Reed.co.uk has redesigned its website from the ground-up to better suit the needs of recruiters.

Managing director Martin Warnes told Recruiter that in the past three years its database of CVs has doubled and the average number of applicants responding to positions has increased from three to 18, which has led to a change of requirements from its audience. “We’re now working with 5,000 recruitment agencies at any one time, and research and analysis revealed that they are looking for a more sophisticated service that helps them identify the best candidate quickly and allows them go from long list to shortlist in the quickest fashion,” he said. “So we wanted to move from a job posting site to a recruitment service.”

The new site, which goes live on 29 November, claims to reduce the time it takes to post a job. It allows recruiters to use existing job advertisements in their library as a template, offers new formatting options and allows them to post a vacancy to a specific postcode. Recruiters can advertise for up to six weeks and can choose their own end date. To help recruiters arrive at a shortlist more swiftly, there are more filtering tools, and pre-screening questions can be added to an advertisement.

Other new features include a green, yellow and red ratings system that recruiters can apply to candidates and tools that encourage a more collaborative way of working. “A typical scenario is that a resourcer does the initial search on the database and passes the list upstream to a consultant. We’ve tried to embed functionality in line with the
working processes of recruitment agencies,” said Warnes. Recruiters can also view embedded CVs within their account to save time downloading them.

While the changes have been driven by the needs of recruiters, reed.co.uk has also listened to its candidates and addressed the recurring issue of a lack of communication after applying for a job. “For a recruiter it is hard to go back to 30 candidates with a personalised reason why they have not been successful, so we have introduced a communications centre,” said Warnes. “This makes it easier for recruiters to painlessly reject unsuitable candidates.”

Reed.co.uk has been working on the redesign for a year and as well as consulting with a panel of agencies, direct recruiters, public sector organisations and usability experts, it investigated how other industries such as banking and travel look after their customers online. It elicited feedback on an initial design and after acting on this took an “80% finished product” back to the panel for further assessment. “In terms of the development process, this is the most user-led project we have ever done,” said Warnes. “The functionality that the users have perceived to be most valuable has been given most prominence.”

While a major redesign, the new reed.co.uk is very much a platform for further evolution and next year the company will introduce candidate-focused changes. Warnes was keen to stress, though, that this redesign has been approached very much through the “lens” of the recruiters who, he said, have become much better at measuring the value they get from a job board. “When we meet with a customer they are increasingly able to tell us cost per applicant across job boards and cost per placement,” he said. “What I want to get most out of this [redesign] project is an improvement in these metrics and better return on investment from the recruiter’s point of view.”

www.reed.co.uk