Category: Online Recruitment

Today is National Grammar Day - a day that was set up in 2008 to recognise that good grammar is a key part of celebrating languages. We thought we’d use this theme for our blog today to talk about the importance of good grammar in your website content and how it can support Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

With Google making changes to their Algorithms constantly, it’s hard to keep up, however many articles talk about four key principles to making sure you’re doing your best in the SEO race:

Content & Quality
Expertise
Presentation & Production
Competitive Comparison

Given that top of the list is content and quality, we think it’s only right to feature our best tips for SEO on your recruitment agency website! 
What keywords & key phrases should I use for my recruitment agency website?
Whenever you’re writing content for your website (such as job ads or on your blog), your keywords should be your first priority. Review them regularly, particularly if your business is evolving and you’re moving into new sectors. Here are some top tips:

Make sure your landing page content is 200 words
For a blog article, make sure it’s over 300 words. If you’ve got a detailed article, split it out into themes to get more value from a single piece
Job descriptions can be between 500-2000 words. Make sure they are relevant and concise - this will increase applications by up to a third!

What length should my page titles be?
Only the first 60 characters will count when your pages are being scanned, so keeping to 60 or under will be better for your click through rate!

For example, if you’re a recruitment agency with a job board, don’t use the title ‘Jobs’ for all of your jobs pages. Make all of your jobs in your database have their own page, and make those pages have their own (keyword rich) title.

“Permanent Graphic Designer vacancy in Wandsworth, London” is full to bursting point with keywords, makes good sense and is only 56 characters or 50 not counting the spaces. Don’t necessarily waste this title space using non-keywords such as your company name (unless of course it is a brand name that people are searching for), or common web words like ‘About’. Use things like “About our Design Jobs”.
How can I use headings in my website content? 
Using headings or sub headers above each paragraph (using h1, h2, h3) help to define a  page’s content to a search engine, so they’re of much more search engine value than the body of your text. 
Should I keep my website content simple? 
Going back to the four key principles above, it’s important to make sure that your content is well written, original and will add value when compared to your competitors. So, it’s worth investing the time in this area - here are some top tips to improve the quality of your website content:

Keep your sentences short
Use active verbs – not terms like “two designers were recruited” – just things like “we recruited two designers”
Go easy on the jargon – keep it full of your keywords, but don’t make things too difficult for the reader
Bullet points and using headings are a good way for people to scan read through your article
Write in the first person – use ‘we’ and ‘you’ – not ‘our customers’ or ‘the company’
Google can read hyphens but not underscores
Don’t worry too much about how the search engines read plurals. They don’t. They see “Job” to be pretty much the same as “Jobs”

For more information about writing simple, but effective web copy to help your SEO, check out the free guides from The Plain English campaign.

For more details about writing website content to help your website’s SEO, get in touch with our commercial director Peter Morrow at sales@reversedelta.com or call +44 (0)8000 199 737 for a copy.

There’s no doubt about it, data is one of the most valuable commodities in the world - the Economist announced in 2017 that it is now more valuable than oil.  And who is dealing with the largest amount of data in the world - yes, search engine giant Google.

Google is fully in our lives now - according to Hubspot, over 92% of searches are conducted on Google.  Google is built on all Android operating systems and we think that Google Assist will continue its massive growth and be huge. Google is here and it’s here to stay.  We wanted to talk a bit more about Google for Jobs and what it means for recruiters.

Reverse Delta’s Operations Director, Dave Haygarth gives his thoughts in this blog post about the opportunity Google for Jobs will provide for recruiters and what the implications are for the wider industry.
So, what does this mean for recruiters?
Like it or not, this is how things are going for jobs now. There’s not a lot we can do about the big blue box coming up when we search for things. It’s happening in a range of industries though, such as retail, airlines, hotels.  It’s not personal to recruitment, Google is simply capitalising on the worth of people’s data. We may not like it, so we just need to play along or you won’t be able to play at all!
Will you still need a recruitment agency website?
Absolutely? As a recruiter, you will need to be able to receive the application and manage the candidate through the recruitment process. Your recruitment agency website is so much more than a repository for promoting jobs.

Plus, in order to put your job visible in Google for Jobs, you need to post it on a website first. Luckily, Reverse Delta’s award winning website design platform, FXRecruiter, automatically makes your jobs visible in Google for Jobs, so it’s one less thing to worry about - write a brilliant job description on your recruitment agency website and it’ll look (and work) great on Google…and if you don’t put the jobs on your recruitment agency website, your competitors will be doing and they will get all the applications, not you!
Will Google disrupt the recruitment industry?
Well, it is a case of wait and see, but my theory is that the job boards are more likely to be under a bigger threat. We know that sites like CV Library have done a massive project to analyse the data they currently have so that they can put more sophisticated algorithms together that follow people through a logical career journey, so fingers crossed, this investment and superior logic applied within a niche will ensure their success continues and competition remains in the marketplace.

