Recruitment agencies

Your vacancies aren’t yours. Judgement is.

Central Systems builds and rebuilds websites for independent recruitment agencies. The roles you advertise are on the job boards the same week, under your name and four other people’s. They go stale in a fortnight. They prove nothing about you, because anybody can list a job. What is actually yours is the judgement: who you would send, who you would not, and why. That is the thing both of your readers are trying to work out, and on most agency websites it is the one thing that never made it onto the page.

Discuss Your Website Run Your Free Website Audit

Permanent desksTemporary and contractTwo readers, one siteSalary, both sides

A recruitment consultant at a desk in a bright office, wearing a telephone headset, taking handwritten notes in a ring-bound pad with a laptop open beside her.

Who is actually reading

Two people are reading. One of them is what you are selling.

A recruitment website is the only kind we build where the buyer and the thing being bought read the same page. The employer pays you. The candidate is what the employer is paying for — and is also somebody you have to win, cannot charge, and who can walk away at offer stage after six weeks of work. No other page on this site has that shape, because nothing else we sell for is capable of withdrawing.

So there are two readers with opposite anxieties, arriving on the same site, often on the same page, and one set of sentences has to satisfy both.

The employer is asking

Are these four any good, or am I about to be sent forty?

Have you spoken to these people, or did you run a search and forward the results?
Do you know this discipline well enough to rule somebody out on my behalf?
What does this actually cost me, all in, before I take it to the board?
And what happens if they leave in six weeks?

The candidate is asking

Are you going to look after this, or send my CV everywhere?

Is there a real salary behind the word “competitive”?
Does my CV go anywhere I have not specifically agreed to?
Am I on a shortlist, or am I volume?
Is any of this going to cost me anything?

Those are the same promise read from opposite ends. A shortlist is short because you were selective, and short because you did not waste anybody. One sentence, if it is written properly, answers both of them — which is why splitting the site into a thin For Employers page and a thinner For Candidates page is the wrong shape for the problem.

You cannot win the employer by being careless with the candidate. Both of them can see the page.

An interview under way across a light wooden desk beside a window, one person seen from behind and the other making notes in a pad with a laptop between them.

We make a version of this argument on the page for estate and letting agencies, where the seller and the landlord are two separate audiences arriving at one site. Recruitment is the harder case, because there the second audience is not another customer — it is the inventory, and it reads everything you wrote for the first one.

The vacancy page

The job list is usually the worst page on an agency website.

It is also, almost always, the page that got the most attention and the most money. Three things are wrong with it at once. It decays — a board still carrying roles that were filled in March tells every visitor in September that nobody is minding the site. It is the page with the least of you in it, because those same roles are on four job boards under your name and somebody else’s. And a candidate has usually arrived at it from one of those boards, which they already trust more than they trust you.

None of which is an argument for taking your roles off your site. It is an argument for making the list do the thing a board structurally cannot.

Live roles — filtered to one desk

A recruitment agency website designed by Central Systems, its navigation bar across the top, scrolled to a vacancy board headed live roles and marked sample. Filter buttons for sector and contract type run across the top with Finance selected, and five roles are listed beneath. Each row carries a job title, a permanent, temporary or contract tag, the desk, the town, a one-line note on what the job needs, and a salary or day-rate band set in large type on the right.

The band, the type, and the one thing that would rule somebody out — on the row itself. A job board shows a title and a town because a title and a town is all it has. You know the salary you agreed with the client, whether this is a permanent hire or a three-month ledger clean-up, and the single requirement that makes half the applicants a waste of everybody’s afternoon. Putting that on the row loses you applications and wins you candidates, which is the same trade every decent consultant already makes on the phone.

Publish the band. “Competitive” is read as “low” by everybody who has ever seen it written down, and it filters out exactly the people who had a number in mind and no time to find out whether yours matches.
Let the list empty. A filled role should come off. A board that never shrinks is a board nobody is tending, and a visitor reads that in about four seconds without ever forming the thought.
Make it worth filtering. Sector and contract type are the two cuts every visitor wants and most sites do not offer, because the list was built as a feed rather than as a page somebody uses.

The number both of them are guessing at

One salary. Two completely different answers.

