Career Pages 101: Essential Ingredients for a Magnetic Employer Brand!

<div class="grey-callout"><h2>Key Takeaways</h2><ul>
<li>Visibility challenges: Career pages often struggle to attract direct traffic and rank poorly in search engines compared to job sites.</li>
<li>Cost and maintenance: High-quality career pages are expensive and time-consuming to set up, with ongoing costs for SEO and content creation.</li>
<li>Limited appeal: Not ideal for SMEs unless they operate in niche markets or small towns where job sites are less effective.</li>
<li>Usability issues: Poor design, technical barriers, and lengthy application processes discourage jobseekers from applying.</li>
<li>Prioritise job listings: Place job vacancies prominently at the top of your career page, with company information and branding secondary, to improve engagement and application rates.</li>
</ul></div>

What are Employer Career Pages?

Employer career pages are like mini job sites usually hosted on an organisation’s website. You may have noticed links to them tucked in footers of websites; Nike has a link called “Careers”; Sainsbury’s has a link called “Jobs”. 

Organisations can use career pages to influence their employer branding and messaging, establishing the business’s culture, values and vision through articles and photographs. (However, candidates often read the information after applying, when preparing for an interview.)

Attracting jobseekers is very challenging as few career pages receive direct traffic, and many struggle to compete in search engines against prominent job sites.

Even when jobseekers visit, many will leave without applying for jobs due to technical and usability issues.

When applicants apply to a job advert on a career page, their CV is sent directly to the employer.

Overall, high-quality career pages can be time consuming and expensive to set up, and it isn’t great value if you aren’t getting many applications and don’t have a persistent hiring requirement.

‍

Which Businesses Should Have an Employer Career Page?

I don’t recommend employer career pages for SMEs. They cost a lot of time and money to create, and the content can quickly stagnate.

However, there are exceptions:

• Companies in very small towns: Because job sites often ignore low-volume searches, a career page has a chance of competing in search engine results. Additionally, local jobseekers are more aware of nearby companies and are more likely to recall them when looking for a job.
• Specialist companies with topical authority: For example, an IT development company constantly writing content about IT related topics and jobs will be considered relevant to search engines. 
• Strong niche brands: Benefit from “big fish in a small pond”.
• Genuinely well-known companies with a large geographical footprint: Such as Apple and Tesco.

‍

What Type of Jobs Can you Fill on an Employer Career Page?

While almost any type of job can be advertised on an employer career page, it does not guarantee (m)any relevant applicants. Most career pages get minimal organic jobseeker traffic; even fewer have strong enough brands to create “direct” traffic.

‍

<span class="grey-callout"><p><span class="text-color-purple">Note:</span> Because employer career pages often get a feeble response, they can be sold as a “touchpoint” in the application process. The sales pitch is usually, “An applicant sees your job on a job site, does further research on an employer career page, and then applies”.</p>
<p>This sales pitch is largely mis-selling. By studying analytics and reviewing diary studies, I know the applicant's behaviour is typically; they see a job on a job site and press apply, then move on to the next job. They do not research employer career pages before applying.</p>
</span>

‍

When Would an Employer use Employer Career Pages?

Use them immediately to advertise non-confidential roles. Because employer career pages typically have a fixed monthly cost, regardless of how many jobs you advertise, it makes sense to try and get some value.

‍

<span class="purple-callout"><p>A little plug – I'm here to help if you need advice or practical assistance. Let's book a call.</p><p>My best-selling recruitment book is full of useful advice, and for just £199, I can post a job on the best UK job boards.</p></span>

‍

How Much do Employer Career Pages Cost? Time vs. Money

The price of an employer career page varies based on your chosen solution, the complexity of the site, how much time you’re willing to invest, and (whilst I hate to say it) how much providers think they can get away with charging:

• High-end custom solutions: Sold by large recruitment marketing agencies and applicant tracking system providers, these can include extensive consultations, custom design work, and integration with existing systems. The cost for such services can start from around £50,000, making them more suitable for large companies with significant recruitment needs and budgets (hence Nike and Sainsbury’s using them). I typically don’t like applicant tracking systems bundled with employer career pages because it is more challenging to cancel a contract if either component fails to meet expectations.
• Low-/mid-range solutions: These may include more templated designs but with some degree of customisation. They start from £100 per month and fit smaller companies or budgets, but are still expensive if you aren’t getting any applicants.
• WordPress and other templates: Whilst attractive due to their lower initial cost, they often come with significant drawbacks: poor SEO generates low levels of jobseeker traffic; and poor usability reduces applications.
• DIY and in-house development: Some companies might opt to develop their employer career pages in-house, especially if they have the required technical expertise. Generally, I find the outcome sub-optimal and ultimately more expensive because it is easy to underestimate the work required.