There is also a potential threat to LinkedIn, although the social networking tools that they have developed should mean their user-base will remain loyal.  It’s unlikely that Google will go back in this direction after their well-documented attempts to grow a social network through the ill-fated Google Plus. But, what they did (and continue to do) by integrating search into our lives so easily, is actually going to give them much better results than another social platform. 
Where will job-seekers apply for roles in the future?
Moving forward, Google for Jobs is a transition piece right now. In a dystopian future, it’s feasible that you (the recruiter) may not control where people apply. Google could develop an “Apply on Google” option which will keep people on Google, and their data would sit outside of your website.  Gone are their chances to visit your site and follow your own carefully crafted calls to action - to make the candidate yours and bring them into your brand and experience.

This could mean that retaining the user on Google will ultimately be the name of the game (for Google).  However, if your agency has a good reputation, I would hazard a more optimistic guess that most candidates would opt to apply for a role via your website, rather than Google.  Given the growing concerns about how voice assistants are listening and stealing our data, this is a real opportunity to show that your recruitment agency is a better place to apply for a job and to get that more personal touch - your expertise.
How does my FXRecruiter website work with Google for Jobs?
When you post a job to your recruitment agency website using FXRecruiter, they will automatically be as Google-friendly as possible (they are built with Google for Jobs schema microformat if you REALLY want to know).

Given our extensive SEO knowledge which is baked into FXRecruiter, you can be assured that job titles and keywords are placed in to our code exactly where Google is looking for them.  Plus, the built-in jobs archive provides a massive “vault” of previous roles which will help you to perform well in Google. Basically, an expired job may come up in a search, but the candidate will be automatically directed to a similar role that is still live.  
Is there anything else my recruitment agency website can do to help me get results?
I’d definitely recommend making sure your sitemap is up to date as this tells Google all about your website, so that it’s easy for the robots to crawl through your site and rank it.

And, there is so much data that you can get from Google so make sure you’re checking out your stats. Google’s Search Console will help you to track the amount of clicks and views your postings are getting and make sure it’s running correctly!

If you want more information about the brilliant SEO capabilities in the FXRecruiter platform, get in touch with one of our SEO tech experts on 08000 199737 or sales@reversedelta.com.

Following on from our recent blog post about Google for Jobs, we wanted to explore the idea of Google and the impact it has on the recruitment sector a little more.

Voice recognition is growing fast as the technology gets more sophisticated. Here are a few stats to back this up:

78% of millennials use a mobile device to search for jobs now and other demographics are following closely behind. 
By the end of 2020, it’s estimated that 50% of all searches will be voice-activated
Also, the market is reportedly worth $150 million globally

So you can see, voice-activated searches are massively on the rise, so if recruitment agencies want to ensure they are attracting active candidates for roles, it’s a good idea to optimise your recruitment agency website to make sure you’re coming up in the growing number of voice-activated searches. Content marketing and making sure you’ve got a good basis for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) within your recruitment agency website will be critical if your recruitment agency is going to perform well in voice-activated search.
Back to basics - understand your customer
This sounds really obvious, but it’s worth making sure that you REALLY understand your audience’s pain points and address them in your job posts and blog content. Attention spans are short, so you need to make sure you’re writing your content in a very clever way to make sure it appears in their search earlier, as it will get your website more traffic.
Use long-tail keywords
We don’t want to go too far into the tech elements of SEO (it’s very complex), but in simple terms, you can write ‘long tail’ or ‘short tail’ keywords in order to help people search for your content.

Long tail keywords: “How can I find a digital marketing job in Central London?”

Short tail keywords: “Marketing job London.”

You can see here that the long tail version is more of a question and it uses How at the beginning, which is another good tip to make sure your jobs and content perform well in voice activated searches.

The short tail version is much briefer and more along the lines of how somebody would type a search into a search engine. Research shows that people ask their device question in the long tail format, so it’s wise to make sure your web copy and job descriptions reflect this. Write your job descriptions to include “how, what, why and when” if you can, but not as the opening sentence. Also build landing pages for popular job searches, that aim to answer questions. Want to know more about the ‘Question’ schema? Talk to us. 
Location, location, location
We’ve touched on this already, but for your job ad to be successful, it needs to have an accurate location included so that you maximise your position on Google.
Make the most of the inbuilt SEO of your site
We’ve written countless articles on how to present jobs well for search engines, and writing well-formed descriptions and job titles following simple rules is an area worth investing your time in.  
What is the impact for recruitment agencies?
We’re inclined to say that voice search is unlikely to replace text search, but it’s worth making sure that you’re optimising the opportunity.

Voice activated search has become a fast growing trend and there is the potential that the upward trend could go downwards at some point. So, our advice would be to keep a watching brief on it, utilise voice activated search if you can, but don’t forget going back to basics by following some of the tips in this blog.

We’d also say that some of the voice activated software can bring about results that are dubious in terms of quality.  Our team had a bit of fun recently playing around with different devices and seeing what came up:
Dave Bancroft - Managing Director
Dave asked Siri (on Mac OS) to “Find me a project manager job in London.”

Siri didn’t find any matching positions.

He also asked Siri to find a project manager vacancy in London. Again, he didn’t get any matches.

