What a Staffing Agency Website Needs Beyond a Job List

A staffing agency has two customers who want opposite things from the same home page. A candidate wants to find a suitable job and apply within a couple of minutes. An employer wants to know whether you can fill roles in their sector and how soon someone will call back. A staffing agency website that is only a list of vacancies serves the first group halfway and the second not at all.

These are the parts that turn a job list into a site that brings in applications and client inquiries, in roughly the order we would build them.

Split the two audiences on the first screen

Give the home page two obvious doors: "Find a job" and "Find staff". Behind each sits its own section with its own navigation, proof and goal. Candidates should never have to read about your account management process, and a hiring manager should not have to scroll past two hundred vacancies to find a phone number.

In practice that means a job search box at the top of the home page, an employer call to action beside it, and sector pages in pairs: "Warehouse jobs" for candidates and "Warehouse staffing" for employers. Track applications and employer inquiries as two separate goals in your analytics, so you can see which half of the site is working.

Make job search behave like a product

Search is most of the candidate's experience of the site, so it deserves more than a keyword box above a long list. The filters that matter are the ones people use to rule jobs out:

• location, with a distance setting;
• contract type: temporary, contract, permanent;
• sector or job category;
• shift pattern, where you place shift workers;
• pay, shown as a rate or range wherever the client allows it.

Put the filter state in the page address, for example /jobs/warehouse/?location=leeds&type=temporary, so a result can be bookmarked, shared in a message and reached with the back button. On a site with thousands of live jobs, fast results need proper database indexes or a dedicated search index, not a plain text search across every listing.

Plan the empty state too. "No jobs found" is a dead end. Offer nearby locations and related categories, plus a job alert: the candidate saves the search with an email address and is told when a match is posted.

Keep the apply step short and say what happens next

From a job page, the apply button should stay visible as the candidate scrolls, and the first step should ask only for a name, contact details and a resume. For hourly and shift work, add a route for people without a resume file on their phone: a few short questions about experience, availability and transport tell a recruiter enough to make the call.

Add a general "Register with us" route as well, for the visitor who found nothing today. A sector, a location and a contact number give your recruiters a candidate they would otherwise never have seen.

After submission, say who will be in touch, roughly when, and how to reach the branch in the meantime. We go through field choice, resume uploads and accessibility in application forms candidates finish.

Give employers more than a contact form

An employer inquiry is worth many applications, yet it usually goes through a generic "Contact us" form into a shared inbox. Replace it with a "Request staff" form that asks what a recruiter would ask on the phone:

• the role and the number of people needed;
• location and start date;
• temporary, contract or permanent, and for how long;
• the best number and time to call.

Route each request by sector and location to the desk that will handle it, and send an acknowledgement that names the person or branch responsible. Keep the phone number prominent on every employer page. Urgent cover for tomorrow's shift is a phone call, not a form.

The employer section also has to answer what a buyer asks before making contact: which roles and regions you cover, how candidates are screened, which checks you carry out, and how billing works in outline. Describe the checks you really perform. Legal requirements for agencies, including licensing, right-to-work checks and worker rights, vary by country and sector, so have that copy reviewed by whoever advises you on compliance.

Let the ATS be the single source of truth for jobs

Recruiters should enter a job once, in the applicant tracking system, and never touch the website. The site reads jobs from the ATS by a feed or its API, shows them in your own design, and sends applications back to the same job record. When a recruiter closes the job in the ATS, it leaves the site without anyone remembering to remove it.

Two rules keep this dependable. Store the ATS job ID with every listing, so updates change the existing page and do not create a duplicate. And decide how often the site checks for changes, because a filled job that stays online for a day produces wasted applications. The choice between an embedded widget, a feed import and an API connection affects branding and search visibility, and we compare them in connecting your website to an ATS.

Decide where timesheets live before you promise a portal

Agencies that supply temporary workers are often asked for "a portal" where workers submit hours and clients approve them. Before commissioning one, check what your ATS or pay and bill software already provides. Often the timesheet function exists there, and the website's job is to get people to it: a clear "Timesheets" link in the header and single sign-on if the product supports it.

A custom timesheet portal is justified when your rules are not covered: several rates within one shift, allowances and expenses, approval by more than one person on the client side, or purchase order tracking. If you build one, design it for a phone, since that is where workers will use it. Send a weekly reminder, let the client approve from a link in an email, lock the timesheet once approved, keep a record of every edit, and export in the format your payroll system imports. This is pay data, and working time and pay rules differ by country, so involve your payroll provider in the specification.

Treat job SEO as structured data plus housekeeping

Job seekers often start in a search engine, and Google shows job listings in their own panel when a site provides the right data:

1. One page per job. Each vacancy needs its own address with the full description in the page, not in a pop-up or an iframe.
2. JobPosting markup on the job page only. Google's job posting guidelines require the title, description, date posted, hiring organization and job location, and recommend the closing date, employment type and salary. Do not add the markup to list pages.
3. An honest hiring organization. When you recruit for a client you cannot name, the same guidelines allow the value confidential for the organization's name.
4. Prompt removal. When a job is filled, remove the page so it returns a 404 or 410, or remove the markup, or set validThrough to a past date. Google warns that sites leaving expired jobs marked up risk a manual action.
5. Lasting landing pages. Individual jobs come and go, so build permanent pages for the sector and location combinations you really recruit in. Each lists the live jobs with a few paragraphs of useful local detail, which gives the site a page that can hold a ranking.

On WordPress, a job board plugin such as WP Job Manager provides listings, filtered search and the structured data for each job. We describe that route on our WordPress job board page.

What a staffing agency website should build first

If the budget only stretches to part of this list, start with what pays back soonest: the two-door home page, the request-staff form with routing, and jobs flowing in from the ATS with a short apply step. Search filters, alerts and landing pages come next. A custom timesheet portal comes last, and only if your existing software cannot do the job.

An agency with a WordPress site and a helpful ATS vendor can do the first stage with plugins and configuration. Development work begins when applications must post straight into the ATS, when search has to stay fast across thousands of jobs, or when the portal has rules of its own. For those builds we work on custom job boards and recruitment portals, and our page for recruitment and staffing companies shows how we approach them.

Frequently asked questions

Do we need a separate website for employers?

No. One site with two clearly separated paths works better, because the candidate side shows employers that you attract applicants, and the employer side shows candidates that you have real clients. Separate the navigation and the calls to action, not the domain.

Should we show pay rates on job listings?

Wherever the client allows it, yes. Pay is one of the first things candidates use to rule a job in or out. Some jurisdictions also have pay transparency rules for job ads, so check what applies where you recruit.

Do candidates need a mobile app?

Rarely at the start. A fast mobile site with saved searches and email alerts covers what most candidates do. An app starts to make sense when your workers use it every week, for example to accept shifts and submit timesheets.