Article
One: Recruitment-to-Recruitment Consultancy Website Review: Aston Taylor – By Hugo Pickering
Company Name – Aston Taylor
Web Address – www.astontaylor.com
Following an interesting recent email from Aston Taylor claiming that they were “exploding all over the web”, I just had to investigate and find out if they really could live up to their claim of “taking over the Recruitment-to-Recruitment world”!
Site description
Aston Taylor have recently launched their website which caters for all levels of consultants across all sectors & markets.
The website provides vacancy listings and registration services for clients and candidates.
Creative Design
Following the ‘explosive’ theme into the website, the design has the potential to be bold but somehow doesn’t carry it off as all the effort seems to have gone into the top of the template and very little on the page itself.
It uses a dynamic menu system across the page and sticks with the same page template throughout the site, varying the imagery in the different sections.
Ease of use
The site is very easy to use and follows many conventions set by other rec-to-rec businesses. The menu is consistent throughout the site and additional menu items appear on the left, although these do not work consistently across all browsers.
The job search function looks clunky but is easy to use for most users.
Relevant content
Aston Taylor provide a comprehensive range of content relevant to their users, with full details of their markets, positions covered and the type of selection and recruitment within which they operate.
Their referral scheme offers £250 per successfully placed candidate and the fun poll feature offers an opportunity to interact with the site, offering such essential information as what recruiters do to relax!
Candidate and client functionality
Candidates are well catered for with a full search function to access the job listings. At the time of review the site showed 601 vacancies which is somewhat short of the consultancy’s claim of “nearly 1,000 Live Vacancies” in their press advertising!
Unfortunately the search function returns inaccurate results which list jobs in completely unrelated sectors. What is also slightly surprising is that the vacancy application form sends an email to the consultant rather than returning data to the site, which could easily result in data loss.
Clients are offered featured client profiles and a client enquiry form which is the absolute minimum – surely today’s web savvy clients deserve more?
Candidate and client marketing and retention
Aston Taylor are not explicit about the nature of any ongoing communication with their candidates and clients, simply mentioning that the company “may send you information about its services from time to time”. There is plenty of scope for offering a newsletter or incentives to stay in touch with users, which can help in ensuring that user details are up to date.
Online marketing
At the time of writing, Aston Taylor appears to only have one inbound link.
Unfortunately the site buries the vacancies (the most important information for search engines) deep in the site, hidden behind popup windows so it is probable that they cannot be crawled by the search engines.
The site is visible when searching on the company name but requires more work to appear in search engine results pages for any of its keywords such as ‘Recruitment to Recruitment Jobs’, for which it is not even listed currently.
Summary
Claiming to be “the UK's leading Recruitment-to-Recruitment Consultancy” requires a great deal of effort behind the scenes to substantiate such a bold claim. Unfortunately the site cannot do the claim justice at the moment, but there are a number of areas that could be improved to give the site greater visibility in search engines.
Hugo Pickering operates a corporate communications consultancy and runs Online Recruiter, providing web services to recruitment businesses. He specialises in search engine optimisation services for recruitment businesses. Contact Hugo at
h@hugopickering.com or see Online Recruiter at
www.onlinerecruiter.co.uk
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