Building a Job Site for a Recruitment Agency: Costs and Eleven Practical Tips

This article is for people who run a recruitment agency business.

Recently our CEO, Imamura, brought together ten years of experience and knowledge in marketing for recruitment agencies and wrote “ The complete guide to recruitment marketing“.

That compendium does talk about why you need a job site, but it does not go into the detail: the points to watch and the knack of building one.

This article was written to explain those.

[Service overview] Marketing support for recruitment agencies

1. Background

So, again: “which recruitment agency businesses need a job site?”
→ Those targeting people with experience in a particular industry.

So when should you build a job site?

• You have 100 or more vacancies
• You can absorb the build cost
• You already run other activities to some degree and bring in traffic steadily

.

Let’s start with the build cost.

2. The cost of building a job site

The cost of building a job site depends on how you build it.
There are broadly two ways to build one.
① Use a packaged product
② Build from scratch (that is, build it from nothing)

Here are the advantages and disadvantages of each.

	Advantages	Disadvantages
① Packaged product	・Cheaper than ②. The set-up cost can be kept to roughly 800,000 to 2,000,000 yen. ・You get a reasonable level of quality without any knowledge of web development or SEO.	・There is a licence fee, so if you later buy the whole thing outright, ② (from scratch) can work out cheaper in the end. ・Little freedom in design. ・There are limits on the site structure as well
② From scratch	・A lot of freedom in design ・You can link it to the other tools you use and design your operation freely.	・More expensive than ①. The build cost ranges widely, from 4,000,000 to 20,000,000 yen, and varies a great deal with which features you add and which vendor you use.

My view as the author is that where the market is small and yours is the only agency in it, a job site for cleaners say, ① is fine and keeps the cost down.

Where there are competitors, as with nursery teachers, care workers and dietitians, and you want features, SEO with columns, and social integration on top of the listings, the cost is higher but I recommend ②.

3. 11 tips for building a job site

From here on, the tips are aimed at the following readers.
・Those at the point of building a job site
・Those who already have one

Three things matter on a job site.
・Easy searching
・Plenty of vacancies
・Easy applying

It is called a job site, so users arrive there looking for jobs.
Most readers will nod along at that.
But when it comes to actually building it, or when you lose your bearings while running it,
many people head off in completely the wrong direction.

Master the tips below and build a job site that is good for users and delivers results.

See our website build work

3.1 Make it clear at a glance what the site is

This is not limited to job sites: you need to show what service you offer and what is distinctive about the site, so that a user can tell from the page whether it is the site they want.
For a job site focused on one field, this is usually “the job site for [field]”.

The headline above the fold often becomes the site title, so work out your main keywords first.

Site titles often look like this.
“Jobs and careers site specialising in [field]”
Check that your own site is set up properly.

3.2 Put the search module above the fold.

To get users who land on the site to search for jobs, the search module has to sit somewhere obvious.
Here we look at where on the home page to put it.

A user on the home page needs to reach the search module as soon as they look at it.
That means putting it in the main visual.

The specification of the search module needs care too.
Roughly 60% or more of visits come from mobile, so put thought into how search works on a phone.

3.3 Every page within two clicks

This is one of the on-site items, what people call link depth.
Every category page needs to be reachable from the home page.
Making every directory reachable in two clicks improves crawlability.
The larger the site, the more thought the layout of content needs.

3.4 Images for each vacancy

Whatever the industry, show an image on every single vacancy.
At a minimum you need ① something that conveys what the work is like and ② the employer’s logo.
For ①, a paid stock image is fine.

It takes a lot of effort, but it is what makes each vacancy a little more appealing and lands it with users.

3.5 Search results

If the jobs a user wants do not come up, they drop off straight away.
Think about a search module that lets them search again when the job they want does not appear.
Where many vacancies are shown per page, it especially helps to pin the search module to the screen.
A tall module cannot be pinned, so take care over how it is displayed and which search fields you choose.

3.6 The vacancy detail page

Whether someone applies in the end comes down to how appealing the vacancy is, so it has to come across as appealing.
And nobody wants to go back to the start and search again from a page they have finally reached.
At the foot of the page, show similar vacancies with comparable terms, popular vacancies in the same role, and frequently viewed ones.

Two technical points here.
The first is heading tags.
A great many job sites do not use heading tags properly.
They are needed for SEO, so review them.
The second: structured markup for job postings is essential.
What structured markup is (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/job-posting?hl=ja）
Adding structured markup
raises how the site is rated for SEO as a job site, and
has the advantage of getting you listed in Google for Jobs through crawling.

3.7 The application form

The form is an important part, and it affects the registration rate.
Here we cover the format and the fields.

First, to cut drop-off in the form, use a step form or a conversational form.

For the fields, the number and the order matter.
Keep it to six at most, start with easy closed questions, and move towards fields that take more effort as you go.
Something like this.

• Whether they have experience
• What experience
• Preferred location
• Name
• Telephone number
• Email address

Start with easy closed questions to lower the barrier to filling in the first part of the form.
In this case the first question asks whether they have experience, so if they answer no, the second question is skipped.

The reason is that even a job site aimed at experienced people gets a certain number of registrations from people with no experience.
Screening them out at the form stage is difficult, so the form has to work comfortably for anyone.
The third question, on preferred location, should be easy to fill in, with a drop-down or checkboxes.
From the fourth question on, answers are free text.

3.8 Page speed

Job sites often have an enormous number of pages, so they tend to be slow.
If you are building from new, pay attention from the requirements stage, when you choose the language and the server.
If you already have a site and want to improve speed cheaply, try compressing your images.
Common causes of a slow site include the following.
・You are on shared hosting
・The images are large
・There is JavaScript that is not used
・The order in which the code loads is not optimised

To diagnose page speed, use Page Speed Insight, which Google provides free.
Page Speed Insight is here → https://pagespeed.web.dev/

3.9 Number of vacancies

When people come to us about building a job site: how many vacancies does it take to win?
That is a question we are asked.

You want 1,000 or more vacancies (assuming they are not spread thinly across industries and roles), and the more the better.

3.10 Page titles

Does every page have a title that someone has thought about?
About half of the job sites outside the big names have weak page titles.
Common examples where no thought has gone in:
・Every page has the same title as the home page
・The home page title does not contain jobs, careers or vacancies
・Job search result pages do not change with the search terms

3.11 Winning traffic and registrations with other content

A job site needs content beyond the vacancies, to earn traffic and raise engagement.
Common choices are career-change how-to blogs, seminars and events.
A career-change how-to blog can win registrations from organic traffic, so do the SEO properly and put thought into the UI and UX.
Seminars and events are for people who are still considering a move, or who will not apply from a listing alone.
You can wait until you have a reasonable number of sessions before running them.

Get “[Guide] Digital methods that win job seekers” download.

4. Points to watch

A job site has many pages, closely related to one another, and the UI and UX need real thought, so there is a lot to do.

It affects your database and your operation too, not just the site.

We understand the urge to build the site and get results fast, but nothing good comes of rushing it.
Build time for thinking into the schedule from the planning stage and you will win in the end.

[Service guide] Marketing support for recruitment agencies