How important is your website's content?

It is a mistake to think that applicants have to be people who are looking for jobs. Yet it is one that most recruiters make. Strange, when experience shows that the best candidates are often those who are doing well where they are, are getting well remunerated and are not actively looking for work. They might still be interested in a position you are handling - it's just that they are much less likely to find out about it.

Traditionally recruiters used printed media to find candidates, advertising in the local paper, the national press or trade magazines, depending on the vacancy. That still happens, of course, but the power of the printed job ad is getting slowly eroded, as more and more people switch to the internet as their preferred way to job hunt.

Thursday, the dog-day of the week, emerges as the prime day for jobseeker activity on the web, with another spike on the graph on Sundays. So how do todays folk jobseek?

Research shows that there are three main ways. Firstly we have the web equivalent of print media - going to the website of your favourite magazine or newspaper. What that might be clearly varies from sector to sector. A good example would the strong position occupied by the Guardian job site (jobs.guardian.co.uk) in fields like design, media, health and education. In sectors like these, this site would be the first port of call for many jobhunters.

Next we have job boards. There are many of these and they vary in size and focus - from the very general, like Monster to industry specific ones like www.myaccountancyjobs.com. They have grown massively over recent years, and have made a profound difference to the process of recruitment, but they can seem big and anonymous, and, as such, not too appealing.

Thirdly we have recruitment agency websites, where, hopefully a sense of personality shines through. The appeal of an agency is that you still get to deal with a person quite early on in the process.

How do you get to find an agency site if you don't already know that it's there? You could get referred from a paid ad that the agency has taken on another site you have visited - Guardian Jobs, for instance. Alternatively you might have dealt with that agency in the past, heard about it by reputation, or seen a print ad. Or maybe you just found it by doing a web search.

Getting found in web searches is a very critical topic for recruitment agencies. How often you are found is a reflection of the prominence of your site on the web. The more likely people are to stumble upon your site, the more applicants you will get. And, critically, some of them will be people who were not actively looking for jobs in the first place, people who, as we noted above, can be some of the best applicants that you get.

So how do you get this "accidental" traffic? By getting other sites to link to yours, and by having as much relevant content as possible.

As far as content is concerned, the most important thing that a recruitment agency can do is to have its job details online - both current ones and filled ones - and to make sure that they are all optimized for search engines. This is imply fantastic content which could well be found when people are trawling the web in search of content which is relevant to their job. Similarly, creating other pages with interesting content will tend to draw the right kind of people to your site. Jobshout makes content management easy for recruitment agencies.

So, the message is: make the most of your website and you will start to attract applicants who were not jobhunting in the first place, as well as those who were.