“how you create the perfect recruitment website?”

This got us thinking. We know that every recruitment company is different, but here are the basics that we came up with – we’d be interested to hear your thoughts…

1. Branding - Every recruitment website needs clear brand messages – why choose us? What makes us different? For candidates this might be around range of opportunities or clients, expertise in a sector or quality of service. For clients this might be based on a range of service options, again expertise in a particular sector or region or quality of consultants.
2. Corporate Identity - Once you have your messages, you need to deliver them in a clear, distinctive and memorable way. It’s all about extending your corporate identity – your logo, taglines, fonts and colours – along with strong imagery that reflects your firm.
3. Full Function Recruitment WebsiteWhen it comes to the website itself, perfection is all about great functionality and ease of use – for visitors and for you.

   This means an easy to use content management system that enables you to update text, images and video. A system that enables you to add and remove pages, jobs, news and blogs. A system that gives you the flexibility to amend and update your website over time, the way that you want it.

   For visitors, it’s all about easy to use and instinctive navigation. Candidates need an intuitive job search; the ability to store CVs, track applications and to be update by email, SMS or social media. Clients expect easy to access information, good quality content about their sector and interests, quick contact forms as well as the potential to submit jobs or review candidates.

4. Going Mobile - The next step is a mobile accessible site. With more people accessing the internet by mobile than PCs by 2013, it is vital to have a site that works on mobile devices – including having a range of application options that work from a mobile.
5. Integration with Social Media - LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Facebook, YouTube as well as the rapidly emerging Branch Out service can all potentially be part of your recruitment website. A modern recruitment website needs to be the hub of this activity giving visitors instant access to profiles and connections as well as feeding content to the various social media platforms.
6. Integration with Search Engines - In the buzz about social media, it is easy to overlook the importance of search and Google in particular. Every recruitment site should feed information direct to Google (and the other search systems) and use the numerous tools available to ensure high search ranking.
7. Integration with Offline Systems - From job up-loaders such as Broadbean and Idibu to full agency management systems such as Voyager, Microdek and Bond, your site should plug-in wherever possible automating processes and easing the administrative workload.
8. Reliable Hosting and Support - Of course, your website deserves good high availability hosting – you need your site to be online all the time. And rapid support for when you want to make changes.
9. Finally… a certain something- Design flare, engaging functionality, a unique application – the something that makes your website stand out from the recruitment website crowd. The something that makes your recruitment website unique.Well those are our quick thoughts. What do you think? Have we missed anything? What would you want from a site? Use the form to contact us and let us know. And we’ll publish the best thoughts we receive.

The key element of the Panda upgrade is a shift in emphasis from Google that increases the importance of fresh content (e.g. blogs) and interesting 3rd party content (e.g. guest blogs) in gaining search positions. Google seems to be pushing popular sites to behave like publishers – which increases the importance of having regularly updated blogs and news integrated into your website.

Blogging for Search

So how should you write your blogs to be search friendly?

The first point to make is that you should always write content for blogs or websites for your human audience. Adding numerous key words into your text (or spamming as it’s known) will be spotted by Google and ignored.

But that doesn’t mean you should ignore your keywords. Keep them in mind. Use them in your headings and sub-headings and, for example, if your key search term is “web development” then make sure that word is a link to a page on your website that describes web development.

If your blog enables you to tag your content (e.g. WordPress or Blogger) then make those tags relevant to your key search terms. And use social media (particularly Twitter) to create links to your blogs. Tweet the links yourself and encourage contacts to retweet the links to a wider audience.

The Importance of Google+

Google has repeatedly tried to break the Social Media market and with Google+ it seems to have hit the mark. The key benefit of Google+ is that it is tightly integrated into search results so that if a Google+ friend has recommended a site it will appear higher on your search results.

That alone makes adding Google+ to your social media armoury a good idea – but its use of social circles makes it a very intuitive platform – we’ll publish a full Google+ review very soon.

Next Steps for Search and Social Media

With Google+ and the Panda upgrade, Google has clearly signalled that social media and search are now intrinsically linked. With a little planning, your blogging and creation of a corporate Google+ account, you can take advantage of this change and improve your search results.

On my LinkedIn group – The Financial Times Guide To Business Networking – we have been discussing the best ways to get your blog noticed.

Good question. Your practice has gone to all that trouble of writing and maintaining a blog, surely the world deserves to know about it AND read it? After all, why else write a blog?

Writing your blog is the easy bit, getting it noticed by sufficient numbers of your target audience is the hard bit.