Dave also asked Alexa Dot (via iOS App):

Find me a project manager job in London

“Bong” - nothing

Find me an IT recruitment agency in London

Alexa reads these out on the Dot, and displays them in the app.  Misheard as “ITV”. Results are poor!
Dave Haygarth - Operations Director
Dave tested Google Assistant via the Android app. His results varied:

“Find me a job in marketing in Blackburn” got good results as a job type and a location was included, but the results showed up trainee, executive and manager level roles.

His next search was “Find me a job in Digital Marketing” which was more specific, but wouldn’t be useful unless you were looking nationally.

“Find me a job” was a very vague search and resulted in Ad based posts only.

Are you using voice-activated search in your recruitment agency? What results are you finding? We’d love to hear from you - put your comments in the blog and we can do a follow up with some insight from the sector.

Love is well and truly in the air at “Reverse Delta HQ,” so we thought we’d embrace Valentine’s Day with a little trip down memory lane and talk about how we first started out as web developers over 18 years ago.

You might not know, but in the early days, Reverse Delta was the web developer for one of the largest dating sites in the country. The work that we did to create highly complex algorithms for the dating sites was actually very similar to the work in creating algorithms for our award-winning recruiter website platform FXRecruiter.  Turns out that the techniques to match potential daters and potential candidates with employers can be pretty similar!

So, although we’ve moved on from our early days of dating site development, we thought it would be a bit of fun to pull together a blog which shows the common dating terms for 2020 and how your recruitment agency website can help you to navigate the complex world of both dating and recruitment!

Benching - ‘keeping a potential love interest on the bench, just in case.’

The Jobs Archive function in FXRecruiter keeps candidates ‘on the bench.’ This isn’t as horrible as it sounds from a dating perspective - the Jobs Archive function simply means that older jobs can still remain visible to Google so may come up in a candidate’s Google search, but although they won’t be able to apply, they will be instead alerted to similar roles.  So, you’re driving traffic to your website and increasing applications without needing to do much!

Breadcrumbing - ‘keep in occasional contact but with no desire to meet.’

By integrating your recruitment agency website with one of FXRecruiter’s many integrations, you can send any passive candidates updates about your recruitment agency and helpful content such as job search tips or industry/sector news via a blog or newsletter.  This way, you’re keeping your pipeline of candidates engaged on the off-chance that the ideal job will come up.

Ghosting/Haunting/Orbiting - ‘ignoring a love interest, continuing to watch them on social media, or interacting with their posts but not engaging in direct communication.’

All of these, from a dating perspective, are very harsh and we’d advise all recruitment agencies to set up a way to make sure you can quickly and effectively thank people for the time in applying for a role and (permissions dependant) ensuring that they know we can keep in touch with them, either via your social media platforms or through email.  By engaging with candidates in this way, you’re keeping them active on your database for when the ideal job comes along.

Ghosting candidates is a terrible thing to do, so we make sure our websites are built to provide a brilliant candidate experience. We’ve built in a bunch of features to automate some of this work, so that you are keeping in touch with candidates as much as you can during the application process. Failing to keep your candidates engaged or if they have a bad experience with you is potentially very damaging to your recruitment agency’s reputation.

Cushioning - ‘keeping in touch with a love interest in case of a break-up.’

From a dating perspective, this means keeping in touch with somebody other than your chosen partner ‘just in case’ the relationship ends.  Given that a third of new hires leave within six months, it is perhaps worth keeping in touch with the ‘second best’ candidate just in case your placed candidate leaves (you can then re-interview them).  Again, use your CRM and social media to keep these candidates engaged by offering them valuable content to help them with their career, so that your agency is front of mind for them.

See also ‘benching’ above - make sure you’ve got decent candidates on the bench and use your digital tools to keep them engaged.

Catfishing - ‘creating a whole new identity in order to start a relationship.’

A good recruiter will be able to spot a dodgy CV a mile off. But, FXRecruiter can help to provide consultants with top-quality profiles because candidates can apply for roles using their social accounts.  A LinkedIn profile is likely to be more accurate as it’s visible to all of a candidate's connections, making ‘catfishing’ much harder in recruitment!

So, now you have the number of ways that your recruitment agency website can support the recruitment process using modern-day dating analogies.

In all seriousness, the algorithms that you create for both dating agencies and recruitment agencies have a number of similarities:

The commodity is actually people’s personal data, so it needs to be kept ultra-safe
The search criteria your daters are looking for is similar to recruiters - location, salary, whether they are looking for something ‘permanent or temporary!’
You might look at a particular job advert or dating profile and whilst they might not quite hit the mark, it’s useful to have other suggestions, based on similar data which again, both dating sites and recruitment sites should be able to handle.

If you think Reverse Delta could be your perfect match of recruitment agency website designer, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with one of our recruitment tech experts on 08000 199737 or sales@reversedelta.com.

