A drive to get candidates to their jobs in the "simplest, quickest and best" way is at the heart of the relaunch of Hays' new website, which went live on 19 February.

The site, www.hays.com, has been 18 months in development and the company has spent a "six-figure" sum on the re-design.

Its main feature is a virtual map of Britain, which allows candidates to zoom in to find out where particular jobs are in the country.

Each job also has a link to the relevant Hays consultant dealing with the vacancy, and more new features will be rolled out in the coming weeks.

"I perceived that some of our competitors had moved on," said marketing director Gary Hughes, who gave Recruiter an exclusive sneak preview of the site last week.

"While our old site functioned very well, we wanted to get people to their jobs in the simplest, quickest and best way. We feel this site does this."

Hays has a team of 16 working on the ongoing development of the site, and it recruited Islington-based firm Flow Interactive to improve its useability. The mapping technology is provided by Microsoft Virtual Earth, although putting the jobs onto the map has been developed in-house.

"It's been a long project and this is a great achievement. The hard work doesn't stop here, though," Hughes told Recruiter.

He added that the development team was working on 15 different projects to improve the 'user experience' of the site still further.

Hays has 240 offices in the UK and offices in 19 countries worldwide.