Recruitment agency websites that get the candidate to upload the CV and the client to brief the role

Recruitment agency websites have a structural problem most agency-led briefs miss. The site has to convince two distinct audiences — candidates uploading CVs and clients writing briefs — without either feeling like the page was written for the other. The win is treating the site as a two-sided marketplace front-end, not a brand brochure.

The recruitment clients I take on tend to fit one of these three shapes:

• Boutique recruitment agencies (5-30 consultants) competing on niche specialism — fintech, life sciences, climate, AI engineering
• Executive search firms needing credibility content alongside discreet candidate-handling for senior roles
• Mid-size staffing firms needing volume-job-board UX with proper ATS integration (Bullhorn, Vincere, JobAdder)

ATS integration is the build, not the bolt-on

Most recruitment sites either run their own jobs database (slow, stale) or iframe-embed the ATS job board (kills SEO, ugly UX). The right answer is a real-time API integration with the ATS — Bullhorn, Vincere, JobAdder, Workable — that pulls jobs into the site as native pages with proper schema markup. Each job becomes an indexable page on its own URL, with structured data Google reads. Static-site generation with on-demand revalidation is the modern stack pattern that makes this fast and scalable.

Candidate-first vs client-first navigation is a brand call

The first menu decision on a recruitment site is whether the primary nav is candidate-led ('Find a job', 'Upload your CV') or client-led ('Hire talent', 'Submit a brief'). Most agencies fudge this and ship a homepage with both fighting for visual weight. The agencies that convert better pick a primary audience for the homepage and treat the other audience as the secondary nav path — typically candidate-first for high-volume staffing, client-first for executive search.

JobPosting schema is the SEO multiplier most agencies miss

Google has a dedicated jobs vertical (Google for Jobs) that requires JobPosting structured data. Agencies that ship JobPosting schema on every job page get included in Google for Jobs search results, often above traditional SERP listings. Most agency-built recruitment sites do not ship this schema; the agencies that do see meaningful organic-traffic uplift from candidates who would never have found the site otherwise.

One senior team, no junior handoff

I am the senior on every engagement. Twelve thousand sites of practice across nine years at Seahawk Media. The kickoff conversation is with me; the build is delivered with senior engineers; the handover at the end is real code with documentation, not an agency-locked WordPress install.

Modern stack first — Next.js, Astro, Supabase, headless WordPress

Most agencies in the recruitment space ship 30-plugin WordPress builds because that is what they know. I ship Next.js, Astro, and headless WordPress for the public site, with WordPress as the editorial back end only when the team is genuinely trained on wp-admin. The result: faster pages, smaller attack surface, lower hosting costs, longer-lasting site.

SEO transport that does not lose rankings

If you are migrating from an existing site, the SEO transport is the part that decides whether the migration is a clean handover or a six-month traffic recovery. Redirect maps from Search Console plus Ahrefs, Yoast or Rank Math metadata transport, schema preservation, hreflang continuity. The boring parts that 90% of agencies skip and 100% of post-launch reports complain about.

Book a 30-minute call. No slide deck, no qualification screen. You describe the recruitment business, the brief, the timeline. I tell you whether I am the right person, and by the end of the call you have a stack pick, a price range, and a realistic delivery window.