Regardless of the option you create, expect there to be downtime and technical issues. For this reason, I regularly “ping” career sites with VisualPing.io to ensure they are operational.

Once created, it is necessary to continue investing time and money in the following:

• Search engine optimization (SEO): This may help a career page rank well in search engines, but results cannot be guaranteed, and search engines continually update their algorithms.
• Creation of “expert” content: To rank well in search engines you need good content demonstrating you are a “topical authority”. Consequently, you’ll need to continually create lots of relevant company information, employee testimonials, images and videos showcasing the workplace.

‍

Do Employers Have any Guarantees when Using Employer Career Pages?

There are no guarantees when using employer career pages. Various factors can impact their effectiveness, and specific challenges remain even with the best design and intentions.

I’ve often seen employers spend a fortune following “best practice” yet still get zero applications.

Consequently, be very careful not to be mis-sold. Software suppliers who develop career pages may overpromise on their capabilities, be too optimistic or desperate to make a sale.

‍

How to Set Up an Employer Career Page

Think of your career page as a shop that sells jobs. It’s your responsibility to make your jobs visible and easy to “purchase”. When designing an employer career page, there are a few content issues to consider:

• Correct order of information: Information should be organised in the proper hierarchy, allowing jobseekers to search for relevant jobs first – if jobseekers don’t see job vacancies of interest, they won’t waste further time.
• Formatting of content: Our research found jobseekers quickly scroll down a career page before deciding whether to invest their time further. Therefore, information must be easy to scan: use clear headings and bold text to pick out keywords; reduce the visual density of copy using bullet points and short sentences; remove irrelevant and uninteresting content.
• Avoid jargon and buzzwords: A common complaint among jobseekers is “corporate speak” and jargon which is inauthentic or incomprehensible. It is much better to use clear and natural language to increase comprehension and make content more relatable and trustworthy.
• Provide case studies of actual employees: It is more authentic, and jobseekers secretly want to become ambassadors themselves.
• Authentic photos: A picture paints a thousand words, and photos of the working environment are often the most crucial thing jobseekers want to see. The best are often reportage shots of employees doing their daily jobs. Avoid stock photos and contrived images of managers sitting around a table, shaking hands purposefully, gazing moodily or laughing madly!

There are also technical issues to be aware of:

• Mobile compatible: Because jobseekers are likely to use their mobile phones, ensure that your employer career page is mobile responsive. Google also ranks mobile responsive sites higher.‍
• Never require an applicant to register: You will immediately create a barrier to applying.‍
• Collect basic information only: First, capture the applicant’s name, telephone number, and email address, then direct them to a new page asking for their CV. This sequence is essential when jobseekers start an application on their mobile device but don’t have their CV available – you still have their contact details to chase up. I recommend allowing applicants to upload their CV via cloud storage such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive.
• ‍Don’t involve LinkedIn: Don’t give the option to connect with LinkedIn as this signals to LinkedIn that the person is looking for a new job and will show them more job adverts, decreasing your chances of hiring them.‍
• Avoid application forms: They significantly reduce the number of applications, which might already be low. If you must use them, ask important questions first and hide upcoming questions to make them less daunting.‍
• Modern HTML and CSS: Use HTML5 compliant forms so that when a user enters their details on their mobile device, the keyboard adapts to the requested information type. For example, when entering a telephone number, the keyboard only shows numbers; when entering an email address, the keyboard shows the @ symbol.‍
• Automatically follow up with an applicant: Automated communication keeps applicants engaged and informed, so they feel valued, and your brand is held in higher regard.

