Hands On Recruitment is a boutique recruitment agency working across South Africa’s digital, tech, marketing, and creative sectors – and increasingly placing candidates internationally. Founder-led. Relationship-first. Deliberately not a mass-market job board.
The brief was the brand-plus-website build – reposition the agency around the hands-on promise, build a real vacancies engine underneath it, and split the site’s two audiences (candidates looking for the next role, and employers looking for a hire) without watering down either.
Challenge
Recruitment sites default to noise. Endless job feeds, generic stock photos, testimonials that all sound the same. Candidates scroll past. Employers do not trust that this agency will not send them the same three CVs everyone else did.
The site had to hold two contradictory jobs at once – a candidate-facing vacancies experience that ranks and converts, and an employer-facing pitch that reads like a partnership offer, not a supplier brochure.
The work
We anchored the identity on the hand in hand promise – warm, direct, human. Type-forward brand. A jobs board that actually looks like it belongs to the brand, not bolted on from a plugin.
Anchor line – Your Talent, Our Expertise, Hand in Hand. Sets the collaboration up front.
Two journeys, one site – Hire Talent for employers and Got Talent for candidates, each with their own tone, content, and next step. Employers land on how the agency thinks about a brief. Candidates land on live vacancies and how to apply.
Vacancies engine – editable job posts across South Africa (Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban) and international (Sweden and elsewhere). Filter by discipline, location, and level. Each vacancy is its own page, structured for search so candidates find them from Google, not just from the site’s homepage.
Testimonials, done properly – individual client and candidate quotes with names and roles, not walls of anonymous praise. Trust proof for a category that has none by default.
Blog – ongoing content pillar for search authority and thought-leadership, and useful for the founder to have somewhere to put opinionated pieces about the industry.
Built on WordPress – the team can post new vacancies, publish new testimonials, and add editorial without a developer round.
If your agency is not a job board and your site behaves like one, that is not the deal. Talk to us about the site that shows the partnership.