In only a few short years the web has become an essential tool for recruiters. While other sectors got their fingers burnt in the dotcom crash, recruitment companies grabbed on to the many opportunities the web offered.

The challenge now is to fully exploit recruitment websites. It is no longer enough for a site to offer job search facilities and corporate marketing material. By responding to customer needs and harnessing new technology, the latest generation of recruitment websites can offer a far greater range of options to build loyalty.

It goes without saying that jobs are the main attraction for visitors to any recruitment site. But, in response to customer demand, editorial content is increasingly becoming a feature.

“Updating a site should involve more than adding in new jobs,” says Colin Kenton, account manager at web design firm eaccountingplus.com. “Companies need to offer information on careers as an extra attraction. People come back to a site regularly for its knowledge-base.”

The website of secretarial and support staff recruiter Gordon Yates, for example, includes a salary survey and has links to related sites, government departments and fun web pages such as i-resign.co.uk. It also offers interactive features including a personal CV builder.

Going interactive

For many, it is interactivity that offers the greatest opportunity. Giles Guest, director of specialist recruitment website developer 4mat.com believes recruitment sites should become a personalised one-to-one service.

“The vast majority of recruitment sites are lacking in interactivity. Many sites include a database of vacancies and some more detailed information. But some consultancies have stuck there,” he contends. “The next step is for the web to be used proactively to assist consultants and reduce admin while also building candidate and client loyalty.”

In its simplest form this can mean sending email or text message alerts to registered candidates when new vacancies arise. It can also involve hosting discussion forums to answer candidate questions. Features can be added to allow clients to upload information direct to a site or even create their own mini zone within the recruiter’s site.

IT recruiter Drax Group recently worked with 4mat. Drax spent less than £20,000 on improving two sites, says head of marketing Nick Terry. He feels he saved administration costs by integrating software that allows candidate filtering and ‘online interviewing’. This works by asking the candidate to respond to a few questions based on the skills and qualifications for a particular role.

“Candidates self-select or de-select themselves based on the criteria, saving their time and the agency’s. This is useful where a specific qualification is essential for a technical job,” he explains. The automated process can also be used to check whether candidates have an EU work permit.

Not too flash

While interactivity may be the Holy Grail, enthusiastic recruiters should not rely too heavily on whizzy effects and gizmos as they can sometimes deter users. For instance Flash, software that adds animation to a site, can slow download time.

“People want to search vacancies and clients want to find candidates. They won’t wait two minutes for graphics to load,” says Alan Temple, business development manager of web developer and internet service provider Aflex, who recently worked on generalist recruiter Professional Recruitment Organisation’s Finance Professionals site.

Temple recommends anyone who is in danger of getting carried away should view their site on a home PC. A run-of-the-mill machine is likely to have a standard 56k modem, which loads web pages more slowly than a commercial unit.

It is also worth taking a glance at a pristine website via anybrowser.com. This site shows the user what their own site will look like when viewed through a range of browsers or on an Apple Mac operating system.

Testing times

Apart from checking how a site looks on different equipment, there are many other usability tests. Web development companies will often do a thorough check to test all links. However, it is also advisable to involve non-technical folk in testing too. Michael Page International brought in people from inside and outside the business to test their newly revamped site prior to launch. They also made improvements in response to feedback from site users.

Thorough testing of this kind is something that companies don’t do enough of, believes Mike Taylor, director of online recruitment specialist web-based-recruitment.com. “You need input from someone who’s not been involved in the development process. The more people who can see it and try it out, the better. Check everything from ease of use to spelling,” he says.

It is also important to think about how the site will be managed day to day. Giving admin staff and consultants varying levels of access to upload or amend the site ensures the potentially onerous task of content management doesn’t fall on one pair of shoulders. It also means consultancies don’t have to pay web developers to carry out simple tasks like uploading jobs.

Traffic flow

Just designing and managing a website isn’t enough. Driving target users to a site from other parts of the web is an art form in itself. It is called web promotion or optimisation. Ask netheads about this and they will emerge from their anoraks to explain that search engines like Google and Yahoo all work on different algorithms.

Those of us whose eyes glaze over at this point would be well advised to sit up and listen as this process has major implications for any site. Translated into English, this techno-jargon means that all search engines use different criteria to index and rank the sites they locate when a user types in key words to search on.

David Craig of web promotion company Fox Productions explains that some engines use key words, others look at links, many rely on ‘metatags’ – a code built into the site – and some use a combination of all these.

“Search engines are continually re-indexing themselves to ensure they deliver quality search information,” he explains. “That’s what brings a site to the top of a search list. And you need to get to the top in order to get traffic.”

We have all been there. Type in ‘retail job vacancies’ and you get a message saying there are 879 web pages to view. You groan and click on the first two or three. The skill lies in being in that top handful – which is where the experts come in.

But take care when choosing a web promoter, warns Dave Ashley, who runs web developer Oi New Media and web promotion company webaddiction.co.uk. He claims some companies will charge about £20 a month to do web promotion, but this will involve little more than adding a site to automated software that continuously submits details to a search engine. Unfortunately, he explains, the search engines treat this as spam – the electronic equivalent of junk mail – and will ban your site.

“A good optimisation and promotion company will modify the code to make sure it is search engine-friendly and make sure that relevant key words and links appear throughout a site. It is worth budgeting for the cost of ongoing promotion when companies are costing web development.”

Cost will always be an issue, but any forward-thinking industry must stay abreast of new web technology to maintain competitive advantage. Of course, technology should never be an end in itself. But companies who fail to make themselves aware of the business opportunities offered by new innovations will not only lose their grip on the web, they also risk losing their share of the recruitment market.