Career Pages: Why Employers May Need One and How to Avoid Common Mistakes

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<h2>Key Takeaways</h2>
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<li>Career pages aren’t a must, but if you have one it’s worth posting your job there at the beginning of the recruitment process, ideally in a Google-friendly format.</li>
<li>Career pages can be bad at attracting applicants. They’re frequently hard for applicants to find, overloaded with irrelevant information and involve over-lengthy application processes. When employers redirect jobseekers from job sites to career pages, they lose roughly 90% of potential applicants, so don’t do this!</li>
<li>Career pages can be a helpful slow burning recruitment channel as long as you follow best practices: make job adverts prominent, make the pages easy to navigate, include genuinely useful information about your company, make it easy to apply for a job, make the pages mobile compatible and use search engine optimisation.</li>
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Employer career pages are a section of a company’s website where jobseekers can apply for jobs directly and find information about working for the company. They can be costly to create and maintain, and aren’t essential for SMEs. But if you do have a career page, then it’s worth posting your jobs on it at the beginning of the recruitment process.

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Why Employer Career Pages Often Fail to Bring in More Applicants

To attract applicants, career pages need to help jobseekers find and apply for jobs and to prepare for interviews. 

Too often they don’t for the following reasons:

• Jobseekers don’t see the career pages: People look for jobs using standard search engines, which rank job sites more highly than employer career pages. Companies compound this problem buy burying a “we’re hiring” link in their website footer which visitors will tend to miss.
• ‍Employers make the mistake of redirecting jobseekers from job sites to their career pages: My own studies have shown that companies lose over 90% of potential applicants this way – don’t fall into this trap! Jobseekers hate it when employers redirect them: when they press “apply” on a job site they want to apply, not be taken to a different website, and they’ll often give up altogether. It’s even worse if they’re taken to a general career page where they then have to hunt around for the job again, or if the role appears there under a different job title. And while they might have earlier uploaded their CV onto the job site, they may not have it on the device they’re now browsing on and so can’t upload it to the career page.
• ‍It’s too hard to apply: Careers pages often require applicants to register before applying or ask applicants to fill in an application form when they’ve already supplied the same information on their CV.
• ‍Career pages are overloaded with company information: This prevents potential applicants from quickly finding jobs they get frustrated and go elsewhere.

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How to Set Up an Employer Career Page

I don’t recommend employer career pages for SMEs, but if you are a large or specialist organisation in the Young Adult or Maturity stages of the business life cycle and want to create one, I suggest you carefully follow these steps.

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Step 1: Plan your content

• Correct order of information: Organise information with job listings at the top, followed by company information and employee testimonials. This way jobseekers see jobs first.
• Formatting: Use clear headings, bold text, bullet points, and short sentences to make information easy to scan. Avoid jargon and corporate speech.
• Authentic photos: Use real photos of the working environment and employees. Avoid stock images.

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Step 2: Technical considerations

• Outsource: It’s a mini-website, so you’ll need to buy a solution or hire a web designer/developer.
• Mobile compatibility: Ensure the page is mobile responsive.
• Simple application process: Do not require registration. Collect basic information first and allow CV uploads via cloud storage.
• Modern HTML and CSS: Use HTML5 compliant forms for better usability.
• Search engine optimisation (SEO): Use SEO best practices to improve search engine ranking. Consider hosting the career page on a unique domain.

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Step 3: Ongoing management

• Regular updates: Continually update the page with fresh content, including relevant company news, job postings, and employee stories.
• Automated follow-up: Use automated systems to keep applicants engaged and informed.

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Common Pitfalls & Solutions

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Visibility issues

• It doesn’t matter how great your career pages is if no one finds it, so make sure to use search engine optimisation. For this purpose, it’s better to give your career pages a unique domain (eg. ACMEJobs.com). In addition, make sure your job adverts are ranked on Google’s job search engine, Google for Jobs; to do this you have to submit adverts in a particular format.
• Provide a link to your career page in a prominent place on your main website, ideally in the main navigation (avoid hiding it in the footer). The best anchor text is “Work for Us”. 

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Application process barriers

• Make it as easy to apply for a job as ordering from Amazon. Don’t ask applicants to register or to fill in an application form.
• When jobseekers arrive at a generic careers page, there can be lots of competing information. Keep it simple: jobs listed at the top of the page with consistent, clear job titles. (Avoid redirecting applicants from job sites to your career page, as this can reduce application rates.)

