Recruitment agency website design: live job pages for candidates, a clear path for clients

What does recruitment agency website design involve?

Website design for recruitment starts from a brief with two audiences who want different things from the same site. Candidates want to find a job, see what it pays and apply. The companies that hire through you want to know what you place and where, and how to ask for people.

The site can also take on the first steps of an agency’s work. On the site we would build, job orders come in through the employer form, each open job is published with its pay, applications go to your recruiters, and every lead carries a record of where it came from. Everything on this page is what we would build for a staffing or recruiting agency as part of our web design service. What a build costs at each level is on our page on website design cost.

What should a staffing agency website show candidates?

Staffing agency website design begins with the candidate’s path, from the first search to a sent application:

• Job search: filters for title, location and type of work, so a candidate can narrow a long list.
• A page for each job: the title, location, pay range, schedule and what the work involves.
• A short application: a form with a resume upload that works on a phone.
• Registration for later roles: a way to join your candidate pool for jobs that aren’t open yet, kept apart from the job pages.
• What happens next: a plain line after applying that says who reads the application and how they will be in touch.

Google’s job posting guidelines rule out postings that require a login to view the job description, and postings that require payment from applicants. So every job page we would build can be read without an account, and applying costs a candidate nothing.

What should it show the companies that hire through you?

Recruiter website design also has to serve the other side of every placement: the hiring manager deciding whether to call you. The employer pages we would build answer what you place, how you place and how to ask, before they show any proof:

• What you place: each specialty, with the kinds of roles you fill and the cities you recruit in.
• How you place: the services you offer, such as temporary and contract staffing or recruiting and permanent placement, each explained in plain terms.
• A staff request form: the role, the number of people, the location, the start date and a contact, sent to the desk that covers it.
• Proof you can show: client names, quotes or placement examples, each used only with that client’s permission.

What the American Staffing Association reports about why companies use staffing firms, and about the people they place, is on our page on staffing agency marketing.

How do jobs get from your applicant tracking system to the site?

If your open jobs already sit in an applicant tracking system, retyping each one into the website makes a second copy to keep in step, and the two can drift apart. Where the system allows it, we would connect them:

1. Read the feed: connect to the system’s job feed or API and map its fields to the job template: title, location, pay range, type of work and how to apply.
2. Publish from the template: each open job gets its own page, with its structured data filled from the same fields.
3. Take filled jobs down: when a job closes in the system, its page and its markup come down with it.
4. Tell Google: Google recommends the Indexing API over sitemaps for job posting URLs, because the API prompts Googlebot to crawl a page sooner. It can only be used for pages with JobPosting or BroadcastEvent embedded in a VideoObject, so it carries the job pages, and Google still recommends a sitemap for the site as a whole.

Where a system has no feed, your team adds and closes jobs through a short form on the site, and the same template, markup and checks apply.

How do your job pages show up in Google’s job search?

Google says adding JobPosting structured data makes job postings eligible to appear in a special user experience in Google Search results, one that lets job seekers filter by various criteria like location or job title. Eligibility depends on following Google’s rules for the markup:

• On the job page, never the list: Google asks for the markup on the most detailed leaf page possible, and not on pages intended to present a list of jobs.
• Anonymous clients: when a staffing agency hires on behalf of an anonymous employer, Google’s guidance is to use the value “confidential” for the hiring organization’s name.
• Salary from the employer: Google defines baseSalary as the actual base salary for the job, as provided by the employer (not an estimate), so that field takes only figures that come from the employer. The pay range printed in the job text is a separate matter, covered below.
• Expiring filled jobs: Google says jobs no longer open for applications must be expired, by a validThrough date in the past, by removing the page so it returns a 404 or 410, or by removing the markup, and that failing to act in time may result in a manual action.

Meeting those rules makes a job page eligible, and Google decides what it shows. We do not guarantee search rankings, traffic, or uninterrupted uptime.

Where does the pay range go on each job page?

In the posting itself. California’s Labor Commissioner says a covered employer must include the pay scale in any job posting, that a third party posting the job for that employer must include it too, and that a link or a QR code leading to it is not enough (Labor Code 432.3). Who is covered, what counts as a pay scale and the federal and state rules beside it are on our page on marketing for staffing agencies.

What that means for the build: the job template we would make has a pay range field that must be filled before a job can publish, and the range prints in the job text where a candidate reads it. Your counsel decides how the rule applies to each posting and approves the wording, and the template carries what you give it.

How should the application form work?

The application asks only what the first step needs: a name, a way to reach the candidate, the job and a resume. Each submission passes a spam check and goes to your applicant tracking system or a shared inbox, with the job and the page it came from attached.