So, how do you get your practice’s blog noticed?

1. Place it where your target audience will see it

Yes, it’s common sense, but this is perhaps the best way to get it seen. I have a large twitter following, so if I want my blog to get seen I tweet about it – and ask others to tweet about it. In fact about 50% of my blog traffic comes from my use of twitter. Posting your blog in a couple of LinkedIn groups may work for your practice as well.

2. Give it a ‘must-read’ title

As the saying goes you can bring a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. The same goes for your blog. If it doesn’t have a title which incentivises them to read it, or pique’s their curiousity, they are not going to read it.

3. Put links to it in your e-mail signature

Enough said really…

4. Comment on others blogs

Very simple, if you make intelligent useful comments on other people’s blogs, they will often pop over to your blog to have a look around and return the favour.

5. Put links to your blog on forums and other people’s blogs

As well as commenting on someone else’s blog or discussion post, do share a link to a relevant blog post on your blog. This is a great way to get interested and qualified readers to your blog.

6. Put links to other people’s blogs in your own blog post (and blog roll)

Like many people I have a set of search alerts for certain keywords. I will also look at my back link report to see who has backlinked to my blog. If I see someone’s blog post I will normally have a look, at the post it’s linked to.

What would you add as number 7?

It brings you closer to clients
The first major benefit of social media is that it will bring you closer to your existing clients. Connect with your contacts on LinkedIn (and perhaps Twitter) and you immediately gain more information about them. To start with LinkedIn will give you a mini profile of each contact; it will highlight their current interests, past triumphs and provide the kind of data that you would have spent years collecting to add to your CRM system.

Once connected, you are ready to keep your contacts up to speed with activities, events and offers. By updating your LinkedIn status or tweeting, you’re free to exchange ideas quickly and easily online. Rather than making hundreds of phone calls, one quick note can reach potentially hundreds of LinkedIn contacts and Twitter followers… as well as the wider online world of billions of people, but more of that later.

It generates referrals
First let’s look at how you can use your existing (online) network. Connect with a contact and you’ll see their contacts; usually this will mean their suppliers, often your competitors (check out who’s chasing their business!) and professional contacts who often hold similar roles in similar businesses. This is an ideal starting point for gaining referrals; for example if you’re connected to the Marketing Director in XYZ Ltd and they’re connected to the Marketing Director of ABC Ltd, it is very likely that you’ll be able to persuade them to arrange an introduction.

Just as important is the reputation you build online by posting ideas and information that is interesting to the wider world and that positions you as an expert in your particular niche or area. When the question arises, do you know an expert in Care Home Fees recovery, I can happily say – yes; I met her on Twitter and so the referrals start.

It builds rapport with prospects
So now you’re connecting and conversing with clients and building a referral network. But what about your existing warm prospects; the people you know, who like you but who have not quite taken that final step to become clients. Using social media to connect with this very important group of people can be very rewarding. First, you are likely to glean more pertinent information; from their views on a business topic to their love of Arsenal. Understanding more about a person makes those ongoing phone calls easier – and if you can get hold of complimentary Arsenal tickets, they may not do any harm. But more importantly, you can exchange comments and thoughts with your prospects; this keeps you in their mind’s eye and enables you to build an even stronger rapport so that when they’re ready to purchase, you are the name that springs to mind.

It’s your broadcast platform for the World
And now to the most notorious element of social media. Twitter and to some extent LinkedIn are both public platforms; publish your ideas and you’re not simply talking to your contacts, you are potentially broadcasting to the world. The key word here is potentially. If what you are saying is inspiring, controversial or just plain daft it is much more likely to be picked up beyond your existing contacts. Being honest, in most cases it won’t – and this isn’t really the point.
For example, Tweet about Lady Gaga and it is likely that your message will be seen by millions (albeit very briefly). However, Tweet about the finer points of property law and the audience maybe narrower and smaller but is also more likely to an audience that’s interested in what you have to say and who are more likely to get in contact.

But surely this isn’t for us?
Here are some of the objections that I’ve heard recently from senior managers about social media…

It’s what my kids do. None of my clients use social media. I’ve looked at Twitter, it’s juvenile nonsense. I don’t want to know what Stephen Fry had for breakfast. It’s risky. We’ve tried it, it takes loads of time and we got nothing from it.

Here at realityhouse, we’re successfully using social media to win new business. And we’re showing a huge range of businesses how to do the same. 18 months ago, we would give you the theory; now we can show you concrete examples of how social media will deliver. The challenge is how to make social media work for your specific requirements and, without wishing to sell too hard, that’s where we come in. Looking forward to hearing from you.

