I am an ex-recruiter/recruitment company owner who embarked, and now I run a recruitment website development company since 2004.

Disclaimer I am severely Dyslexic, and so this post will have spelling and grammar errors, partly because I am severely Dyslexic but mostly because Word, Chrome & Grammarly can't agree on what is correct and what is not, so WTF chance have I got? Either way, the advice here has been validated by some others who know a little bit about websites, recruitment marketing and SEO.

Here is some free advice on the subject based on 18 years and counting of delivering recruitment websites to the most prominent and smallest recruitment firms in all continents of the world, in multiple languages across hundreds of niches or niches of niches.

Lesson 3 -Advisors to start-ups

Number 1 issue we find - I am constantly contacted by those who wish to advise start-up recruiters.

None of them knows about IT, and all want a solution based on price and the lowest price possible.

None of them wants to know about the real factors like server up times, the track record for bugs a vendor has, the track record for customer service wait time and vendor has, the track record for hacks a vendor has dealt with etc., just price.

The biggest vendor we compete with had more downtime in 2022, then we have had from 2004 to date. Despite this incredible fact, 'Bandwagon Marketers' jump on this vendor's coat tails and recommend away in complete ignorance of the quality of the vendor's server uptime.

Number 2 issue we find - Advisor recommends based on how a website looks, not the tech being fit for purpose.

For example, if you ask 100 people for advice on websites, 99 will offer WordPress as the holy grail. They do this as the WordPress tech community has many resources to download lots of nice-looking site designs.

Designs which, you guessed it is cheap, you can buy WordPress themes for $5 to $50, but if you know website design, you will know these themes come with £2000 to £3000 of bugs to fix and, yes, cyber security issues to fix as well because a bug in the template allows your WordPress site to be hacked.

What they don't know, never consider, is that WordPress is the most hacked software defended by the top cybersecurity firms globally, accounting for 70-90% of all the hacks they deal with. So bad our cyber insurers said not to touch WordPress with a barge pole.

60% of all hacks happen in the WordPress world because of WordPress plugins; a plugin is a piece of software invented by a WordPress community member to perform a specific task. Like you would have a plugin to hold your design, a different plugin to provide you with a "contact us form", an additional plugin to provide you with your job posting feature, a plugin to tell you how to do SEO parts the site can provide and so on. A typical recruitment site could have 20-60 plugins, and here comes the killer part.

Most all, if not all, of those plugins will be from a different plugin vendor source, so if your site has 20 plugs, your supplier is hiding the fact that they use 20 other people's software to provide your site and rely on that software to be fit for purpose to deliver you site. 

As these plugin vendors have no agreements with each other (current stats say there are over 50,000 plugin vendors, mostly one-person vendors) when one plugin needs an update but the update is not available, it can hold up or get in the way of other plugins being updated, and this is how 60% of hack end up happening due to out of date/out of sync plugins. For many hacks, hackers can Google ideas for how to exploit the plugin!

Plugin as a real-world example, now suppose your website was your mobile phone. Buy you buy a phone where Vodafone provided the numerical keypad, EE provided the alpha keypad, BT provided the mic, Virgin provided the speakers, and the WordPress guy made the phone case look pretty? Of course not, but you do that blindly when you buy WordPress websites today. 

WordPress is not all bad.

But WordPress is only as good as the vendor who provides it, the SLA they have and how much control they have over the plugins.

The first questions you need to ask any WordPress vendor are...

What they contract says about how hackers will be kept out?

How plugins will be managed/updated weekly?

Wow do they fix or work around their cyber issues?

Have they specific insurance cover for these hacks/plugins.

What cyber secuirty qualifications do they have like Cyber Essentials etc.

 

Got any questions or need any more advice on how your recruitment website can help? Then connect with me here:

 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/recruitmentwebsitedesign/

 

Darren Revell

Director

Please note I am Dyslexic, and in my form, I am blind to grammar, and sometimes I get my fors and fours, etc. backwards.  I am not stupid – in fact, my IQ and EQ are both quite high.  Please keep that in mind when you read my posts.  Thanks.