The Basics of building a recruitment website in 2021

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Building a recruitment website, shouldn’t be too hard right? It is just a website with a few recruitment specific elements in the site. Yeah, this is what we think too, but so so often we get a new client on board or even a prospect reaches out to us and so many of the basics for building their site have been missed.

1. SSL Certificate

With people more security conscious than ever, you will lose both conversions and credibility by not having an SSL certificate on your website. The website browser Chrome even displays these websites as ‘not secure’ to highlight to your audience that your site is not secure.

ssl

If you have a good webhost you might even be able to get an SSL certificate for free using Lets Encrypt. As you would imagine, SSL certificates come as standard with Refari websites. In fact, it is so standard that we do not even talk about is as a feature, now days it is just the basics of building any website in our opinion.

2. Natively responsive – not just mobile responsive!

Often Responsive web design gets referred to as ‘mobile responsive’ but that is an oversimplification, there is a large range or resolution devices you need to cover and then what about if people are split screening!?  (putting two windows side by side inside one screen.) Essentially a natively responsive website means that what ever resolution a user decides to use, the website should respond accordingly to make all important content visible. Again, we kind of see this as a fundamental of all websites.

A good tool for checking different resolutions on your site is responsivedesignchecker one other good tip is CMS choice can be important here, as some basic CMS’ do not readily support responsive webdesign, opting to have three resolutions available for desktop, mobile, table resolutions. In 2021, this approach simply isn’t good enough.

3. Add open graph meta tags (OG Tags)

Open graph meta tags also known as OG Tags, enable social sites and even messaging apps to display a custom image when someone shares your website address.  For example here is the Refari.co website

Website Basic LinkedIn

4. Add Favicon

You may not realise this but we humans are very good at picking out a colour we are looking for a website in our navigation bar. You may have even found yourself looking for the ‘light blue’ icon of one of your favourite social media sites only to incorrectly pause on another website whose icon is a similar colour. The Icon that lives at the top of each tab in a web browser is called a ‘favicon.’

Website Basic Favicon

5. Fast web hosting!

Do not skimp on webhosting. Webpage speed matters. It affects your SEO, bounce rate, and general first impression of your business. Here at Refari we used to use third party web hosting companies, but every single one of them seemed to care more about cramming as many sites as possible onto one server to maximise profits rather than actually delivering well resourced servers to their clients. With this in mind we actually built our own webserver using meaning we can properly resource any websites we host to deliver performance first and foremost! A good website to test your website speed? Webpagetest, it may look old and outdated but it gives the most thorough website speed testing process.

What about recruitment websites

OK so it turns out everything above applies to all website builds not just Recruitment websites! For everything else Refari’s widgets do the heavy lifting. With over 30 widgets to choose from you can build recruitment websites quickly and easily. Best of all of these widgets link to one another and have advanced capabilities to drive traffic to your website.