If you’re considering updating your current recruitment agency website or are a start-up recruiter and aren’t sure what type of website you need, then take a read of this blog because we explain (without loads of tech speak) what the difference is between an open source website (eg Wordpress) and a specialist website (such as FXRecruiter).
Firstly, what’s the difference between a specialist system and open-source system?
A specialist system is closed source - this means that the developer owns and controls it from a tech perspective. The quality of these systems can vary - a good specialist system will keep your website safe and secure and will give you complete control over your site’s content.

We will talk about this later.

An open-source system is something like WordPress. WordPress is built for general use and doesn't have recruitment in mind. Whilst it has developed some plug-ins that are tailored to the recruitment market and something that many start-up recruiters end up going for because they think that a specialist system is out of their budget. It isn’t, and at Reverse Delta we offer some great solutions for start-ups - you can see more on this blog.
Open-source websites are easier to hack!
Before we delve into this issue, it’s worth noting that 96% of websites on the internet (there are 1.7 billion live websites as we write this) are open-source. Therefore, hackers spend a lot of time trying to hack WordPress simply because there is a bigger opportunity for them - by learning to hack WordPress they can target a huge number of businesses. And it's often unclear as to where the responsibility lies - with the developer? Or the developer of the plug-in?
What about ongoing support, maintenance and updates?
Open-source technology is designed to make website design accessible for everybody. However, it’s worth doing your research into the longevity of your open-source web developer. Are they working from their bedroom (many do)? If they present you with a ‘too good to be true’ offer, then it is probably because they are aiming to build up a portfolio, possibly haven’t got enough industry knowledge and credibility and could potentially fold their business when they realise how hard it is to succeed. You need to make sure you've got maintenance and support in place to update and maintain your plug-ins.

Who will you contact about your website then? (NB: if you ask this question, an open-source designer will say they have contacts they work with. Truth is, nobody wants to work on somebody else’s code).
Your specialist website will last longer!
For the reasons explained above, an open-source website will be cheaper. If you go down the route of using a reputable company who are experts at building closed-source technology, you’d have invested more initially so you’ll want to keep the site for longer.

A specialist system should have a CMS (content management system) which will allow you to be in control of the content changes your recruitment agency will inevitably need to make. For example, is it likely that your recruitment agency will grow? Will you open another office or start up in a new sector? And what if some of your team move on or new starters join? These are all easily managed by you in your CMS if you have a specialist system - which will allow you to keep your site up to date in a cost effective way.

We’ll be honest with you; we don’t want to make content updates to your site - we want you to be able to do that as and when you want to! What we do want to do is all the back office techy stuff (we get quite excited by this) - backing up your website, virus scanning, preventing hackers, keeping your client and candidate data safe, working on integrating your recruitment website with your CRM and ATS. Integrations with WordPress are quite tricky - ours are written and ready to go and are being used by lots of our customers. This is where a specialist recruitment website provider can add value - not updating your team pages!
Why wouldn’t you want to work with a recruitment expert?
We’ve already mentioned that WordPress does have some plug-ins for recruiters that your web developer can use, but you would need to teach them about recruitment and invest time in making sure they can talk your language and understand your systems. Surely it’s more cost-effective to work directly with a specialist recruitment web designer, who can guide you through the tech process AND integrate other systems with your website to save you even more time and more money? You can find out more about the benefits of integrating your website with your internal systems here.   
Why Reverse Delta?
We pride ourselves on making sure we don’t blind people with tech speak when we meet them, because we want you to know and understand the product that you’re buying in to. Many web companies talk to their customers in a language that they won’t understand, so we think it’s important to set out the pros and cons for each client to make sure that we support you to get the best possible tech for your recruitment agency!

If any of the following are important to you, then Reverse Delta is the obvious choice for your recruitment agency website:

A dedicated support team available during your office hours
Unlimited warranty of fixes
A website that’s regularly backed up
Virus and security scanning
Technical upgrades and maintenance 
A technical agreement with clear lines of responsibility defined

If you want to know more about the benefits of a proprietary system and how it can help you to grow your recruitment agency, then I promise that I’ll go through it all and keep the tech talk to an absolute minimum!

You can reach me on 08000 199 737 or email peter.morrow@reversedelta.com. If you’d prefer you can connect with me on LinkedIn.

There’s no doubt, replacing time-consuming work with technology is key for any business to be successful. Given the number of applicants many consultants receive for each job, tech is a brilliant way to make sure your consultants spend their time on the tasks that add the most value to the recruitment process.  However, many recruiters that we speak to find it incredibly difficult to understand the benefits of combining two pieces of time-saving tech to drive their business forward.

In this post, we want to simplify technology integrations and explain why this could be a brilliant benefit for your recruitment agency.

First off, what type of tech do recruiters have?

Most recruiters will have a combination of:

A recruitment website where they post jobs (amongst other things)
An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to help them identify the most appropriate candidate; eg Broadbean has an ATS built in
A Customer Record Management (CRM) to record interactions with candidates and clients and to identify people for roles.

As you can see here, there are three different systems, which won’t automatically talk to each other. But an integration with an FXRecruiter website will make this possible. Here’s how:

Consultant can put the new role into the CRM
The role then gets posted out to the relevant job boards
It’s then fired over to the FXRecruiter website and automatically published
Depending on the level of integration, it can then go out to multi-posters and your social media feeds.

