Origin Recruitment (formerly Merrow Language Recruitment) stands as the longest established specialist language, and multilingual recruitment consultancy in Europe. For the last 60+ years, they have built a respected reputation for attracting and placing exceptional multilingual talent in high demand industries. Despite an unmatched legacy, an outdated website risked overshadowing their expertise.

We were thrilled to partner with Origin Recruitment to bring an enhanced user interface, intuitive job application functionality, and powerful API integrations to boost conversions and elevate, streamline, and automate processes.

The previous website suffered from several key issues, which ultimately affected Origin’s success in recruiting candidates and converting clients. The site was bare, unresponsive, and lacked clear calls to action. Although the site had great information, navigation was also difficult, causing high fall-off before conversion.

The first step was to design a clean, mobile-first, responsive interface that guides the user and presents key information in a logical flow. We included on-page navigation for accessibility and easy, highly-visible call to action sections on each page addressing both target audiences—job seekers (candidates) and employers (clients).

Strong trust signals were added throughout the entire site, such as a scrolling marquee of notable clients and animated statistics of candidates, countries, languages, and clients serviced. For added polish, we added subtle animations on scroll to introduce important sections as well as a toggle for light mode/dark mode versions of the site.

After the facelift was complete, the next phase of the project was to create a fully custom job board which integrates with Zoho Recruit, the primary Applicant Tracking System (ATS) used by Origin Recruitment. Our goal was to streamline management, allowing their team to add and update jobs in one location (Zoho Recruit) and have those updates push out to the website and other job boards.

To accomplish this, we had to first develop a custom experience within WordPress (the CMS of choice) to house the data. We created a custom WordPress plugin which generates a new post type for jobs, complete with fields that align with Zoho Recruit’s API.

In addition, as part of our extensive Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy, we enhanced and developed several more custom taxonomies (tags) within WordPress for Languages, Industries, and Sectors. This allows each job posting to be “tagged” with the relevant country, sector, and industry—which then feeds relevant jobs throughout the site onto country pages, industry pages, and blogs.

Under the hood, the job board is connected with Zoho Recruit via a custom API integration built by Appelman Designs. All new job postings, status updates, and content edits are automatically synced from Zoho Recruit to Origin’s website and connected job boards, allowing for a streamlined editing process.

We also needed a way for candidates to apply for jobs and manage their job seeker profile. We created a customized front-end registration, which is fully integrated with Zoho Recruit’s Candidates module via their API. As job seekers sign up for an account on the website, the system first checks for existing Zoho Candidates, and then either creates or updates a Candidate within the Zoho platform.

This allowed us to create a seamless application experience—associating all user accounts with corresponding Zoho Candidates, and then allowing them to apply for jobs (which are associated with Job Openings within Zoho Recruit) directly on the Origin Recruitment website. Within the first week of launch, there was a spike in new user accounts and job applications.

We were thrilled the be a part of this revamp for Origin Recruitment. The project was an immense success, and further enhancements are already in the works for the near future.