QUESTION: I do not have a website. The reason is I do not have many clients or job postings to put on it. How important is it to have a website for a solo? Vic, UK
ANSWER: I would say it is very important to have a website. Even when we were in the millions as a firm, I never used my website to post jobs. I just thought that commoditized what we did. Regardless, I think you need a website.
You can go to Upwork and have one put up for a few hundred dollars. You do not need anything with moving video or anything like that. If you do not have a website, there is a feeling you are not real. If you close one opening a year that you fill for a couple hundred bucks, that more that pays for it.
Here is the thing when recruiters put up websites is they look at other recruiters’ websites, so pretty much almost every recruiting website looks the same. Worst case scenario Vic, even do that, but it says to the world I am real and we are out here and we exist.
The other thing that I see missing on a website is a way to capture the information of the visitor, and by that I mean, I go to your website, I think, oh, interesting, and then I move on. Well 98% of the people that visit your website or find it through some form of search engine optimization, never come back and it is any website. The term I use is you want to make your website a little “sticky.”
Create a free special report on, say, the 6 Biggest Mistakes People Make Hiring in the XYZ Industry and How to Avoid Them Forever. You can have somebody interview you and record it on audio. Take that audio and have someone through Upwork make the audio a transcription. Then you can have someone else edit it and you make it into a special report.
There are email programs that are out there that you will not have to email them, autoresponders. Just like if you go to my site, TheRecruiterU.com, we have a 4 Part Video Series for Free and if you subscribe to it I do not have a team of people going, let us send one of these video links out every 3 days. It is all done on an autoresponder. But we are able to capture that information from the people that visited our website and then I put them on my content marketing email followup. You can do it Vic, even if you do not have a content marketing followup.
You can call up a week after they opt in for your special report and you can say:
Hey Mr. Hiring Manager,
I saw you got a report. I just wanted to make sure (1) that you got it, and (2) to see when you read that report, which one of those mistakes resonated with you?
See, I am calling you as a consultant, not do you have any openings I can help you file? Now you are building your list from your website so instead of saying, the reason I do not want to have a website is I do not have any jobs, I would not recommend having your website be a job board. I would recommend to have your website be something that people would find because they are in your specialty and that when they find you there is a quick opt in, something of value.
You cannot say, sign up for our newsletter. Nobody wants to sign up for your newsletter. But come up with a special report, even if it is a 2-page report, or even if it is as simple as a 1-page checklist. Opt in here for the checklist of the 6 Biggest Mistakes People Make and see which ones you are making. It could be a 1-page thing where they just check the boxes. Checklists are actually very popular things that “make websites sticky.”
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