So, just like that, the role is input into one system once, and shared many times!  But the integration works both ways - when an application comes in, the integration saves more time:

Candidates will submit their CV to your recruitment agency website, using FXRecruiter’s application portal 
The ATS filters out the most appropriate candidates and declines unsuitable candidates
Your candidate portal in your FXRecruiter website will be filled with only the details of the most suitable applicants
Your CRM is now populated with a qualified lead and you can track your interactions with them (interviews, offers etc) and you can keep the contact in your system (with permission) for when another suitable role comes up

So yes, we can make your team happy by making sure all your systems TALK TO EACH OTHER!

We’ve been doing it with over 35 different technology platforms over the last 12 years, and we have helped hundreds of our customers to streamline their process by making their tech investments work better.

We do integrations at scale so we can make them highly effective and as techies we know our APIs and our XML. We build it right in the first place and keep it maintained (I’ll cover more on that later).  A non-specialist website builder simply doesn’t have the experience or relationships required to build a quality integration and, in my opinion, is one of the biggest mistakes people make when buying a recruitment website.

Common questions we get asked about integrations:

What happens when the software that my website integrates with is updated?

Software is updated all of the time. Sometimes, a tech company might need to release a patch if there is a security threat and most decent systems will have an annual programme of updates, so you always want to be working on the latest version to get the benefits from your software.  With all FXRecruiter integrations, we can work with your CRM/ATS provider to make sure that the integrity of your integration is maintained.

What happens if I change my supplier?

FXRecruiter has proven integrations with 35 of the leading platforms in the recruitment sector. If you choose to change your ATS or CRM, the chances are we can simply swap it over for you, so you’ll continue to benefit from the integration – it’s unlikely we’d need to build one from scratch!

What if you don’t integrate with one of my suppliers?

Contrary to what I’ve just said, if you do have a system that we don’t currently have an integration with, we can use our experienced in-house development team to build something specifically to meet your needs.

What if I just have too many spammy candidates?

This can be a problem in some sectors and just because a candidate may want to apply to a job or - worse - 20 jobs on your site, it doesn’t mean you want them in your CRM.
We can work with you if this is a problem, to allow you a simple one-click ‘add to CRM’ type button or link, so you get to control the throughflow of candidates to your all-important internal systems

A specialist recruitment website design agency will be able to integrate your CRM or ATS which will streamline your recruitment processes, making your consultants more efficient, improving candidate experience and ensuring you get the best candidates for the role.  Overall, this will save you time and make you money!  And who wouldn’t want more of that?

Have an initial chat about your recruitment tech needs, get in touch with me on  08000 199 737 or email peter.morrow@reversedelta.com. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn.

We've written a blog about how your recruitment website can help your business to grow in 2020, with a very strong focus on ways to reach and attract your candidates. Your recruitment website is also a brilliant business development tool. We’ve got 9 ways that your recruitment website can help start more conversations with potential clients.

Do you answer your client’s questions?

The client wants to know how you can add value to their business, so make sure your content is focussed on their problems and how you can solve them. By default, talking about your clients will give you lots of sector-specific keywords, which will help your website to perform well on search engines.

Can your client find the information they need easily?

Putting some thought into the design of your recruitment website will make sure you are getting the right message to your client easily. The aim of a website is to allow a client to find out enough about you to make them want to get in touch with you. Don’t go in to so much detail that they switch off! A clear design with a sitemap for your clients is a great way to start. Make sure you answer their questions and provide clear links (and articles/blog posts) so that you can explain key issues in more detail.

Play your blog content to attract clients.

Be consistent by offering value-adding blogs that are topical and relevant to your target audience. If you’re lucky enough to be a creative writer or have someone on the team who can do this then create a process, otherwise delegate it externally. Reverse Delta now offers content marketing and social media packages designed for recruiters and this is a great way of making sure you put content out regularly. Every time you think of a good blog, record it and be clear what the key message is. Create a pipeline of future blogs and aim to have 3 to 6 months of ideas for articles to be written.

Link your blog to your social media.

And make sure you ask your colleagues to do the same. The audience is potentially free, and if your content is good, you’re being of value to the reader. Great!

Support a struggling sector.

If you have a sector that’s struggling to gain traction amongst your many stronger specialisms on your main website then it might be worth breaking it out into its own website and gain the benefit of building the right content and links around it. A pecialist website will perform best for Google and it will improve your reputation and your brand. Our FXRecruiter software can allow you to operate two or more websites under a single CMS, so it’s easy to manage but will perform better.

Offer to showcase your client’s brand.

A recruitment microsite will support you with your client’s recruitment campaign as you can direct candidats to a separate, branded microsite just for their jobs, which could be a great selling point for you as an agency. Managed entirely within FXRecruiter, client microsites equip you to create powerful and engaging jobs websites focused on your client with total control over set-up and editing, adding logos, video, images and other content.

Show them your candidates!

Offer clients a look at your talent through a talent board. Showcase your candidates to your clients with anonymous profiles and beat your competitors to fill their vacancies.