What the form leaves out is decided with the same care. The Civil Rights Department says California’s Fair Chance Act means most employers, temporary employment agencies included, cannot ask about conviction history on a job application (Government Code 12952), so the forms we would build ask no such question. Where a law requires a background check for a particular position, your counsel applies that exception.

Google adds a rule of its own for job pages: publishers may solicit resume collections for open positions only. So a general “send us your resume” page for future roles stays a plain registration page, without job markup.

Which specialty and city pages should a recruiter website have?

Staffing covers very different work, and the searches differ with it: someone looking for warehouse shifts and a hiring manager looking for an accountant type different words. So each specialty you place can earn a page with its own roles, its open jobs and a staff request form for that specialty.

City pages need more care. Google’s spam policies describe doorway abuse as sites or pages created to rank for specific, similar search queries, and their examples include pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page. So we would plan a city page only where you have a branch, open jobs or real demand, and each one carries something of its own: the jobs in that city, the branch that serves it and who to contact there. How those pages are found in search is on our page on recruiter SEO.

What is a staffing agency website built on?

Every site we make is built in our own system, on Astro for recent builds and on Next.js for some others. We don’t build on WordPress, Shopify or Webflow. An agency site running on WordPress today, with or without a job board plugin, is rebuilt in our system, its old addresses redirected. What goes into the code for a staffing site:

• Structured data: JobPosting markup on each job page, plus markup for the agency and its offices.
• A sitemap, the Indexing API and IndexNow: the sitemap for the whole site, the Indexing API for job pages, and IndexNow for the search engines that use it.
• AI-crawler rules and llms.txt: robots rules that let AI crawlers read the job and specialty pages, and a plain-text summary for the tools that look for one.
• Forms: the application, the registration and the staff request, each with a spam check.
• Launch guards: checks that stop a job with an empty pay range, or a page still waiting on a fact, from going live.

Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary. The setting to check is Search Console’s Search generative AI control, rolled out to every website as of August 31, 2026: it starts on include, and exclude keeps a site’s links and content out of AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover. The aim is a site that is easier for AI answers to find, read and cite.

What happens to your current site and its old job pages?

An agency’s old site can hold two kinds of address that need different handling: pages people still visit, such as the home page and the specialty pages, and job pages for roles filled long ago. A page with visitors or links gets a permanent (301) redirect to its match on the new site. A job page for a filled role comes down with a 404 or 410, one of the ways Google lists for expiring a job, so it stops appearing as open.

The domain itself doesn’t move. Before launch we copy the existing DNS records, then change only the web records that point the domain at the new site, leaving the registrar, the nameservers and email as they were.

What does web design for recruiters look like in practice?

The site we can point you to is the Alvy Logistics website, a 70-page rebuild in our own system that we still run with Alvy. Alvy is owned by our co-founder Noah Alvarez, and DSI is an Alvy company. Alvy is in logistics, not staffing, so the site shows how we build and look after a site of that size, not experience in recruiting.

For a staffing agency, what we would build depends on its size:

• One office: the job search and its job pages, the candidate and employer pages with their forms, and a page for each specialty you place.
• Several branches: the same, plus a page for each branch with its open jobs, the specialties it covers and how to reach it, and city pages where the demand backs them.
• National: specialty sections with city pages beneath them where you have jobs and a presence, a job feed sized for a long and fast-changing list, and a separate path for each brand if you run more than one.

What does a recruitment website need after launch?

A recruitment website keeps changing after launch, because jobs open and close and the feed that carries them has to keep working. Agencies sell upkeep as a monthly maintenance or care plan, and the plans differ in what they take on. Newmedia’s cost guide describes a standard monthly maintenance retainer as covering routine software updates, automated daily backups and continuous security monitoring, while Websults’ three care packages back up a site monthly, weekly or daily depending on the tier. On a staffing site someone also has to check that the job feed still runs, so filled jobs come down and new ones go up. A site we build is looked after on our monthly plan, and your proposal sets that plan’s scope. Upkeep in general is on our page on website maintenance.

Measurement starts on launch day. Google Analytics records applications and staff requests as two separate events, each tied to the page it came from. Search Console reports the Google searches that lead to the site, with a Generative AI performance report for Google’s AI features, and Bing Webmaster Tools reports on Bing.

If that is the site your agency needs, book a 15-minute call and we will say whether a new build is the right next step.

What do we leave out of a staffing agency site?

Two things, by design. The first is AI that screens job applicants or makes significant decisions about them: it is outside what we build, and choosing who moves forward stays with your recruiters. The second is paid advertising, sponsored job listings included. Your team or an ads agency runs it, and the site’s measurement can show the applications and staff requests each campaign brings in.