Guest Blog: Does Your Recruitment Agency Need A Blog For Its Website?

I’m going to get straight to the point on this one. The short answer is yes. Your recruitment website needs a blog and you should ideally have one. The long answer is still yes but with a few caveats. 

I’ve never met a great recruiter who isn’t also a halfway decent storyteller. Every time you’re talking a candidate through a live role, you’re telling them about the story of that company, its history, founders, its products, the team and so on. And likewise with clients, when you’re selling a candidate, the best salespeople are also storytellers. 

I’d Rather Be Warm Than Cold

Pitching is tough and never more so than in this current market. Clients are being swamped with direct applications and inundated with calls. This includes calls from your competitors and many others. You need a way to separate yourself and stand out from all of this noise and confusion. 

There’s a lot of general marketing channels to use for this, such as events, email marketing, LinkedIn personal branding, Google & Bing advertising campaigns but also a relatively inexpensive channel, which is your website’s blog. 

Your recruitment agency’s blog is a great way to warm up your sales prospects. I’m a firm believer in cold calling but it’s a lot easier if the prospect has already heard of you or is familiar with your agency’s brand. Clients & candidates will of course bump into your blog content while scrolling through your website but they’ll also stumble across it while on Google or LinkedIn and the more small hits of exposure they get from your company, the more likely they are to buy from you. People like familiar brands, it makes them feel comforted. It makes them comfortable in the decision to buy from you.  

What Do You Think? 

A recruitment agency’s primary purpose is to source talent for their clients’ vacancies but your clients & candidates should also view you as a consultant or advisor to their business in all matters of talent hiring and retention. I’m not talking about BCG, McKinsey, Bain management consultancy level here but your clients should have the view that you know the market, salaries levels, what’s important to candidates, how their business is viewed in the industry, how they can improve that and so on. This is obviously proven through direct conversations, face to face meetings and the talent you shortlist but you can also show you’re an expert in your sector through your blog and insight pages. 

I Did That

Blog posts about case study situations are a great way to sell to a very niche audience in a very truthful way. Maybe a startup technology firm is looking for a Head of Engineering to come in under their CTO, it’s an integral role and their potential angel investor has been very specific that it needs to be the perfect fit. They come across a blog post you wrote about how you helped a similar tech firm who were going through their seed stage and looking for a Head of Engineering to bring everything in order. You met with the founders, spent a day sitting with their team to get an idea of the culture and within a week had presented them with 3 strong potentials, with 2 being taken through to the final stage and one being offered (and is still there 3 years on). 

Diversification

You might be a small recruitment agency without a specific full time or part time content writer or recruitment marketer but that doesn’t mean the burden for writing all of the content will fall on your shoulders. Ask around your team and see if anyone else might be interested in writing articles for the blog. I’ve worked with several ex-colleagues, recruitment agency side who were avid readers, amateur writers, had degrees in English Literature & Language or who were actually ex-writers or freelance writers. Your employees might love the opportunity to write for the website and it may open up their role and make it a little more interesting. It’s a possible option for those with no budget but if you do have some marketing spend set aside then invest in a professional. 

SEO

This is going to be a big one! Search engines love websites that are regularly updated. Now I assume you’ll likely be posting jobs to your website on a daily basis, however this type of content is likely to be quite one dimensional and will only be on your website for maybe a month or so before the role is filled and the job post is subsequenlty removed from your site. Your blog posts will live on your recruitment website and the search engines for years. I was searching for something the other day and one of the top articles was an article from Forbes from over 10 years ago! That article is ten years old but it’s still proving useful to readers and still driving traffic to the Forbes website. 

I will add they do need to be properly maintained. You can’t just leave your blog posts sitting there from 3 years ago and expect them to still perform, rank well and bring in business. They may do but they need to be looked after to ensure they’re fully effective. Each year go through all of your blog posts and scan Google for similar posts. Is there new information you can update yours with from these sources? Are some of the stats out of date? Have you added new blog posts since this was first written that you can now link to? 

Blog posts are a great way to rank for long tail search terms. Long tail search terms are search terms that typically have 3-4+ words in them so examples would be “sales jobs in Bristol” or “engineering recruitment agency UK”, etc. The more quality blog posts you write, the more chance you have for ranking for long tail keywords, which will eventually push you up the ranking for short tail searches, which is the holy grail in SEO. 

After some time, maybe after 6-12 months your domain will have a degree of authority and the search engines will trust it and will be more open to pushing your content. Think about questions that clients, candidates, potential employees will type into Google and write content around that. I have several blog posts that rank on page 1 for a range of questions that my target audience may search for at some point during their buying process. For my business, the process of buying a recruitment website may span several months and it's great to be listed on page 1 for 10 different questions my target audience is likely to search for before they pick up the phone to a web design agency. Hopefully when they are ready to pull the trigger they’ll either specifically call me or they’ll recognise my business in a list of search engine results and will subsequently call me. 

Expectation

I think clients & candidates expect to see blogs / insight / resource pages these days on recruitment agency sites. They may not read them but it shows your agency is of a reasonable size that you have the revenue or the time to dedicate resources to something like this. It adds a degree of professionalism, authority and size to your firm. 

Value Added Versus Transactional

Clients & candidates are more likely to remember your recruitment agency if you provide them with real value rather than just speaking with them when they have a role to fill or when they’d be perfect for one of your positions. Give them real value, content they’ll find useful when hiring for their teams or looking for a job. Hiring managers, HR professionals and talent acquisition teams want value led partnerships these days, not just someone who’s going to fill one vacancy and then disappear. 

Journey

When we’re designing websites we aim to guide users through relevant pages, giving them the required information they need to buy into your recruitment services. Your blog pages can act as an extra step on that journey, giving your audience more information to make a positive decision that they feel really happy with. 

Social Media

It can be tough putting together a social media content plan for each month. Well sharing your blog posts once a week has now made that a little easier. Sharing long form content such as blog posts across your social media channels offers you the opportunity to network - building up your connections and potentially connecting with your perfect candidate.

Remember to make sure your developer has implemented og tags within your blog posts essentially meaning prettier social media sharing links.

Caveats

What were the caveats I mentioned? Your recruitment agency website needs a blog / insights / resources section but only if it’s done well. 

You’ll need it all planned out properly, put together a content marketing strategy. Do your research. Look through the websites of your competitor agencies and look to their blog pages for sources of inspiration. Write down a list of potential headings and categorise them. 

Your recruitment website visitors and Google want to see quality content. Write entertaining and insightful blogs. 

You’ll also need to ensure you put time aside each week and write fresh new content for your blog pages. I’d recommend posting once a week ideally but if you can’t keep to that then just make sure it’s regular. Don’t post on a regular basis for 3-4 months then just leave your blog to go stale. There’s nothing more off putting than coming across a blog that hasn’t been touched in 3 years. It gives me the impression your agency is in decline, rather than being on the rise, growing and having more time and resources to dedicate to content marketing. 

Don’t use AI generated content. We can all tell it’s AI content and no one wants to read it. It’s unpleasant to read stylistically and you’re not bringing anything new to the table. Of course use AI tools to generate ideas or form a structure or check for spelling mistakes or grammatical errors but write it yourself. Also search engines can now detect AI generated content and they are starting to penalise websites that use it. 

If you can afford a professional writer then I’d recommend it. A lot of your clients can hire for themselves, they can post an advert, look through the ad response but they hire you because you’re a professional and a specialist in what you do. Do the same when it comes to your website’s content.