Recruitment website quotes range from a few hundred pounds to five figures for what looks like the same thing, and almost all of the difference is one decision: whether the site has a job board built into it, and how that board is fed.
A brochure site for an agency is an ordinary small business website and should be priced like one. A site with vacancies, applications, candidate accounts and a link to your applicant tracking system is a piece of software. Knowing which one you are buying is the whole game, so this post separates them properly.
Two audiences, one website
Recruitment sites are unusual because they serve two groups who want opposite things, and the site has to make clear within a couple of seconds which door is which.
Candidates want to see the jobs. That is it. They are often browsing on a phone, frequently in the evening, sometimes at work when they should not be. A candidate who has to click through a wall of corporate language to reach a vacancy list is gone.
Clients, meaning the employers who pay you, want something else entirely: evidence you know their sector, an idea of your fees and terms, who they would be dealing with, and how quickly you work. They read more and they take longer.
The practical answer is two clear routes from the homepage, labelled plainly, with the jobs route dominant. Most agency websites get this wrong by writing the homepage entirely for clients, which is understandable because clients pay, and self defeating because no candidates means nothing to sell.
What actually makes a recruitment website expensive?
Five things, in order of cost.
- The job board itself. Vacancy pages that can be created and closed, searchable and filterable by sector, location and salary, with a sensible layout on a phone.
- Integration with your applicant tracking system. The big one. Jobs flow out of your system onto the site, applications flow back in. Done properly it saves hours every week. Done badly it is a permanent source of irritation.
- Candidate accounts. Registering, uploading a CV, saving jobs, tracking applications. A genuine step up in cost and in ongoing responsibility, because now you are holding accounts and personal data.
- Automatic posting out to job boards and aggregators. Feeds to the big boards, each with its own format and rules.
- Anything bespoke like timesheets, client portals or shift booking. That is software development and should be quoted as such.
A small agency does not necessarily need any of one to five. Plenty run perfectly well with a simple site and a third party board, which is the option most people never seriously price up.
The option most small agencies overlook
Use an existing job board platform for the jobs, and keep your own website simple.
Most applicant tracking systems for recruitment agencies include a hosted careers page or job widget. You post the vacancy once in the system you already use, and it appears on a page that is yours in branding if not in address. Your own website then links to it, and needs to be nothing more complicated than a well written five page brochure site.
The trade offs, honestly. You lose some control over how the job pages look, and the job pages may sit on a different web address, which is not ideal for search. What you gain is that applications land in your system automatically, nothing has to be built, and nobody has to maintain a job board. For a two or three person agency that is usually the better bargain, and it turns a five figure project into an ordinary small website.
If you do want the board on your own site
Ask these before anyone starts building.
- Which applicant tracking system are you using, and does it have a documented way to publish jobs? If it does, the integration is straightforward. If it does not, be very careful about what you are being promised.
- Who closes a filled vacancy, and how quickly? Stale jobs are the single biggest complaint candidates have about agency sites, and they waste your consultants' time on applications for roles that went three weeks ago.
- What happens to applications if the integration breaks? There should be an email fallback so nothing is silently lost.
- Where are CVs stored, and for how long? You are handling personal data and you need to be able to answer this. Check your obligations with the Information Commissioner's Office rather than assuming your web developer has.
- Does each vacancy get its own proper page? It needs to, both for candidates and because job pages are what search engines can actually index.
What makes a vacancy page work
The vacancy page is the most visited page type on the site, and most are written as though the reader already works in recruitment.
Put the things a candidate decides on at the top: job title in the words people use, location including the nearest town, salary or a genuine range, and whether it is permanent, temporary or contract. Hybrid or on site, and the hours. If the salary is genuinely not disclosable, say why in one line rather than writing "competitive", which candidates read as "low".
Then the detail: what the job actually involves day to day, what you need to have done before, what is nice to have, and what happens next after applying. A short line about the employer without naming them, if you cannot name them.
