You pay for every click to your vacancy page. What happens there in the first five seconds decides whether that money turns into an application or evaporates. Below is a concrete build order: which block belongs at the top, how to handle salary, how many fields your form may have, and what to test first.

What the visitor must know in five seconds

Your visitor arrives from a feed, on a phone, usually in the evening and rarely with undivided attention. Four questions have to be answered before they scroll even once.

  1. Which job is this — in the words the candidate uses, not your internal job title?
  2. Where is the work and how far do I have to travel?
  3. What will I earn?
  4. What is the next step, and how long does it take?

Every visitor who drops out here is paid traffic you have lost. How hard that lands only shows once you work out what a candidate through Meta Ads costs: a page that converts a quarter worse makes every placement a third more expensive.

The block above the fold

Put this at the top, in this order: job title, town or region, salary range, hours, one sentence that makes the work concrete, the primary button, and beneath it the alternative contact channel. “Above the fold” on a phone is roughly one screen height — test that on a real device, not by narrowing your browser window.

Salary: concrete or explained, but never left out

Anyone comparing three vacancies skips the one without a figure and does not come back. Give a range with its basis attached: gross per month on a 38-hour week, plus allowances, travel expenses or time off. If your client genuinely will not let you name a figure, give a floor and say why: “from €3,100, depending on experience and certification”. Still better than “competitive”.

The direction of travel is settled anyway: the EU Pay Transparency Directive (EU 2023/970) had to be transposed into national law by 7 June 2026 and requires employers to inform applicants about the salary range before the interview.

“What you will do” versus “what we ask”

Most vacancy pages are the wrong way round: a long list of requirements and three sentences about the work. Your visitor is not judging whether they may apply, but whether they want this. Rule of thumb: the block about the work is twice as long as the block of requirements, and that list holds only hard knock-outs, four at most. Cut everything that could be said about any vacancy anywhere: an informal atmosphere, a dynamic organisation.

Example: a weak intro rewritten

Before: “For one of our clients, a renowned player in the technical sector, we are looking with immediate effect for a motivated and enthusiastic engineer to strengthen the team. Are you someone who rolls up their sleeves? Then get in touch!”

After: “You work as a service engineer around Eindhoven, fixing faults on industrial refrigeration systems — usually two to four addresses a day. Van, phone and tools come from us. Salary €3,200 to €3,900 gross per month on a 38-hour week, plus an on-call allowance. You start with two weeks shadowing a permanent colleague.”

The difference is not tone but information: region, installations, addresses per day, money, first two weeks. The candidate can picture their Tuesday. The first version only describes the candidate the agency wants.

Social proof that holds up

Never invent quotes or figures. Candidates in engineering, healthcare and logistics recognise a generic review instantly, and what does not ring true works against you. What does work is material that can be checked.

  • A photo of the actual workplace or team, taken on site — not stock imagery of four people laughing at a laptop.
  • A quote from a placed candidate, with their first name and their permission.
  • The recruiter with name, photo and direct phone number: proof that somebody picks up.
  • Your real Google reviews through a widget showing the live count and score.

The form, and the alternative beside it

How many fields

Every field costs conversion. Ask only what you need for the first phone call: name and phone number. Email and CV come later — an engineer on the sofa does not have a CV to hand. One qualifying question is fine, provided it is genuinely binding: driving licence, safety certificate, professional registration. The rest you ask on the phone.

Mobile design

  • One column, generous input fields and buttons sized for thumbs.
  • The right input type, so the phone opens a numeric keypad for a number.
  • Autocomplete switched on, so name and number fill themselves in.
  • No dropdown with forty options; use buttons or drop the field.
  • Validation right at the field, with no reload that empties the form.
  • A captcha only if you demonstrably receive spam.

WhatsApp and call-me-back

Some of your visitors will never fill in a form, however short. Put a second route beside it: a WhatsApp link that opens with a pre-filled message naming the vacancy, or a “call me back” asking for a name, a number and a time slot. Make it land with a real person, and only promise a response time you meet.

Measure that route as a conversion too. If you do not, your campaign optimises on the wrong signal and you underestimate your own page — one of the classic mistakes in recruitment campaigns on social media.

Speed, and what happens after the submit button

Paid recruitment traffic is almost entirely mobile, often on cellular data. Test the real ad URL including UTMs on a phone away from the office.

  • Serve images at the size they are displayed and compress them.
  • Load chat and tracking widgets only after the content.
  • Avoid a redirect chain from shortlink to tracking URL to page.
  • No ten-megabyte autoplay video above the fold.

The page is not finished at the submit button. Send the visitor to a real thank-you page — that is where your conversion event belongs — with a concrete expectation: who calls, from which number, within what time. Repeat it by email or WhatsApp. Then deliver on it: the best-converting page is worthless if nobody calls for three days.

A/B testing: what first, and when a result means anything

Test the blocks with the largest leverage first; only then is the rest worth your traffic.

  1. The offer above the fold: salary visible or not, and how specific.
  2. The route to contact: form versus WhatsApp or call-me-back as the primary button.
  3. The number of fields in the form.
  4. The opening paragraph: concrete work versus general recruitment language.
  5. Only then small things such as button copy. Button colour appears nowhere on this list, deliberately.

How much traffic you need

A test compares two percentages that both contain noise. The number of visitors per variant rises as the difference you want to prove gets smaller and your baseline conversion rate gets lower. The relationship with that difference is quadratic: detecting an effect half the size reliably costs roughly four times the traffic. That is why small copy tests are unmeasurable for most agencies — not because they do nothing, but because you can never prove it.

So work backwards. Decide up front which relative improvement is big enough to act on, put it with your own baseline conversion rate into a sample size calculator, and only start if you can reach that number within a few weeks. Run the test in whole weeks, because application behaviour varies by day. And do not stop the moment it looks good: watching until the result pleases you produces flukes more often than winners.

If you cannot reach those numbers, do not test. Build the version that is better on the reasoning above and compare periods, knowing that comparison is the weaker read.

Checklist for your next vacancy page

  1. Job title, location, salary range and hours sit above the fold on a phone.
  2. The first paragraph describes the work, not the desired candidate.
  3. No more than four requirements, all hard knock-outs.
  4. Every image and quote is real and traceable.
  5. The form asks no more than the first phone call requires.
  6. A second contact route sits beside the form and is measured as a conversion.
  7. The thank-you page names who calls and when; source and campaign travel into your ATS.

Conclusion

A vacancy landing page is not a business card but the point where paid traffic either turns into a conversation or does not. Build it in the order above: the offer above the fold, the content about the work, the form with its alternative beside it, speed and follow-up. After that, only test what is big enough to measure. How we set this up for staffing and secondment agencies is on our services page.

Want your current vacancy page held against these points? Book a call and we will walk through it together.