Business plan? What business plan?

Strategy for growth? What strategy? (or even strategy for survival!)

Very often, I am finding that many firms don’t have a three or five year plan. Let’s be honest, having a business plan or vision would be a start. In case you are thinking.. “but our practice has revenue targets for every partner“. This is not a business plan or strategy.

At this point in time, the professions are changing. Clients are becoming less loyal and wanting more discernable value from their advisor. Both the accountancy and legal world are facing significant change. Legal services act anyone? Online accounting software anyone?

Far too often a practice is a collection of partners doing their own thing tied together by common overheads and letterheads. When this is the case, often leadership – the very thing needed for the firm’s survival – is lacking. It’s this leadership, it doesn’t matter from which partner it comes from, which will gel the partners together to decide on the firm strategy, business and marketing plan for the next 3 to 5 years. And more importantly, it will be this leadership which means that the firm actually works toward the business plan rather than paying lip service to it and letting it get dusty in a drawer somewhere. Without this common vision for the practice, it’s all too easy to get caught up in the daily challenge of client demands and lose sight of the bigger picture.

It’s this bigger picture which will ultimately be the difference between your practice surviving and thriving during the next five years… or not.

Does your practice have a 3 or 5 year business plan?

But will recruiters look for a new agency using their mobile? And will candidates apply for vacancies using their mobile… and do people store their CV on their smartphone?

The short answer is yes… and here are three very good reasons why…

Why a mobile site is important…

1. According to IDC Smartphones outsold PCs in 2011 and this gap is set grow in 2012.
2. Your candidates and clients are using Facebook and Twitter on their mobiles. Over 40% of Facebook users access the service on their mobiles and a similar figure applies to Twitter; what’s more LinkedIn is catching up fast. If you’re posting vacancies on these platforms, people will be visiting your site from a mobile; if they receive a poor experience on your site; they’ll simply browse away.
3. Thanks to sites such as the BBC, Amazon mobile and Google itself, users are expecting more from mobile websites. Google research has found that 71% of users expect a mobile site to load as fast as a desktop sites and 40% have turned to a competitor site if a website doesn’t work well on a mobile.

What sort of mobile recruitment website do you need?

The key questions to ask when looking at a mobile recruitment website are:

• Is it bespoke – has it been designed specifically to work on mobiles?
• Is it editable – can you use a content management system to edit pages, jobs, news etc?
• Does it connect to social media – does your website work well if a visitor clicks from within the Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn apps?
• And the big one – are your candidates able to apply online using either a stored CV from your main website, a cloud service such as dropbox or via LinkedIn?

But what about apps?

The other major option when going mobile is to build an app. And this is very possible; we can easily create an app that matches the functionality of your mobile website. However, the most successful apps we have developed are not job search systems. They tend to be tools or applications that have some specific use.

For example, if you run contractors you might want an app that enables them to complete their timesheets from their phone. This timesheet app would also include latest contract vacancies so that it would prompt existing contractors to look at new opportunities.

So mobile recruitment. Is it the next big thing? To be honest who cares, its here and its a way for you to attract more business. But be aware, a mobile recruitment website is no longer an option; you need to be thinking about it now.

Picture this scenario.
I’m a Sales Manager earning 75K and living in London, I specialise in selling software to HR and Recruitment organisations and it’s that experience which makes me worth my wage in my industry, after all, it’s just ‘sales’.
You’re a specialist Sales Agency, and you’ve got 50 jobs on your website. Somehow I’ve managed to find you on page 92 on Google and did I apply for the 300+ Sales Manager Jobs on Monster or the 350+ Sales Manager jobs on reed amazingly I’m now looking at your website – with 25 jobs on it. (let’s call them adverts rather than live jobs)

Are any likely to appeal? Probably not, and I’m onto sales agency website #93.

Do the candidates viewing your website turn into successful placements? Do you know?

Is your job page actually pushing people away from your business?

What is your Recruitment agency website for?

If like most, you see your website as a shop window to your business, your staff and your expertise you need you shelves stocked – and perfectly displayed.

There needs to be good content, confidence that you’re experts in your field and ultimately a reason to engage with you.

1. Post successful ‘placements case studies’ on your website – instead of fake jobs
2. Make the ‘about us’ page personal – consider a video
3. What makes you an expert in your industry? Consider a blog
4. Profile your staff – use twitter to position yourself as an expert in your field
5. Case studies – get permission to use clients logo’s on your website (add a clause to your terms!!!)