Write it in the words a candidate would use rather than the words the client's HR department used, which usually means rewriting the job description you were sent rather than pasting it. There is a method for that in writing the words for your own website.
Make applying take under a minute on a phone. Name, number, email, CV upload, apply. Every extra field costs you candidates, and a registration wall before anyone can apply costs you more of them than it gains you.
What candidates complain about
Worth knowing, because all three are free to fix and all three cost agencies applications every week.
- Jobs that are gone. Applying for a role that was filled a fortnight ago is the quickest way to lose a good candidate permanently. Whoever closes vacancies, make it part of the placement process rather than a separate job somebody has to remember.
- No salary. "Competitive" and "depending on experience" are read as low, and the better candidates filter them out. If a client will not let you publish a figure, publish a band and say it is indicative.
- Application forms that take twenty minutes. Every field you add loses people, and the ones you lose are the ones with options. Take the CV and the number, and ask the rest on the phone.
How many vacancies justify a job board?
A rough test. Count the roles you have live in an average month and how often they change. Under about ten live vacancies with a steady turnover, a simple vacancies page that somebody updates, or the careers page in your applicant tracking system, is genuinely adequate and nobody will notice the difference.
Past twenty or thirty, with several consultants adding roles, the manual approach starts costing more in wasted time than the integration would. That is the point to spend the money, and by then you will know exactly what you need it to do, which makes it a much better project than building it on day one.
What about the client side of the site?
Fewer pages than you think, but they have to be substantial.
- Sectors you recruit for, one page each if you have two or three real specialisms. This is what employers search.
- How you work, honestly. Your process, your timescales, whether you work exclusively or on contingency, and how you source candidates.
- Fees and terms. Publishing a figure is unusual in this trade, but publishing the structure is not, and it filters out conversations neither side wants.
- The team. Consultants with names, photographs and sectors. Employers ring people.
- Evidence. Roles you have filled, time to hire where you can prove it, and a couple of client references.
What should it cost?
Three brackets, and they are miles apart.
A brochure site with jobs handled elsewhere: ordinary small business money. £800 to £3,000 as a one off build in the UK, or the five to ten page bracket on a rental, which with us is £99 or £149 a month excluding VAT with the first three months paid up front and no setup fee.
A site with a job board and an applicant tracking integration: typically £4,000 to £15,000 built, depending on the system and how much has to be custom. Specialist recruitment website providers also sell this as a monthly package, which is often the sensible route because they have done the integration before.
Candidate accounts, timesheets, client portals: software pricing. Get two quotes and a written specification.
The mistake is buying bracket two when bracket one would do, which happens a lot because the job board is the exciting part of the conversation. Work out how many vacancies you actually have live in a typical month first. If the answer is six, you probably do not need a search and filter system built for six hundred.
Getting found
Two different search jobs again, and they need different pages.
Candidates search job titles plus places, and they mostly do it on the big aggregators rather than on Google. That means your realistic candidate strategy is being present where they already are, not out ranking a national job board from a two room office.
One thing genuinely worth doing on the technical side: make sure each vacancy page carries proper job posting markup, which is the structured data search engines read to understand that a page is a job advert. Any decent developer can add it, most job board tools do it automatically, and without it your vacancies are invisible to the job listings that appear directly in search results.
Employers search the sector plus the area, and that is winnable. A proper page about recruiting in your specialism in your region, written by someone who does it, will do more for the client side of the business than anything else on the site. Local visibility helps too, and the method is in getting found on Google when you only work locally.
The short version
Decide where the jobs live before you talk to anybody about design, because that decision sets the price bracket and everything else follows from it. For most small agencies, a straightforward website plus the careers page in the system you already pay for is the honest answer, and it leaves the budget free for the thing that actually wins clients, which is being visible for your sector.
If the simple route is where you land, you can price up your website in a couple of minutes, or read why UK website quotes vary so much for the wider picture on what moves a quote.
