What an employer actually finds when they look you up
By ScopeSite Digital Studios ·
Somebody is going to look you up before they call you. A former candidate mentions you, a colleague forwards a link, or an employer types your specialism into a search box and lets an assistant do the reading. What they find can decide whether they make the call.
Start with the employer's question. Can they tell which roles and situations the desk understands, how you work with a client, and what evidence supports the explanation? A page saying ‘people solutions’ is leaving rather a lot of the recruitment work to two words. Your team already has the substance; the page needs to carry it.
Check the explanation before the engineering
- Choose one employer type and the relevant service page.
- Check whether it explains the roles, specialism and engagement model.
- Find the approved evidence and ask what it actually demonstrates.
- Follow the employer enquiry route and identify the receiving team.
Candidate registration has a different job. Keep it easy to use, but give the employer a route to discuss a hiring requirement without asking them to upload a CV. Then inspect whether search and other readers can reach the same explanation.
A site can explain your expertise beautifully in a browser and return very little of it in the first response from the server, leaving a reader that does not run the scripts with the wrapper and none of the explanation. The expertise is there, the delivery needs checking.
Content in HTML does not wait for scripts
A page can assemble its content in the browser after it loads. Google can render JavaScript, while other readers may use the initial response. Putting the important words in that response makes them available before any scripts run, with interactive extras loading on top. That is why we build the public explanation into the HTML.
This is ordinary engineering, which is rather reassuring when the sales presentation has started talking about the future of humanity. Google explains its rendering process in its JavaScript SEO guidance.
Say it where it can be read
A template that puts a rotating hero, a cookie wall and a mission statement ahead of the explanation makes everyone work through three things before finding the answer. Say what you do, for whom, and why you are the right call, high on the page and in plain HTML. The person skim-reading and the software parsing both get on better with it.
Let the readers you want reach the page
If your robots rules block a crawler, that crawler cannot read the page it was blocked from. Some assistants lean on independent crawlers and third-party indexes, so it is worth checking what you exclude before you exclude it. If you are relying on a page being readable, let the readers reach it.
What none of this buys you
Nobody can promise a ranking, an index slot, or a citation in an AI answer, and anyone who does is selling you the one thing they do not control. Current Google guidance is clear that no special AI schema or text file is required, and that inclusion is not promised in its guidance for AI features in search. The useful objective is a page that is readable, accurate and marked up where the facts support it, with visibility observed after publication and reported with its limits.
The strongest evidence we point to publicly is the Hear 4 The Long Term case study, in occupational hearing and HSE compliance. Different sector to recruitment, so read it as proof of the method rather than a recruitment result. Read the published H4TLT case study.
The expertise-to-enquiry diagram shows that employer route, and the AI search page explains the technical work and the observations it can support.