Marketing for recruitment agencies, built around both sides of the desk
A recruitment agency has two marketing problems that look like one. Winning clients who will pay a fee, and attracting candidates who can fill the role. They need different work.
Organic impressions for one client in 12 months
Client pages ranking top for their own service names
Based here, working with agencies across the UK
Two audiences, one website, usually built for neither
Most recruitment agency websites are built to impress clients and then used mainly by candidates. The result is a brochure with a jobs page bolted on the side, where the search barely works and every application drops into an inbox.
Those are different jobs. A hiring manager wants evidence you understand their sector and can actually deliver. A candidate wants to find a relevant role in under a minute and apply from a phone without creating an account.
Building one site that does both properly is mostly a structural question rather than a design one, which is why it usually gets missed.
The four things that move a recruitment agency
Lead generation sits across the middle two rather than beside them, because winning clients and filling roles are both acquisition problems.
Websites with the job board built in
Not a plugin bolted onto a brochure site. Proper job search, filtering that works, fast mobile apply, and indexable job pages so roles appear in Google for Jobs. See how we build websites.
SEO for sector and role terms
The terms worth holding are specific: a sector plus a location plus a job title. Broad terms like “recruitment agency” are held by the global players and are rarely worth the fight. Our SEO work.
Client acquisition
Winning the companies who pay the fees. Content that proves sector knowledge, paid search on hiring intent terms, and tracking that ties an enquiry back to the search behind it.
ATS and CRM integration
Roles flowing from Bullhorn, Vincere, JobAdder or whatever you run, to the site and the job boards, without anybody rekeying them. We build integrations and bespoke systems, so this is normal work for us rather than a limitation.
If your consultants are copying roles into three job boards by hand, that is not an admin problem. It is a system that was never finished.
Google for Jobs is free traffic most agencies never claim
Google surfaces job listings directly in results when the pages carry the right structured data. Get it right and your roles appear without paying a job board for the privilege. Get it wrong, or render the listings in JavaScript a crawler cannot read, and you are invisible in the one place candidates start.
A great many recruitment sites fail this on a technical detail rather than on content: jobs loaded by script, no JobPosting schema, expired roles left live, or apply links that break. All fixable, and cheaper than the board spend it replaces.
This is technical SEO more than marketing, which is usually why nobody has looked at it.
What the first six months look like
Audit
The site, the job board, the tracking and where your applications and client enquiries actually come from today.
Fix the foundations
Indexable jobs, structured data, speed, and the integration that stops the rekeying.
Go after the winnable terms
Sector and location combinations rather than the head terms the global agencies hold.
Measure both sides
Client enquiries and candidate applications tracked separately, because they are different businesses.
What recruitment agencies ask
Can you work with our existing ATS?
Usually yes. Most have an API or at least a feed, and where one does not we have built integrations against worse. Bullhorn, Vincere and JobAdder are the ones we see most. The aim is that a consultant posts a role once and it appears everywhere it should.
Should we compete for "recruitment agency" terms?
Almost never. Those are held by the global agencies and job boards with budgets you cannot match, and the traffic is poorly qualified anyway. Sector plus location plus job title is where the winnable, better converting searches are.
Do we need marketing for clients or for candidates?
Whichever is currently the constraint, and it is worth being honest about which. Plenty of agencies have more roles than they can fill and are still buying client acquisition. We would look at the ratio before recommending anything.
We already pay for job boards. Is this instead of that?
Alongside at first, then often less of it. Getting your own roles visible in Google for Jobs and ranking for sector terms reduces how much board spend you need, but it takes months rather than weeks. We would not suggest cancelling anything on day one.
What does it cost?
It depends on whether this is a website build, ongoing marketing, or both, and how much integration work sits behind it. The fee is agreed in writing before work starts and sits separately from any advertising budget on the invoice.
Talk to us about your agency
Tell us whether clients or candidates are the constraint, and what you are running behind the scenes. We will tell you what is worth fixing first.
