Niche or grab-bag: a desk page for each specialty your placements back

What can be said about specialist agencies and AI answers

Not much, from measurement. Our audit's probe put one buyer question per business to Claude, once, with web retrieval on, across 9,240 businesses in 40 trades, and 14.9% were named. It did not sort agencies by specialty and it has no cut for recruiting or staffing, so it cannot say whether a specialist agency is named more often than a generalist, and this page does not say it either.

What can be said is about pages. For an answer to tie your agency to "[role family] in [city]", some page has to make that tie in words: a desk page, a posting, a review from a client who hired through you. No operator documents how its assistant chooses among agencies whose pages all make the tie. A generalist with three desks it can document can state three ties, each as plainly as a specialist states its one.

For an owner, that turns niche against grab-bag into an inventory. List the desks, count what each has placed, and write a page for the ones the count supports. The rest of what an agency's site states is on the recruiting and staffing overview; this page is about the desks.

A desk is a record, not a line on the services menu

A desk, in this page's sense, is a role family or an industry the agency places again and again, with recruiters who work it: payroll and accounts payable, maintenance technicians and millwrights, [role family], or every role in [industry] from [entry level] to [senior level]. Use the unit your clients use when they call. A plant manager asks for maintenance technicians, not for manufacturing.

The test is a count the agency can produce. Can the desk list the permanent placements, contract assignments or temporary workers it has supplied in that role family over the last [period], with dates? Then it is a desk, and its page can carry the count. If the list is two names long and the interest is strong, it is a plan, and it belongs in one sentence on the services page until the record exists.

A menu of industries on the homepage ("manufacturing, healthcare, logistics, finance and more") names no desk. It tells a reader what the agency would accept, not what it has done. A desk stated with its record is the agency's unique selling proposition in a form someone can check.

What a desk page states, and where each number comes from

Two rows, placements and time to shortlist, come out of records only your agency holds; a competitor could copy the rest by lunch. Fill each bracket from the record named beside it, and round nothing up into a claim the record does not hold.

The markup repeats the desk and adds nothing to it. A Service node per desk carries serviceType (the role family, in clients' words), areaServed (the cities) and provider (the agency's EmploymentAgency node), which states that every desk belongs to one entity. A recruiter on the desk is a Person whose worksFor points at the agency and whose knowsAbout names the role family. schema.org describes knowsAbout as suggesting possible expertise without implying it, which suits a line of markup; the count on the page does the rest.

Counting placements so the number holds up

A count on a public page will be read by clients who can set it against their own experience of you, and by competitors. Decide the rules before the first count, write them beside the number, and keep them.

• Say what counts. A permanent placement might be a candidate who started, or one whose fee was invoiced; a temporary assignment might be a worker who completed a first shift. Pick one definition per contract type and state it.
• Keep contract types apart. Permanent placements, contract assignments and temporary workers supplied are three numbers, and one total mixes a search desk's year with a staffing desk's week.
• Count once. A replacement under your guarantee is not a second placement, and a temp-to-hire conversion goes in the one column your definition names.
• Count by desk. A desk page carries only the placements its own recruiters made in its role family.
• Date it. State the period and the day the count was taken, and refresh it on a date fixed in advance, such as each January, so the number is never chosen for how it looks.
• Name no client without written permission. A count and a role family describe the record without identifying anyone.

Time to shortlist gets the same care. Measure from the signed brief to the first shortlist sent, take the median for the year rather than the fastest search, and say how many searches it covers. A desk that fills temporary shifts states time to fill instead, from the client's request to a worker on site, in hours.

The roles a desk turns down belong on its page

A line saying what the desk does not take does as much work as the line saying what it does. A hiring manager with a role outside it learns so before the first call, a candidate learns whether to register, and an answer about the desk has the limit in the page's own words to repeat. "We place [role family] up to [seniority]; we do not recruit [senior or adjacent roles]" is a sentence a page can carry and an answer can quote.

The limits are about the work: seniority, contract types, places, shift patterns, the licenses a role requires. They are never about who may apply. A desk page, like a posting, describes roles and their requirements and says nothing about candidates in terms of a protected characteristic; what a page may say about requirements where you operate is for your counsel.

Which desks get a page: placements first, then capacity

1. List every role family and industry the agency placed in over the last [period], with the count for each and the recruiters who made those placements.
2. Set the smallest count you are willing to publish, and drop the desks below it. They stay a line each on the services page.
3. For each desk above it, ask its recruiters whether they can take more briefs in the next [months]. A desk that cannot either waits for its page or says on it when new briefs can start.
4. Give each remaining desk one page, written from its own record. Two desks that share a role family and differ only by city are one desk with a list of cities.
5. Link each desk page from the homepage, the services page and every open role in that desk, so internal links lead a crawler from the front door to each one.

Search demand is not on the list. Query volume tells you what people type; it says nothing about whether your recruiters have filled the role, and a desk page for a role family you have never placed has nothing true to count. Google's spam policies describe both ways this fails at scale: scaled content abuse, meaning many pages produced mainly to manipulate rankings, and doorway abuse, which includes pages built for particular regions or cities that funnel people to a single page.

A before-and-after reading for one desk

A desk page is a change you can test, provided the test is in place before the page goes live. It runs on the panel you already keep, set out in AI visibility for recruiters, with three additions:

• A dated group of [number] lines for the desk, on both sides: client lines that ask for the role family in your cities, and candidate lines that ask where to find that work.
• A baseline for that group, read before the page exists, including the fee-or-term column, so a figure that only the new page states can be spotted later.
• A comparison group: the lines for a desk whose page will not change while the test runs.

Publish, keep other changes to the site small, and read both groups on the same questions every time, as our methodology sets out. Read the client lines and the candidate lines apart. A desk page can speak to one side and not the other; if the candidate half stays flat, check whether the page says anything a candidate would ask about.

The results can say less than an owner might hope. If the desk's lines move and the comparison desk's hold, the new page is the best available explanation for those lines in those months, and no more than that. If an answer quotes the desk's placement count or its limit, which appear nowhere else, the page reached an answer even where no verdict changed. If nothing moves after [number] months, first check that the page is fetched and its text is in the HTML, using the steps in what ChatGPT and Perplexity can reach on an agency's site. None of these says that specialist agencies are named more; each says something about one agency's lines.