@paulatvoyager

Paul.thompson@voyage.co.uk

To start with there are no games, no embarrassing pictures (well okay, a few of those profile pics – you know who you are) and your company and personal profile are very much business focused.

Recruiters have been successfully mining the 135m members (8m in the UK) for candidates for several years. And with 2 new members signing up every second there is unlikely to be a shortage of talent any time soon. But what does LinkedIn do next?

The universal CV and beyond…

LinkedIn wants to be the place that your career develops. It is your CV (and you can now use your profile to apply for jobs – see the realityhouse mobile recruitment sites) and if someone searches for you by name on Google, your LinkedIn profile is likely to top the results.

According to LinkedIn the next step is to further enhance the individual skills sections on profiles as LinkedIn wants to be the place that you search for a “commercial lawyer with franchising expertise” or “a recruiter with accountancy knowledge” widening its scope to be a business resource.

Plus LinkedIn will be further refining ‘Insights’ – its news services; the goal is to deliver key news and information to your profile and your inbox based on your key interests and expertise.

LinkedIn Company Profiles

One weakness in LinkedIn in until recently was company profiles. But these are changing – particularly with the introduction of product and services tabs and the inclusion of company testimonials. And of course the vacancy tab enables jobs to be posted.

It is the move into corporate recruitment that potentially offers the biggest shake up as the cost/hire of direct recruitment using LinkedIn can really produce savings as evidenced by Invensys, Boots and ITV at the recent Enhance Media conference. And this despite the frankly eye-wateringly expensive LinkedIn corporate packages.

So is LinkedIn the future of recruitment?

LinkedIn is clearly going to play a key part in recruitment over the next 5 years. It’s ability to help attract passive candidates (rather than the active jobseekers reach by job boards) offers huge potential. The best people have so many options and LinkedIn can help to build a relationship ahead of the need for the employee.

In other words LinkedIn is moving into the arena of talent management and relationship building. You engage with prospects and when they’re ready for a move they will come to you. Top recruitment consultants are already heavily using this technique and in our view this is where the future of recruitment lies.

LinkedIn – tips to start using it effectively
Millions of professionals use LinkedIn, most get no business from it. Others use it as a rich source of leads and develop powerful business relationships with it.

What can LinkedIn do for you?
LinkedIn can help you, in your target market, find new prospects and discover more about them before you even have to “sell to them”.

How can increase my sales by using LinkedIn?

1. Getting more people to connect with you is a key part of the process, but first you have to have a good profile. Get your profile right, before attracting people to it!
2. Once you have a great profile, start to build connections, search for the contacts that you want to develop, demonstrate your expertise, and get to know people in your target market and participate in group discussions.
3. Have a contact strategy so you take the development of key relationship offline at a relevant point.

The profile headline and the most common LinkedIn mistake
Your profile headline is the key statement to get people to read your profile; it shows underneath your name, every time people see you. Write something to get the reader to keep reading. What do you do (not job title–what do you do)? Job title and company do not make good headlines.

Imagine somebody asking “what do you do”. An unhelpful reply would be “I am partner in xyz”, more likely you would tell them what you do and for whom. Ideally in such as way as to get them to say “that’s interesting, tell me more”

What should I put into my summary?
Using the language of your target audience, talk about your useful skills, how you help people. Don’t forget to make it keyword rich, readers will find that easier to read (so will Google). It is normally a good idea to write about you and your practice within the summary – but in separate paragraphs for clarity.

I hate my photo; do I really need one on LinkedIn?
Yes, I’m sorry but you do. We are human and make quick decisions looking at faces. This is a business forum; the photo is one you should happily share with prospects. A professional head shot, not a distant portrait or logo.

LinkedIn allows me to show 3 websites, I have only one?
Do you really only have one website? How about a blog? Are there any specific pages on your website which may be directly interesting to readers, (e.g. commercial and family law)?

Change the words “My website” for something meaningful (e.g. your company name or what the page is about).

What are applications?
A well written profile will attract people in your niche; adding applications can make your profile stand out more and make more detailed information available to those that want it.

Things to consider adding are:

• One of the blog applications – so your latest blog posts show and can be read
• Boxnet and/ or slideshare. Slideshare can allow you to start showing video on your profile. Boxnet can allow you to share documents that you already have.
• Amazon reading list. Show that you are knowledgeable and continuing to develop your knowledge.

