This Is How Recruitment Agencies Can Build A Proper Digital Presence

Building a proper digital presence is more than essential nowadays. Here Recruit CRM shares how a recruitment agency can achieve that as smoothly as possible.

This article covers the bare minimum necessity of a startup recruitment agency to build a presence on the internet. This is just a precursor to the limitless possibilities of enhancing internet presence and building an inbound leads pipeline for getting clients and candidates.

Once you have set up a recruitment business, it goes without saying that a digital presence is a must. By digital presence, I mean that your organization and information about jobs that you are working on must be discoverable online. This a bare minimum. As a startup or a small company, not very many clients nor candidates are going to visit your office.

Getting The Basics Right

So the very first impression they will have of you is when they visit your website. Your office may not be grand (you cannot afford it!), but surely your website can be. As mentioned in my earlier article a website can be created nowadays with free tools online, or can even be outsourced at a couple of hundred dollars.

You will also need to buy a domain to host your website. As far as possible look for a simple domain name (that reflects your organization name) and has a top-level domain extension like .com or .io or your country-specific extension (like .uk for the United Kingdom)

The Essentials Of Your Website

Keep the website simple and keep the following in mind-

• Home (describing what the organization does)
• A page for Employers (Includes services provided, the area of expertise, etc)
• A page for Candidates (This could also be the ‘Jobs’ page)
• Blog Page (Ensure you write something periodically at least once in two weeks if not more. At a later stage professional content writers may be engaged)
• Contact Us
• Integration with your ATS/CRM so that any job you add or close in your ATS automatically reflects on your jobs page. For this, you will need to select an ATS/CRM that meets this requirement. I will dedicate a separate article later to the choice and use of technologies by a recruitment agency.
• Candidates must be able to apply to jobs through your jobs page, and the application must directly be added to the candidate database.
• You should be able to choose whether you display the name of your client on your jobs page or not (depending on your agreement with the client). Some positions may be confidential and the client may not want you to advertise the same.

Let Your Presence Be Known

Now that you have a website, it is a virtual address/presence. Though, you have barely got started. The next big step is to let candidates and clients know of your presence.

To begin this process it is important to create company page/account in the three of the most popular social media platforms, namely LinkedIn, Facebook & Twitter. It is important to start writing on your company blog page regularly and then sharing the blog link as posts on your various social media accounts.

There are various digital tools available which can do an automatic posting on all accounts by posting on just one account. So if you post on LinkedIn, the same will be posted on Facebook and Twitter as well.

Deploying A Chatbot

Nowadays it is also useful to deploy a chatbot on your home page (or all your pages) that can interact with visitors to your website. Much as ‘Chatbot’ sounds very technical, there are many service providers which allow to simply add a few lines of code to your webpage. You can then configure the chatbot using a simple interface. a typical chat would be like —

• Chatbot- Hi! Welcome to ‘XYX Recruiters’. How can I help you? Are you an employer or a candidate seeking a job?
• Visitor — I’m a candidate.

(If this happens during working hours, you can take over the chat, else the bot continues)

(This would help you direct this query to a specific recruiter if you have a larger team)

• Visitor — Health Sector
• Chatbot — Ok, Kindly leave your name and contact
  details with us and we shall get in touch with you shortly.

(A small form could pop up which is filled by the visitor)

The above example is just to give you drift of what is possible, the more intelligently you configure the bot the lessor your time & efforts at handling the query/lead. These bots can be very customized to give a personal touch with your picture & name in the frame as though you are chatting live with the visitor.

You can also integrate your calendar with some both showing available timeslots so that the visitor can even schedule an appointment or a call. This way you do not miss on any visitor (client or candidate) who visit your website. It takes huge effort to get them to your website in the first place and then losing them would be disastrous.

Joining Online Communities

The next this to do would be to create an account in various community forums and join various related groups on various platforms. There would be innumerable groups/forums like recruiters, temp staffing, assessment, recruitment software, job opportunities, industry-specific groups (eg Pharma Industry), Human Resource, labour laws & compliance, Payroll and so on.

Most of these groups will have members who you are typically targeting, employers, candidates, service providers (software/assessments), or even potential employees (for your own startup). Just joining these groups is not enough. You will need to participate by posting your articles/blogs, or by answering queries by members or by commenting on other articles/view.

Building a wide and meaningful digital presence is a work which is laborious and requires a large amount of patience. However, the results can be really rewarding in the long run. At Recruit CRM we today attract visitors from more than 80 countries without spending a penny on advertisements. So roll up your sleeves & go for it!

Originally published at https://recruitcrm.io.