As a recruitment agency you’ll know that having a professional-looking website is essential.

Primarily, it acts as an online space for posting job vacancies and in the background it is working for you to categorise employers, employees, and vacancies by sector, industry, or skill set.

Specific functions of your website will also aid in the application process and allow employers to update or edit listings as necessary.

If your website can do all of these things for you, it’s the greatest tool you have for saving time and money. It will also provide as smooth a process as possible for both those who are looking for work and those who have positions to fill.

In this article we are going to outline the reasons why WordPress is the best content management system (CMS) on which to build a website for a recruitment agency.

Open Source

As an open-source CMS, WordPress is updated by a community of developers who are able to modify it and add their own functionalities.

This is different to being a company-owned CMS, which is owned and maintained by one firm.

This is really helpful if there’s a problem, as a fix is likely to be released far more quickly than if you have to wait for a single company to get to work on it.

Reduce Costs

With many company-owned CMS, having a great design and style comes at a cost; and not one that you can skimp on.

If your recruitment website doesn’t look professional people won’t trust you. Companies won’t want to post their jobs on your site and job seekers are unlikely to want to waste their time searching an inadequate website when superior ones are available.

By using WordPress getting that professional look won’t cost an arm and a leg.

On WordPress there are an abundance of themes (the colour, layout, and style of a website) and the vast majority of them are far cheaper than those on offer from most company-owned competitors.

Tools to get the job done

This is perhaps the most exciting element that WordPress has to offer. Remember I mentioned that community of developers who work as little saints of the computer world to fix problems with the software?

Well, these guys are also producing thousands of innovative plug-ins to perform various website functions. Many of these are extremely useful to recruitment agencies. WP Job Manager happens to be our favourite.

WP Job Manager

On its website it describes itself as ‘A lightweight plugin for adding job-board functionality to your WordPress site.’

This plug-in has a simple admin user interface for listing job and company information, as well as filterable job listings.

But, what we love the most is the frontend job submission forms; which allow users to post job vacancies using a form on the frontend of their site. These are then sent to admin for approval before being made live.

• It’s simple and quick for the user.
• It reduces work for the agency.
• The job-seeker can apply directly via the email/website address listed in the description.

This plug-in also incorporates popular add-ons such as Applications and WCPaidListings.

In total WordPress has over 50,000 plug-ins. You’re far more likely to find the tools you need in WordPress than by using any other CMS.

Compatibility

If you’ve been in the recruitment business for more than five seconds, you’re bound to have heard of (and probably be using) Bullhorn and/or Broadbean.

WordPress is completely compatible with both of these software programs.

You can automatically send job information that has been entered into your site over to Bullhorn and/or Broadbean; reducing the stress of posting jobs to various different channels.

Flexibility

The last thing you want when you are building a website is to feel trapped in a contract when you don’t know what the future holds.

The beauty of WordPress being an open-source CMS is that should you ever change your mind about your web host or developer, you can up sticks and move to a different provider without losing the hours of hard work already put into the design, content input, and learning the system.

Easy-to-use

WordPress is relatively simple to use and requires no knowledge of coding. Even the least tech-savvy agency should be able to put up a post, view job applications, view applicant information, filter searches and carry out any other day-to-day task required.

It won’t hold you back

As your business grows you will likely want to add more pages to your site. With WordPress you can add hundreds and hundreds of pages without slowing down your site.

Summary

If you own a recruitment agency and are thinking about going online, or if you’re thinking about updating or changing an existing website, WordPress is definitely worth a look.

The flexibility and functionality on offer, coupled with the vast array of designs and themes available, makes for an altogether powerful arrangement; not forgetting how cost-effective it is compared to a similar package from a company-owned CMS.