Look in the mirror.

1. Re-read your profile, aloud, slowly.
2. Does it explain, succinctly, why someone should ask you for business? Reading it aloud will help you tell if it sounds right.
3. Then get somebody else to do the same exercise and check your grammer and spilling. Tipos look reall bad.

With a great profile you are well placed to develop your professional life.

The waiting may be painful but by feeding the results into our annual brand audit, we’re able to assess whether the values and expertise that we’re aiming to promote are being received by our clients – which is what branding should all be about.

Measure, measure and measure again
Also feeding into the audit are the results of our various marketing campaigns. The great advantage of living in a digital world is that you can measure and track marketing performance in so much more detail. From assessing the success of each search, email or direct marketing campaign to gaining feedback on customer service and reading comments online, you have information at your fingertips that will drive the evolution of your brand and focus your marketing planning.

Increasingly, we’re helping firms to use online marketing Dashboards to track campaign performance in real-time. What the brand audit adds is the ability to step back, review day-to-day results in the context of feedback from clients and to ensure that you are achieving your brand vision.

Every Comment is an Opportunity
The other area that is now feeding into our brand audit is public statements about realityhouse. In the real word, not every comment made about your business will be 100% positive. The ever increasing obsession with social media and review websites means it is vital to listen, to respond, to apologise when necessary and to treat every comment as an opportunity to win back an existing client as well as showing prospects that you take criticism seriously.

You can’t please everyone. The website “solicitors from hell” (apparently soon to reappear in a new guise) is a classic example of where no amount of reasonable comment can help. But, in our experience, most clients are reasonable and will respond positively if you respond to their expressions – no matter how extreme they may initially appear to be.

Making a Brand Audit Count
The real joy of a brand audit is that to enables you to see your successes as well as revealing where you need to try harder. In addition it raises questions that feed not only into your marketing plan but back into the core business plan itself – and that is surely where marketing should add value.

So, what’s the difference between 3G and 4G? There are two main differences which will enhance the mobile experience for the user:

1. The speed on the 4G network will be approaching land broadband speeds – i.e. up to 50 Mbytes per second

2. Base stations are becoming smaller, to the extent where they can be placed in private residences – which will allow greater reliability of the 4G mobile signal.

In effect, the mobile broadband network will soon be as reliable and quick as land broadband.

This is going to impact the way people like to receive their information – and more importantly, how marketing professionals reach and engage with potential clients. In my opinion, the practices who will benefit from the introduction of 4G already:

• Use video to engage with potential clients
• Have video embedded on their website
• Engage in social media marketing
• Planning to use a mobile phone app to enhance their client experience
• Have a mobile ready website

What have you already heard about 4G?

How do you think it will change our marketing practices?

But why focus on specialist mobile websites and apps – can’t you simply use your main desktop website? The short answer is no… and here’s why: According to the latest research from Google…

• By 2013 more people will use their mobiles phone than PCs to get online
• 60% of users expect a mobile site to load in 3 seconds or less
• 71% of users expect a mobile site to load as fast as a desktop site (but mobile uses 3G not broadband)
• 40% of users have turned to a competitor when a site doesn’t load quickly on a mobile
• 61% of mobile users call a business after a search; 59% visit the location
• Mobile searches have grown 4x since 2012

The opportunity is clear – you can reach busy clients and prospects and offer information that will position you as an expert and a partner. This might be by refining your website so that it is focused on the needs of the mobile user – visit www.pizzaexpress.co.uk or www.barclaycard.co.uk on a desktop and then a mobile to see some really effective (albeit graphically disappointing) mobile websites. Or it might be by developing a relevant app – the success of our own Tax Rates app for Haines Watts on Android and iPhone is a great example of useful information made available in a very simple and low cost app.

Up until now, mobile has been a ‘nice to have’ option. In 2012 mobile will increasingly be at the heart of your marketing mix. We’re looking forward to it.

Happy New Year.