Here is a thing neither of your readers can work out on their own, and which both of them need settled before they will commit to anything. The employer does not know what the hire really costs: the advert says thirty-eight thousand and the number that has to go to the board is not thirty-eight thousand. The candidate does not know what lands in their bank, and in Scotland, on the same salary, it is not what somebody doing the identical job in Manchester takes home.

You already know both. You do this arithmetic most weeks, on the phone, from memory. Publishing it is the closest thing to free credibility an agency has — it is the one page an employer bookmarks, and the one that tells a candidate you are not hiding the money.

£38,000 on the advert is £43,903 on the payroll. What it costs us

Salary calculator — the employer’s side

The same recruitment website with its navigation bar across the top, scrolled to a two-panel salary tool headed one number, two very different answers. The left panel takes a salary of thirty-eight thousand pounds, a choice between the employer and candidate views, and a minimum wage check listing the April 2026 rates. The right panel returns a true cost of the hire of forty-three thousand nine hundred and three pounds a year, broken into salary, employer National Insurance and employer pension, with the monthly, daily and equivalent day-rate figures beneath it.

The same £38,000 is £2,465 a month in the hand. What I take home

Salary calculator — the candidate’s side

The same salary tool on its second tab, with the same thirty-eight thousand pound figure entered. The left panel now offers a workplace pension contribution and a choice between Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom, with Scotland selected. The right panel returns take-home pay of two thousand four hundred and sixty-five pounds a month, broken into gross salary, pension, Scottish income tax and National Insurance, with the annual take-home and the amount kept out of every hundred pounds earned.

One box, one figure, two answers — and the gap between them is the conversation. The employer’s number carries employer National Insurance and the pension, which is what turns a salary into a budget line. The candidate’s number carries their own pension, income tax on the Scottish bands and National Insurance, which is what turns an offer into a decision. A tool that only does one of those is a tool built for one of your two readers, and the other one will notice.

The rates behind those figures are published ones: employer National Insurance at 15% above £5,000 and employee contributions at 8% then 2% are the 2026/27 thresholds, the pension figures use the auto-enrolment qualifying band of £6,240 to £50,270, and the tax uses the 2026/27 Scottish bands. The minimum wage rates shown are those that applied from 1 April 2026. A calculator like this produces estimates, not advice, and the page it sits on should say so where a reader will actually see it.

What you know that a job board does not

The compliance you already do is the content you are missing.

An agency carries a set of obligations a job board has never had to think about: right-to-work checks before a first shift, a key information document for every temporary worker, terms agreed in writing before anybody is introduced, and since April 2026 the PAYE position in an umbrella chain sitting with the agency rather than the umbrella.

You handle all of it. The problem is that an employer ringing three agencies cannot tell which of the three handles it properly, because all three will say they do. Showing the working is the only version of that claim a stranger can check before they commit.

Right to work — which check do you need

The check most firms still get wrong is the one that changed. Where somebody holds an eVisa, the physical card in their hand is not the check any more — and a page that says so, with the share code route set out beside it, is doing something no job board and no competitor’s brochure page is doing. It is also the page an office manager sends to their own finance director, which is a link you did not have to ask for.

Temporary desks

The key information document

Every temporary worker gets one before terms are agreed: who employs them, the rate, the deductions, what reaches the bank. Publishing a plain example of it answers the candidate question you get asked most and never get to answer until they are already on the phone.

The awkward one

Transfer fees and extended hire

The single term clients most want to understand and least want to raise. A page that states the period plainly — and that an extended period of hire is the alternative — removes the suspicion that it is buried somewhere in your terms on purpose.

What is changing

A diary an employer will bookmark

Tribunal time limits, harassment duties, the unfair dismissal qualifying period. Dated, sourced, and updated when they move. It is the least glamorous page on the site and reliably one of the most visited.

To be plain about what this is and is not: none of it is legal advice, and a website is not the place to give any. It is a description of the things you already do, written down where somebody can read them before they ring — and dated, so a reader can tell whether it has been kept up. Anything that goes further than that belongs with your own advisers, not on a marketing page.

The enquiry

A contact form throws away the only thing worth having.

