option of how to promote the site. Another advantage of online advertising is a high level of targeting (the advertising is focused on the target audience). Selection criteria may be manifold: browsing history, geographical location, professional characteristics, age, etc.
We’ll rely on the simplest and the cheapest option. This is a good solution for a starting agency, which wants to start at a decent level, but it doesn’t have a big budget. On average, such a site can be created for a couple of weeks and for about $200. Nowadays this site is the most popular solution because clients including enterprise heads started trusting the internet a lot more even in the issue of recruitment.
Generally, the website requirements can hardly be high when the budget is limited. We should proceed from the principle «Genius lies in simplicity». Oddly enough, this allows making the site as visually pleasing as possible and gives the expected advantage – the pages load much quicker than those, which are written from top to bottom by professionals. A good example is glassdoor.com. Maximally simple logos create a user-friendly interface and make a good impression.
Keeping in mind that we have a limited budget, it’s better to choose something either low-cost or completely free.
A nice solution in this case is either WordPress or Wix. Due to the fact that they are fundamentally different, it’s very easy to compare them by laying emphasis on each program’s pros and cons. Let’s start with the analysis of Wix. This CMS is better for a newcomer because it’s universal even at the «out of the box» level. If you develop the website for the first time, then you’ll probably choose this system since it’s far more comprehensible by intuition, has a more user-friendly interface, and provides a lot of features. If you wish, you can start an online store, forum, and even make your own app in Wix Corvid. Statistics collection from clients’ data, automation of business processes on the website – whatever you want in your own virtual office. When it comes to comfort, Wix is on better positions to the majority of users.
As for WordPress, this system allows making a website of any type with no limits. The only issue is that despite the interface’s friendliness, the complexity of the process is plain to see. You need to download plugins for many websites; as a result, they make the site slow even if they don’t conflict. As a rule, experienced users prefer this program on grounds of broad functionality. It will manage an online business card and a blog not involving any additional plugins, which isn’t an advantage in general, but in our particular case, it’s quite useful. Mastering this CMS takes most users at least one week given enough eagerness, which is most commonly neutralized by work and personal life. Nevertheless, webmasters choose WordPress every so often as a difficult and against all the odds a reliable working tool.
Naturally, there are more than these two systems; they’re just the most popular ones. When choosing between them, you need to ask yourself «how qualified am I in this matter?» and then confidently point at the suitable program. Both programs will eventually provide websites with a user-friendly interface even in the administrative panel, which will make it possible to hold the site at a sustainable level even with no in-depth knowledge of programming languages, design, and SEO. A purely personal opinion: WordPress is more promising. It may present challenges, but thereat its openness to continuous development positively impresses. In addition, we shouldn’t forget about the website adaptability.
The site has to be adapted to be displayed on mobile devices because modern users spend a lot of time using their smartphones and tablets. Under the current circumstances, it’s more likely that the person wouldn’t have a desktop computer than a smartphone or a tablet.
If we’re talking about a low-cost website, the preferred style would be minimalism. Nothing extra – only the useful things. Core elements are highlighted not to be lost after a long work and to always be at hand. All of that helps to save time not only on the search for required data but also on the operating speed of the site, which will work quickly and seamlessly being as simple as possible. Of course, it’s worth thinking about a color scheme. Surely, it can be done in the style of your logo, but it’s not that simple here. The logo is intended to get the attention and stand out amongst all others so its colors can be catchy and garish. It’s quite normal. Making the site, which the people would want to close in three minutes of working for their eyes to feel better, is an omission. First of all, you should give up on neon colors. Yes, it’s bright, brave, fun, but the eyes perceive them badly, and they can’t interact with the inscription, which gradually gets from the background to the text, for a long time. We also shouldn’t forget about the problem of «the vibrating effect» when several highly saturated colors are combined and it seems like they’re moving. This terrifically annoys users. As well as, of course, classic mistakes in the sort of «light inscription on the light color», «dark inscription on the dark color», «bright inscription on the bright color». The inscription becomes illegible, which leads to a decreasing audience’s interest; only those, who have decided to go straight ahead and read the entire website, stay. The color combination can’t be universal, but you better not use aggressive tones or at least mix them with softer ones.
The example: indeed.com. Despite the «above average» saturation, the colors are skillfully mixed with not only warm colors of the system but also with the photos of soft colors.
Conclusion
So you’ve taken three steps, success has come, but the work scope has been growing. You can remain at the same level, limit access to the system, and at a steady pace, but is a stagnation something that you so proactively sought? If your answer is «yes», then you might not go on reading because you’ve already succeeded and you don’t want to risk. It’s a pretty tenable and in its own way correct position so please accept our sincere congratulations. There’s the fourth adventurous step for those, who are ready to go on.
Sounds like «I, Robot», right? This is not far from the truth. This wording implies the choice between many recruiters, who select personnel in person and those, who use the system to automate recruiting that is implemented in the corporate network to simplify the work. This is a pretty difficult and rather expensive task, which is executed to order, but it will help if not get in the major league of recruitment agencies, then at least leave the beginning competitors behind.
System requirements are obvious. With its help, recruiters should have the opportunity to:
1) Adding to the database and editing these vacancies, candidates, clients. It’s a good idea to add space for comments and to moderate them smoothly because the human factor in the field of commentators occasionally works not in a good way.
2) Search for candidates and vacancies based on several parameters. This is essential as far as all candidates pursue different objectives. Agency’s task is for everybody to be satisfied and for conflict situations to be managed in their infancy.
3) Ease and simplicity of database maintenance. Adding the CV in the system shouldn’t cause the system’s hanging or failure of certain system’s parts. This will lead to stagnation in the work and create a lot of problems with the target audience. As a rule, adding the candidates is done from three popular sources:
5) Cooperative work of a team of employers with the common database of candidates and vacancies. The point is that it’s possible to build a proper hierarchy in the agency, which will allow appointing responsible recruiters to specific CVs and orders.
6) Opportunity to delegate authority and manage its amount. This will make it possible to avoid mistakes, deletion of critical information, and to criticize or encourage outstanding staff members.
7) System recording every user’s actions. The monitoring function is essential at any firm and any enterprise so it hardly requires an explanation.
There is also a shortlist of functional requirements:
Good luck with your noble work of recruiting!
