Building Market 36 Recruitment a website that works for candidates and clients

We first built Market 36 Recruitment's website back in 2022. It did its job. But over the next few years the agency evolved — new brand identity, busier job flow, more hiring partners — and the site needed to catch up. Not a reskin. A proper rebuild: clearer journeys for two very different audiences, a live jobs board, apply flows that actually work, and portals where candidates and clients can get things done without ringing the office for every small task.

This post walks through what we shipped, why we made the choices we did, and what other recruitment (and dual-audience) businesses can take from it. If you want the short version first, there is a Market 36 case study on our work page with the headline outcomes. This article goes deeper on the build itself.

The brief: two audiences, one front door

Market 36 sits across Industrial, Commercial, and Technical & Engineering recruitment in Essex and beyond. That means two kinds of visitor hit the homepage every day: someone looking for their next role, and someone looking for their next hire. Treating them the same is how recruitment sites end up with vague headlines and buttons that nobody clicks.

The new homepage makes the split obvious from the first screen. On desktop, a diagonal yellow divide separates the candidate path ("Find Your Next Role" → Browse Jobs) from the client path ("Find Your Next Hire" → Partner With Us). On mobile, candidates get the full viewport first — because that is who most organic traffic is — with a clear secondary link for hiring managers. Same brand, same site, two deliberate front doors.

From prototype to production platform

We started in Cursor with a high-fidelity visual prototype — split hero, sector blocks, job cards, portal shells — so Market 36 could react to layout and tone before we committed to backend work. That is a step we recommend for any non-trivial build: agree on how it feels first, then wire up the hard parts.

What went live is a full Next.js application on MongoDB, not a static brochure. The public site includes a database-backed jobs board with filters and sector landing pages, individual job detail pages with JobPosting structured data for Google, and a public apply flow where candidates upload a CV, pass bot checks, and get a confirmation email — without the team manually copying attachments out of an inbox.

• Candidate portal — profile, applications tracker, availability, and notifications.
• Client portal — post jobs (with recruiter approval), review submissions, team invites, and hiring analytics.
• Admin tools — job approval queue, business onboarding, content management, and broadcast messaging.
• Security baked in — Cloudflare Turnstile on forms, rate limits on apply endpoints, virus scanning on CV uploads, GDPR consent mode on analytics.

Design choices that matter day to day

The visual language is deliberately bold: black backgrounds, white type, Market 36 yellow as the only accent. It mirrors the confidence of the refreshed brand and keeps CTAs impossible to miss. Typography is clean and large enough to read on a phone between shifts — because a fair chunk of candidate traffic is mobile, on the move, with thirty seconds of attention.

Performance was treated as a feature, not a post-launch audit. The homepage hero is server-rendered with priority preloading so the largest image paints quickly. Featured jobs load in Suspense so the shell is not blocked waiting on the database. Sector pages and job detail URLs use readable slugs with legacy redirects, so old links and printed materials still land in the right place.

SEO and discoverability

Recruitment SEO is not generic "rank for recruitment Essex" fluff. It is job-level visibility: the right role showing up when someone searches for a warehouse operative in Braintree, or a hiring manager looking for a specialist agency. We shipped JobPosting schema on every live role, sector cornerstone pages, and an Essex recruitment landing page — the kind of technical and local SEO foundation that compounds as the job board grows. Sitemaps, canonical URLs, and sensible internal linking between sectors, jobs and service pages are all in place from launch.

Ongoing care — because launch is not the finish line

Market 36 stays on a monthly Website Care plan — EU hosting, daily backups, monitoring, security updates, and included time for content tweaks. For a platform this size, that is not optional luxury; it is how you keep apply flows working, integrations current, and the team focused on placements instead of plugin panic.

“The best recruitment website is the one where candidates apply in two minutes and clients post a role without sending a Word doc to someone's inbox.”

What we would tell another recruitment agency

• Split the homepage early. If you serve candidates and clients, say so above the fold — twice, if you need to.
• Invest in the apply flow. A broken or slow apply path costs you placements even when traffic is healthy.
• Build for the team, not just the brochure. Portals and admin tools pay back faster than another "About Us" rewrite.
• Prototype before you pour concrete. Align on UX while changes are cheap.
• Plan for care from day one. Platforms age; recruitment sites age faster.

If you are weighing a similar rebuild — recruitment, dual-audience, or just a site that has outgrown its first version — website design and development is where we start the conversation. We will scope honestly, quote in writing before work begins, and tell you if a lighter refresh is enough. Get in touch or browse starting prices if you want a sense of budget first.