Put the control in your client’s hands.

Equip clients to post new jobs and manage live ones, search candidates, create new candidate alerts and review applications, by having a client portal. Offer employers with in-house recruitment teams an added-value service, while keeping your internal costs low.

If you want to talk to one of the Reverse Delta experts about improving your website to help you reach more candidates in 2020, contact our team at sales@reversedelta.com or call on 08000 199 737.

Peter Morrow is Commercial Director for Reverse Delta. Follow Peter on LinkedIn or email peter.morrow@reversedelta.com.

For all recruiters, getting the word out there about how you add value to your clients and showcasing your amazing jobs are the biggest priorities for your recruitment agency website. In a highly competitive market, how do you entice new clients and job seekers to your site, over your competition’s? In this blog post, we explore 8 brilliant ways that you can get your recruitment website ready for business growth in 2020 giving your consultants a pipeline full of candidates!
Write quality job adverts.
This is a sure-fire way to get more applicants! Invest in coaching and training to get the desired quality standard of job advert content.
Are you advertising all your jobs?
It surprises me that one of the most common topics with recruiters is “how do I ensure my consultants are publishing every job?” Even if the consultant has an ideal candidate to put forward for interview, every job that you publish will attract more traffic to your website, which of course means more registrations, applications and more placements! Working with your consultants to explain the importance of all roles going on the site is crucial – it will give them more potential candidates to work with on other roles and support your site’s SEO efforts.
Are your adverts Google for Jobs compliant? 
To see if your job adverts are compliant to Google for Jobs schema microformat, check a job page URL here.
Auto SEO for job adverts.
Google likes URLs that humans can read simply without lots of characters. If your job urls are full of characters and difficult for humans to read, then your roles might not be performing as well as they might if you had a new Google for Jobs’-friendly website. Our FXRecruiter software automatically inserts job titles and keywords in the URL for your job advert.
Personalised job notifications.
Offer your job-seekers one-click sign-up for multiple notifications matched to their personalised searches. This makes it easier to engage with your candidates and potential candidates and shows your clients that you’re serious about nurturing ongoing relationships.
Are you offering value to your candidates?
Offer helpful/useful content for your job seekers. Attract candidates to your website with blog & content marketing that is relevant to them such as “preparing for a job interview” or sector relevant content such as “what skills do you need for a career in finance” or by location “what’s it like moving abroad to work”. Our FXRecruiter software can advertise the most relevant jobs to the job seeker on content pages and help you convert more traffic to placements.
Reach candidates with engaging videos.
Video is an increasingly popular format and is set to grow in 2020. Get more shares across social media and drive even more candidates to your website by using video content. FXRecruiter has video job adverts capability which will help you to share jobs on social media, meaning your roles reach more people.
Support your SEO with a niche landing page.
A landing page on your website can attract more candidates if you fill the content with niche keywords. A recruitment campaign landing page can be monitored and tweaked quickly and easily through your recruitment website content management system. This gives you complete control of your campaigns – no need to speak to your web designer every time you need to start a new campaign!

If you missed it, I wrote this blog post about creating a recruitment website and these tips are still relevant today 10 tips on creating a recruitment website in 2019. And we’ve also written a blog post about improving your recruitment website to attract more clients.

If you want to talk to one of the Reverse Delta experts about improving your website to help you reach more candidates in 2020, contact our team at sales@reversedelta.com or call on 08000 199 737.

Peter Morrow is Commercial Director for Reverse Delta. Follow Peter on LinkedIn or email peter.morrow@reversedelta.com.

We wanted to focus this blog on a huge issue that’s impacting many of our recruitment clients and that’s – recruiting. You’d think that filling your own internal vacancies would be easy if you’re recruiting all day, but actually it’s a huge challenge. This is a great blog post from Centred Excellence about the importance of having the right mix of skills in your recruitment agency. There’s no doubt, the right people in your business will be the key to success, but how do you find them?

We think that many recruiters are missing a trick – they’re not offering the same service to their own agency that they are offering to their clients. Let me explain.

Many recruiters have a brilliant website to showcase the roles that they’re filling - we’ve designed quite a lot in the last 18 years – you can check them out here.

However, what they aren’t able to do is showcase their own roles very well because the site’s main focus is to act as a business development tool for attracting new clients and to convert job-seekers into registering with your agency. Take a look at your website and take a look at how you attract job-seekers to your agency.

Perhaps you have a page called ‘Careers’ or ‘Work with us.’ This is a good step, but is the page as enticing to prospective consultants as it could be? It is possibly one of the ‘standard’ pages on your site that you rarely update – with just a form or email address to register your interest?

We’ve listed some improvements – can you make any changes?

Talk about the great things that your recruitment agency does, awards, career progression and development?
Who would the prospective consultant work with every day? Share some photographs or videos of the team.
What does a day at your agency look like? As a consultant, what can they expect day-to-day?
Overall, why would a career as a recruitment consultant be a great move for somebody? And why should a quality consultant make the move to your agency over one of your competitors?

