Recruitment agency website design: two customers, one site.

Recruitment agency website design has a structural quirk that most agencies' sites get wrong: the website serves two completely different customers at once. Candidates come to find jobs; clients come to decide whether your fees are worth paying, and it is the clients who pay. A site that is all search-bar-and-vacancies is a job board wearing your logo, and it quietly ignores the audience your revenue comes from. A properly built agency site runs £675 to £4,000 +VAT against platform subscriptions that cost more over three years, and this guide, written from a studio that watches the search data rather than the recruitment industry's marketing, covers both audiences, the platform question and the free Google shelf space most agency sites never claim.

One website, two customers

Map the two journeys and the design brief writes itself. The candidate arrives from a job ad or a Google search, usually on a phone, often on a lunch break: they need to find relevant roles in two taps, read a specific and honest job description, and apply without creating an account or retyping a CV. Every extra field on the application form costs you applicants you will never know about.

The client, the HR manager or business owner with a vacancy bleeding money, arrives differently: from a recommendation, a LinkedIn profile, or a "recruitment agency Cardiff" search. They are not browsing your vacancies; they are auditing you. They want your sectors, your process, proof you have filled roles like theirs, the consultants they would actually deal with, and some signal about fees. Most agency websites give this visitor a thin "Employers" page and a contact form, which is why so many agencies win all their business by phone and wonder what the website is for.

The structural fix is straightforward: two clear front doors from the homepage, candidate and client, each leading to a journey built for that visitor, and a vacancies system that serves the first without swallowing the whole site.

Platform, template or custom build

Recruitment has its own specialist website platforms, Volcanic being the best known, and they exist for a reason: at the enterprise end, deep ATS integration and hundreds of live roles justify platform machinery. The honest question for an independent agency is whether you are that customer or just paying as if you were.

Route	Typical cost shape	The honest fit
Specialist recruitment platform	Setup plus an ongoing subscription, year after year	Large agencies with hundreds of live roles and full ATS plumbing
Generic template with a jobs plugin	Cheap upfront	Looks like every rival; job pages rarely built to rank
Custom build, jobs done properly	£675 to £4,000 +VAT once, plus £39 +VAT monthly upkeep	Independents who want to own the site and win search

The three-year arithmetic is the part the platform sales deck skips: a subscription that looks modest monthly outspends a custom build long before the contract ends, and when you leave a platform, the site stays behind. A ten-role independent does not need enterprise machinery; it needs fast pages, a jobs section the consultants can update themselves, and the two journeys above done properly.

If you want the version you own outright, our web design service builds exactly that, with published prices and the jobs plumbing included rather than sold back to you as modules.

Google for Jobs is free shelf space, mostly unclaimed

Here is the technical section your current provider may hope you never read. Google runs a jobs experience directly in its search results, and listings get into it through JobPosting structured data: machine-readable markup describing the title, location, salary, closing date and employer of each role. Jobs marked up correctly can surface there without a penny of advertising; jobs on pages without the markup are invisible to it regardless of how good the role is.

This is a build-quality question, which is why we raise it. Generic templates and hastily configured plugins routinely ship job pages with missing, invalid or half-filled markup, and nobody notices because nothing visibly breaks; the roles simply never appear where candidates now look first. We build structured data into every page we ship as a matter of course, the same discipline that puts our own FAQ and business markup into search results, and on a recruitment site the JobPosting layer is not an enhancement, it is the product. Ask any prospective supplier one question: will every role we post carry valid JobPosting markup, and how will we know? The pause tells you everything.

The client side pays the fees

Recruitment fees are substantial, typically somewhere between 15 and 25% of a first-year salary for a permanent placement, and a client committing that kind of money does the same due diligence you would. The client half of the site has to survive it: sector pages that prove depth ("industrial recruitment", "healthcare staffing", each with its own page and its own evidence), named consultants with real photographs and real specialisms, case studies with concrete outcomes, REC membership and any accreditations made visible, and testimonials from both sides of the desk, because a client reads what candidates say about you as character evidence.

The candidate side of your website fills this month's roles. The client side decides whether there are roles to fill next year.

Fee transparency deserves a hard look too. Almost no agency publishes fees, which is precisely why signalling something, a fee structure page, a "no placement, no fee" promise, honest guidance on how your terms work, stands out. We would say that, because we publish every price we charge and can watch what it does: enquiries arrive pre-qualified, already trusting, and our 16 Google reviews at 5.0 keep saying the same thing back. The first agency in a market to be straight about money inherits the same effect.

CVs are liabilities as well as assets

A recruitment website handles more personal data than almost any other small-business site: CVs, work histories, salary expectations, sometimes health and right-to-work details. GDPR treats all of it as personal data you must justify holding. Practically, the build needs consent captured at the point of upload with a plain-English promise about what happens to the CV, a stated retention approach rather than a folder that grows forever, encrypted transfer as standard, and a way to honour the candidate who asks what you hold and wants it gone.

This is also a trust surface, not just a compliance one. Candidates hand their working lives to an agency; a site that visibly takes care of that data, and says so in human language rather than legal boilerplate, converts more uploads than one more urgent red "APPLY NOW" ever will. And every journey here happens overwhelmingly on phones, which is why the sub-second loads we build to are not vanity: a candidate on a bus gives your slow site three seconds before returning to a rival's listing.

The Wales picture

The agency market here has a shape worth building for. Cardiff carries a dense cluster of generalist and IT agencies where standing out takes real differentiation; across the valleys and the west, the winnable ground is niche, driving and industrial staffing, healthcare and care-home recruitment, engineering for the manufacturing belt, hospitality for the coast. "Recruitment agency" plus a town, or a sector plus "recruitment Wales", are the searches that convert, and they are won the same way every local search is won: a genuinely local page, a complete Google Business Profile, and reviews that keep arriving. Our notes on web design in Cardiff cover the wider local search picture the agencies compete inside.

It is the same dual-audience, listings-driven logic we set out for property firms in our estate agent website design guide: buyers browse the portals but vendors choose the agent, exactly as candidates browse the boards but clients choose the recruiter. The industries rhyme, and so do the websites that win in them.

What to do with the site you have

Run three checks on your current site tonight. Search one of your own live roles on Google: does it appear in the jobs experience? Visit your employers page as if you were a client with a £40,000 vacancy: would you shortlist this agency? And open a vacancy on your phone: could you apply in under two minutes without an account? Three passes means your site is better than most of the industry. Any fail is money leaking to whichever rival fixed it first.

If you would rather have it fixed than audit it, send us your site through the contact page and we will tell you plainly which of the three is costing you and what the fix costs, against published prices, with no obligation and no platform subscription at the end of it. You deal with Jack directly, and the site you pay for is yours.