Name, email, message. An employer with a role to fill types four lines into it and waits. You ring back the next morning and the conversation that actually matters — the money, the two things that would rule a CV out, the date they need somebody — happens then, from a standing start, with nothing written down anywhere. The form cost you a day and captured none of it.

The fix is not a longer form. It is a form that asks the questions you were going to ask anyway, in the order you would have asked them, and hands back something the employer can see.

Brief us on a role — step six of six

The same recruitment website with its navigation bar across the top, scrolled to a dark section headed brief us on a role. On the left a six-step form sits on its final step asking for name, company and phone, with the five completed steps ticked above it. On the right a document builds up alongside, showing the role as management accountant, the desk as finance, the type as permanent, a salary band, a timescale of within a month, and two must-haves, with the contact line still blank.

Six answers, and the employer watches the brief being written as they give them. The document on the right is the point: by the time they reach the last step they have seen the thing you will work from, and they have committed to a band in writing rather than in a conversation neither of you can quote back later. Nothing is sent to a candidate until they have approved it — which is also the sentence the other half of your audience needs to read.

Four colleagues gathered round a laptop at a table in a bright office, two seated either side and one standing behind, looking at the screen together.

An enquiry that arrives already qualified is worth more than three that arrive blank, and it costs the sender less to send.

The demonstration

Lynedoch Recruitment does not exist.

Building one was the only honest way to test the argument. Four of the things above — the vacancy board, the salary tool that answers twice, the right-to-work checker and the brief builder — only prove anything when they sit on one site and have to share a header, a navigation bar and a reader. It was also the only way to find out whether a single home page can face a hiring manager and somebody quietly looking for a new job without either of them feeling handled.

There is not a single review, rating or placement statistic anywhere on it. A real agency’s site would carry all three, and yours should. We will not invent evidence to make a demonstration look better, which is the same reason we would not invent any for you. The telephone number on it is one of the numbers reserved for fiction, so that nobody ever rings a stranger by accident.

lynedoch-recruitment — desktop

The top of the demonstration recruitment website on a desktop screen. A dark navy header carries the agency name, navigation, a telephone number and a call to action, above a hero headed we send four people, not forty CVs, over a photograph of two people shaking hands. To the right a panel sets out the four stages of briefing a role. Below, two large adjacent panels read I am hiring and I am looking for work, each with its own three promises and its own button.

The same page on a phone: the header collapses to the agency name, a call-to-action and a menu button, and the hero stacks into a single column with the headline, the summary paragraph, both buttons and the four contract-type tags beneath it.

The split at the bottom of that screen is the whole argument in one component. Two doors, equally weighted, neither of them the poor relation — because the day you make the candidate door smaller is the day your shortlists get worse, and the employer is the one who finds out.

Before you ask

The four things agencies raise on the first call.

Our roles come out of a CRM. Does that still work?

Usually, yes — most recruitment systems will publish a feed of live roles, and where one does we take it and build the page around it so your consultants carry on working in the tool they already use. Where a system exposes nothing usable we will tell you that plainly rather than quoting for an integration that cannot be built.

Is a tool like that calculator a lot of work?

Less than people expect, because the hard part is not the code — it is deciding which rates it uses, saying so on the page, and agreeing who checks them each April. That last one is the question worth asking before anybody builds anything, and it is the one that gets skipped.

We are two consultants, not a national. Is this over the top?

The opposite. A national can win on spend and on brand recognition; you cannot, so the only ground left is being visibly better at the part that needs judgement. Everything above is cheaper for a small agency to do well than it is for a large one, because it needs a point of view rather than a committee.

What about the candidate side — do we need a portal?

Almost never, and we will usually argue against one. Candidates do not want an account with a recruiter; they want the salary band, a straight answer about where their CV goes, and a way to register interest in under a minute. A portal adds a login to a decision nobody wanted to make.

If you place into the trades, the professions or property, the sector pages on this site describe how those businesses buy — the accountancy practices and agencies you recruit for are reading their own versions of this argument.

Let’s build the half of the site that is actually yours.

Tell us which desks you run, whether the money is permanent fees or temporary margin, and where your roles get published today. What comes back is this argument applied to your disciplines, your rates and the questions your consultants already answer twenty times a week on the telephone.

Discuss Your Website Run Your Free Website Audit