Whilst there are surely some changes you can make to your Careers page (and this is the best option if budgets are tight), the main drawback with this approach is that your main recruitment website will be built so that your keywords are optimised. If you recruit for people to work in the Logistics industry, for example, your website will be built so that words related to Logistics will perform well on Google, such as driver, courier, warehouse etc. However, those keywords won’t be relevant to people who are searching for a role as a recruitment consultant. Therefore, if people are searching for roles as recruitment consultants, your site won’t be found because it’s set to perform for different keywords and search terms.

Here’s a couple of options for you to consider:

Use the campaign landing page functionality

Using our FXRecruiter software you can quickly create content-rich landing pages that perform brilliantly in Google. The main benefits are that you can advertise your own in-house roles for no cost and share easily on social media!

Below are three examples:

https://www.mcgregor-boyall.com/work-for-us

Work for us statement
We are McGregor Boyall and testimonials
Link to Glassdoor so see what current and previous employees think of working with McGregor Boyall
Link to Instagram for historic images of working and events at McGregor Boyall
Internal vacancies listed with Apply Now and Apply with LinkedIn

https://www.jmc-legal.com/work-for-jmc

Launch your career and work for JMC by providing your details and upload cv
A carousel of short articles by consultants who work for JMC and why they enjoy working for the business
A video message from Jason (CEO)
Collage of images  showing events throughout the year
A picture of the whole team

https://www.martinveasey.com/pages/work-for-us

Careers at Martin Veasey explained
What Martin Veasey are looking for to recruit
A list of roles currently recruiting for
Contact details

Landing pages are designed to attract more of your target candidates, using target niche keywords for searches. You can use your existing website to make things easy for potential job hunters so that they get to know what life is like at your recruitment agency.

Build your own standalone career website

From an SEO perspective, this is the best option.

You can structure your website so that your keywords really target the consultants for the industry you work in. This is what one of our clients, McGregor Boyall did. They identified a need to improve their ability to recruit quality consultants, so developed a career portal specifically to engage potential recruiters looking for a new role (or to start a career as a consultant).

A dedicated career site isn’t just an option for the big recruiters. It’s a very viable option for recruiters of all sizes.  If you want to up your recruiting game for your own recruitment agency, get in touch to see how an FXRecruiter website has brilliant in-built functionality to support you to overcome one of your agency’s biggest recruitment challenges!

If you are interested in finding out more about our services at Reverse Delta or our digital recruitment platform FXRecruiter, then give us a call on 08000 199737 or email sales@reversedelta.com

Peter Morrow is Commercial Director for Reverse Delta. Follow Peter on LinkedIn or email peter.morrow@reversedelta.com.

Content marketing is one of the biggest trends in recruitment marketing at the moment – and it looks here to stay. A relatively inexpensive way to get your message out to your target market (no printing, no design and no event/sponsorship costs), the key is to make sure that you spend your time and energy in creating content that accurately reflects your brand and ultimately, engages your candidates and clients.

One piece of content can be used many times

If you’ve got a content plan and a list of topics that you know will engage with your candidates and clients, you can then work out ways to use them multiple times. If you film a video for your website, why not transcribe it into a blog post? If you cover a couple of themes within your video, you can cut it in to a short teaser film and post it on social media, driving people to the main video on your website using several different key messages to entice people to view.

Tip: Think carefully about your message and invest time in a high-value piece of content. From there, work out how you can use it in several ways.

Content will help your website perform better

If you are writing about a topic or issue that’s relevant to your industry or sector, there’s no doubt that it will be full of keywords that Google will LOVE. Although the Google algorithms are always changing, one principle remains the same – it rewards websites where the content is updated regularly, which has lots of keywords and where readers have spent time on a page.

Tip: Make sure you have researched your keywords and use them throughout your content. There is a lot of discussion about Content vs. SEO – but SEO will rely on good quality content, so make sure you get it right. Make sure your content is worth reading and your SEO will benefit.

A content strategy will feed your social media

Your website’s blog is the first place to go to for your social media content. For each blog post, create social media posts to drive people back to your website. This could be a quick video to introduce your blog post (make sure you add in subtitles) or you could do an Instagram story or just a series of text-based posts (with an accompanying image) that will help to drive people to your blog post. And don’t just drive people to your blog once – think of different ways to introduce the topic and create eye-catching posts to drive people to your posts.

Tip: Make a plan of content that you want to share – this could be trends and news in your sector, the recruitment perspective on various national awareness days such as Mental Health Awareness Week, or simple techniques such as CV top tips or helping people through the recruitment process and what to expect when they register with an agency.

Reverse Delta now offers content marketing to our recruitment clients because we know it’s a vital way to improve the performance of your recruitment agency website. As we know, many of our clients struggle to find the time to manage this in-house as typically the consultants are too busy to take this on and some clients don’t have their own marketing team available.

We are delighted to welcome Rachel Allen to our team as Social Media & Content Specialist. Rachel has over 15 years’ experience of B2B marketing, with the last five years spent working with a range of recruitment clients. Rachel has been working on the Reverse Delta blog and social media since late 2019 – check out some of her articles here.