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Technical obstacles 

• Make sure that your career site is mobile compatible because many jobseekers browse for jobs on mobile devices.
• Don’t include a closing date because job adverts with expired closing dates give an unprofessional impression. ‍
• Many jobseekers think registering and/or filling in application forms will take too long so don’t continue. All they want (and all you need), is the ability to upload a CV.
• Probably the worst I’ve seen was an instruction telling jobseekers not to apply if they’d already applied for a job at the organisation within the past six months. In one usability test, I observed an ideal applicant who had earlier applied but was never contacted about a relevant new job. I called the employer, explained they already had the perfect applicant, and they eventually hired her. If I hadn’t been doing their job for them, they would have never known about their potentially costly mistake.

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Information overload

• Information about your company is certainly important, but make sure to place it after the jobs (and anyway most applicants won’t even look at this unless their application leads to an interview).
• Use genuine, relatable content rather than generic corporate statements. Photos of your workplace and staff, as well as case studies of actual employees, can be a great help in communicating to jobseekers what it will be like to work for you. Make company information truly informative; don’t pad it with corporate jargon and stock images.
• Make the page easy to scan by using headings, bold text for keywords, bullet points and short sentences. 

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Advantages of Employer Career Pages

• Direct application to the employer: Jobseekers apply directly to the business; a more streamlined communication channel between the applicant and the employer. However, this assumes you have candidate traffic, excellent usability, and an effective communication process.
• Control over branding: Employers can influence their branding and messaging, establishing the business’s culture, values, and vision.
• More informed candidates: Well-designed career pages can enhance the jobseeker experience by providing detailed information about the organisation, its values, benefits, and the types of roles available. (However, candidates often read the information after applying when preparing for an interview.)
• Good value in the long run: Having a dedicated career page can be cost-effective for businesses that consistently recruit.
• Integration with internal systems: Employer career pages can often be integrated with internal HR and recruitment systems, allowing for more efficient management of applications and candidate data. (However, just because the systems are integrated doesn’t mean you should force jobseekers to use your solutions.)
• Reduced reliance on external platforms: Having your career page may reduce your dependence on external job sites and platforms, potentially lowering recruitment costs and avoiding competition with other employers on these platforms.‍

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Disadvantages of Employer Career Pages

• High initial setup and maintenance costs: Developing a high-quality career page can be time consuming and expensive, especially for custom designs. Additional expenses are incurred to keep content fresh and relevant.
• SEO and visibility challenges: Employer career pages often struggle to be found in search engine results, competing against more prominent job sites. Low visibility means low application numbers.
• Usability issues: Poorly designed career pages can suffer from usability issues, such as complicated navigation, incorrect order of information, or not working on mobile devices. This can deter potential applicants and negatively impact the user experience.
• Regular content updates required: The information needs regularly updating to remain relevant and accurate, which requires time and resources. Additionally, Google requires content to be consistently updated, ideally every three months. If you fail to do this it can reflect badly on the company and be perceived as outdated.
• Limited reach: Due to SEO issues and a lack of direct traffic, employer career pages might only attract candidates already aware of the organisation.
• Risk of technical problems: There’s always a risk of technical issues, such as downtime or glitches, which might deter candidates. In my experience there are frequent issues even with expensive solutions.
• Dependence on internal resources: Managing an employer career page requires significant internal resources, including IT support, HR personnel, and content creators, which might strain smaller companies.‍
• Challenges in measuring effectiveness: It can be difficult to accurately measure effectiveness in generating applications and determining the return on investment. This is principally because tools like Google Analytics (GA4) attribute the jobseekers’ last click as the important metric. In contrast, a career page may have been a catalyst for an application but not necessarily the final “click”.‍
• Non-confidential only: A company would have to use alternative Applicant Attraction Channels to advertise confidential roles.

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Additional Resources

• Recruiting Book; The Secrets of Great Recruitment: How to Recruit Great Employees.
• Downloadable PDF guide; Why Most Employer Career Pages Fail (& How to Make Sure Yours Doesn't).
• Article; Career Pages 101: Essential Ingredients for a Magnetic Employer Brand!
• Article; Advantages & Disadvantages of Using Employer Career Pages for Recruiting Staff.