• The Dark Knight Rises – The final instalment of British director Chris Nolan’s Batman trilogy. View trailer »
• The Artist – French romance silent film, already released in the US to qualify for the Oscars – might win best picture. View trailer »
• Django Unchained – next Quentin Tarantino film with a well talked about plot that’s bound to cause a stir.
• The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – Part 1 of a 2-part Lord of the Rings prequel installment.  View trailer »
• Les Miserable – British musical film Directed by Tom Hooper who directed The King’s speech and with Anne Hathaway cast as Fantine. »
• Skyfall - next Bond film likened to the classic Goldfinger.
• Brave - Pixar’s first fairytale but with a Brothers Grimm edge. View trailer »
• Prometheus - A Ridley Scott sci-fi film, which is  sort of an alien prequel! View trailer »
• The Great Gatsby – An adaptation of F.Scott Fitzgerald’s best-selling novel, directed by Baz Luhrmann and starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
• The Flowers of War - with British Oscar winner and Batman star Christian Bale. Chinese Director Zhang Yimou (Hero and House of Flying Daggers). View trailer »

What do you think about our predictions? Or perhaps you have some more you would like to add to our list? Comment below.

It’s that time of the year again when the realityhouse team start to think about our top 10s. A couple of years ago it was our top Christmas songs (‘I believe in Father Christmas’ by Greg Lake is still my personal favourite). This year it’s our top Christmas movies…

• Trading Places—Laura
  Why? Dan Aykroyd as a drunk Santa going loco at his office Xmas party—brilliant!
• Die Hard—Justin
  “Now I have a machine gun. Ho Ho Ho.” Why is it my favourite? It has enough explosive action, one-liners and wry humour to balance out the day’s festivities once the children have gone to bed. And it has sleigh bells.
• A Christmas Carol—Tonya
  An old classic and it reminds me of Christmas eve excitement watching it in the mountains of Mallorca wondering how Santa made it all that way—lol!
• The Grinch—Sophie
  Because I hate christmas almost as much as he does! But I won’t steal anything, honest!
• Rare Exports—Cliff
  It revolves around an evil Santa, what could be better? I expected a dark, tense pseudo-horror and whilst it starts off brooding & suspenseful it builds into a fun & oddly charming film.
• Miracle on 34th Street—Mike W
  Because its one of the all term classics and embodies the true spirit of Christmas.
• The Nightmare Before Christmas—Mike F
  Tim Burton animation at it’s brilliant best.
• The Christmas Tree (1969)—Paul
  The story is really quite beautiful. Comment on the progress of science during the cold war era combined with sickly sweet sentimentality and a father/son relationship…all wrapped up in a not-so-festive bow.
• Love Actually—Heather
  Just because I’m a massive Colin Firth fan.
• National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation—Chrissie
  I can watch it every year and it never fails to make me laugh and it gets me in the Christmas spirit.

If we’ve missed your favourite, please let us know. If you agree with us—tell us why—we look forward to hearing from you.

Firstly ask yourself the following questions:

1. Why is the website being created?

Before you jump straight into your website project, think about why you are creating it. Typically a recruiter’s website should offer an accessible, action driven space that caters to the two different audiences you are looking to attract. The homepage should reflect this.The goal of the homepage and in turn its copy is to give a good first impression, provide an at-a-glance overview of what you do and then allow people to follow the path through the site that best suits them.

2. Who is our audience?

The most important thing to remember when writing copy is who you are writing it for. You are not talking to another recruiter and users may only have a rough idea of what you could offer them. Some users may never have never dealt with a recruiter before and might be daunted by the prospect. Therefore it needs to be accessible to anyone and the key to accessibility is to keep your copy  clear, concise and jargon-free.

3. Am I a Niche recruiter?

If you are a niche recruiter who only targets specific job levels or sectors try to think about the types of candidates & clients you want to attract and what type of content they are going to respond best to. Typically it is easier to write copy when you have a very specific niche audience in mind  as you can concentrate on what they really want to know.

Conversely if your services are targeted at a much larger range of industries and job levels then you need to be less specific in your copy without appearing too generic. The key is to reassure the people in the various sectors you recruit for that you are experienced and will deliver the level of service they expect.

4. What are my ideal outcomes?

Ultimately your recruitment website needs to help you generate leads from potential new clients and encourage candidates to sign-up or apply for jobs. When it comes to writing for clients, make sure that you give them enough information to be interested but not so much that they don’t feel the need to call you or fill in a form.

5. How should I structure the page?

Now that you have thought about your audience & your goals you should consider  the structure of the page and the word count.

The structure should typically be;

1. A headline
2. A short intro
3. Then a couple of paragraphs of main copy.

When getting across stats or a series of points its best to use a list. Not only will this be easier to read, but easier to write.

By following this structure you should naturally keep the page to a reasonable length. However should the page become quite long consider either splitting the page into two pages or breaking the information up with headers at regular intervals.

Ultimately the key to good copy is to provide what your audience wants to see and to make it as readable and findable as possible.