If you’d like to find out more about how Rachel can help your recruitment agency write great content to support your recruitment marketing strategy in 2020, get in touch via rachel.allen@reversedelta.com or call her on 07734 886538.

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Deciding on the best recruitment website when you’re a large recruiter can be a real challenge. From a start-up, you might now find yourself operating nationally, in a number of sectors or have grown through merger or acquisition? Perhaps you  have opened an overseas office? All of these factors can make choosing a website quite complicated, especially if you’ve experienced quite rapid growth and your website suddenly doesn’t meet your needs anymore.

In this blog post, we talk about the key things larger recruitment agencies need to consider when commissioning a new website.

How will my recruitment website perform in Google?

There’s no denying, this is absolutely critical. If you aren’t on page 1 of Google, then you may as well forget it. You need a recruitment website that has in-built SEO capabilities and is Google for Jobs optimised.

How can a new recruitment website represent the different areas of my recruitment agency?

Your agency might operate in different sectors, or you might have regional or national recruitment offices. In Reverse Delta’s experience, websites that are highly RELEVANT to what candidates are searching for will perform best. Workforce is one of our long-standing clients and they recruit for a number of different sectors across the West Midlands. We created a branded website for each division so that all the jobs were highly relevant to what candidates are searching for. But, they are managed and hosted as a multi-website, saving our client money and making the website easy to manage, through a single CMS. This saves time with only one sign in and content that was created for one website, can simply be copied to another.

If your agency operates across different sectors, or if you have a number of recruitment offices, creating several ‘local’ websites under your brand will be a cost-effective way of getting an SEO optimised and highly relevant recruitment website.

How can my recruitment website streamline my processes?

With a brilliant candidate portal, it’s possible for candidates to sign in with their social media account and populate a large amount of data from their LinkedIn profile.

In addition, an FXRecruiter website will integrate with a large number of CRMs, including Bullhorn, Broadbean and Itris. There’s loads more that we integrate with (check them out here) and if there’s any missing, we can link FXRecruiter up to them, assuming that the database or CRM has an open API.

How can my recruitment website support my marketing initiatives?

With the opportunity to auto-post your jobs on to 15 different recruitment websites and share them easily on social media, a big chunk of your marketing work is being done for you.

In addition, FXRecruiter websites have the option to create campaign landing pages for specific roles or sectors. For example, you might have an initiative to find graduates or customer service staff – so with a landing page you can provide all the reasons why a candidate would want to register with you in a single page, rather than expecting them to land on your website.

The FXRecruiter website has a highly-intuitive Content Management System so it’s easy to hand full management over to your marketing team, so you can make changes to your website in-house, without needing to come back to us every time you want a new page creating.

An FXRecruiter website also allows full reporting and analytics, so your marketing team can report back on their successful campaigns safe in the knowledge that they are working on real-time, accurate information.

I am now operating overseas; do I need a separate website?

Your FXRecruiter website can support multiple languages and will auto-adapt to settings in a user’s web-browser as well as offering a menu of languages on the site itself. This means you can engage with candidates and clients in their own language. So make a winning impression, in your audience’s own language and convey more credible affinity with ‘local’ markets.

We can also tailor your website to present your website in different parts of the world – but all on the same website! This means different pages (even the homepage), different sectors and specialisms, different jobs (naturally!), different teams, different imagery and videos, different blogs, different news… different whatever – wherever you are in the world. FXRecruiter displays it all automatically based on where the user is located. Users can always switch between regions as they want with flag icons or a region selector. So capture your benefits of targeting content more specifically at local audiences and present the right content in the right places with functionality for one website.

Who can I trust to do custom-development for my website?

Want to avoid the one-size-fits-all platform? If your website needs some custom development, we have plenty of options available for you. FXRecruiter isn’t a rigid out of the box solution, we can build tailored solutions around your business requirements. We will listen to your problems and help solve them by building a bespoke solution for your business. Our tech team embraces new challenges and has a track record in developing innovative, unique functionality to solve your specific tech requirements. We offer solutions you won’t find elsewhere and will help to continue your business growth.

This is exactly what happened when we met GiveaGradaGo in 2018. Cary had previously been let down by two other recruitment website providers, who did not have the expertise to deliver his specific technical specification. After 18 months, and two failed attempts at delivering a website, he was referred to Reverse Delta by a friend as a last resort.  Not only did we deliver on time and to budget, we also won a National Online Recruitment Award in 2018 for the site – www.giveagradago.com.

We hope that this blog has given you something to think about. Reverse Delta is a long-standing recruitment website specialist and our background is in SEO – so obviously performance of your website is mission critical for us.  Since Reverse Delta was formed in 2002, we have delivered over 300 recruitment websites and many of our customers are on their third or fourth website with us.

We also offer Creative Services and Digital Transformation, which we will talk more about in another blog post. But it’s clear to see that we are a trusted partner with the skills and expertise to support your recruitment agency on your growth journey.

For more information, give the Reverse Delta team a call on 08000 199737 or email sales@reversedelta.com.