Carry out search engine optimisation (SEO) on your employer career page. Your career page must rank well in search engines, otherwise it will get few visitors. Aside from the points I’ve previously mentioned about topical authority and valuable expert content, here are some SEO tips for career pages:

• Host the employer career page on a unique domain: If your business is acme.com, host the career page on acmejobs.com. A unique domain name causes fewer DNS issues (quite geeky, but your IT team will thank you), and if you make an SEO blunder on your career page, it has less chance of affecting your organisation’s main site. (The two sites can have links with each other.) Commercially, it also makes sense to separate consumer/marketing content from employer branded content.
• Use Google “Job Posting” structured content: Google has created its own jobs search engine, Google for Jobs. To include your job adverts, you must make them visible to Google in a specific format. Information about the latest version is available online.

‍

Four Common Reasons Employer Career Pages Fail

I’ve held a lot of focus groups and usability studies to understand why jobseekers rarely visit and apply for jobs on employer career pages. Here are four common reasons, in no particular order:

‍

1. Jobseekers struggle to find employer career pages

This is because: 

• Job sites rank higher: Jobseekers use search engines to find jobs, and job sites are often ranked higher than career pages. (Thankfully, Google for Jobs delivers some organic traffic, but career pages still need good SEO techniques.)
• Company websites hide navigation to the employer career page: Many employers place a “We’re hiring” link in the footer of their website, but jobseekers rarely scroll down to the bottom. (Interestingly, the footer usually contains an “Anti-modern slavery” link, creating an association between employment and slavery!) I also work with a few membership organisations that want new members so include “Join Us” links that are confusingly similar to career pages links, so ensure the language is unambiguous.

‍

2.  Employer career pages are used as an extra, unnecessary step in the application process

Some employers try redirecting jobseekers from a job site to their employer career page. Redirecting jobseekers is a terrible idea; studies I’ve conducted show 92% of applicants never apply if you redirect them from a job site to a career page!

Jobseekers hate being redirected for these reasons:

• Redirection is unexpected and abnormal: Experience has taught jobseekers that once they press an “Apply” button on a job site, they’ve finished their application. If a jobseeker presses “Apply” but is redirected to a career page, they feel confused because something unexpected happened and anxious because they’ve lost “channel momentum”. This confusion alone is enough to cause most jobseekers to leave a career page and not apply.
• They become “lost”: When jobseekers arrive at a generic careers page, there could be lots of information about a company or a list of all the job vacancies the business has. While they were motivated to apply, they now face a lot of irrelevant information and must search for the job advert again on a site they’re unfamiliar with.
• Continuity errors: Jobseekers might be redirected to an advert on a career page that uses a job title different from that on the job site. I once worked with a royal household that advertised on a job site for an “Accounts Assistant”, but on the career page used an internal job title of “Assistant to the Privy Purse Keeper”; jargon that few jobseekers understood.
• They’ve had a bad experience: Jobseekers often do a transderivational search, reviewing past experiences to validate their actions. When they remember the poor experiences on other employer career pages – the amount of effort they had to go through and then never heard back from the employers – it indirectly reflects badly on yours. Just like an echo-chamber their opinion is reinforced, and the simplest thing for them is to press the “back” button and return to the original job site.

Some hiring managers know that they’re losing a lot of applicants and try to justify it in several ways, such as:

• “I want to capture an application on our employer career page to avoid competition from recruitment agencies and other employers.” Jobseekers will continue applying for jobs elsewhere, so competition is inevitable. The best strategy is to make job offers quicker than rival organisations.
• “I want the applicant to self-screen by reading information about the organisation before applying.” However, the jobseeker was already motivated to apply for the job. Faced with information they consider irrelevant until an interview, they’re unlikely to bother reading it and instead return to a job site.
• “I want applicants to upload their data via the employer career page because it goes straight into an applicant tracking system.” So essentially, the applicant has to put in a lot of effort so the hiring manager doesn’t! Instead, get an applicant tracking system that makes it easy to upload a CV, most have this basic functionality and it can be automated.
• “I want applicants to make an effort to show they’re keen for our job.” This attitude is very biased and makes a generalised assumption. Applicants using career pages are sometimes the most desperate, not the most motivated. It is nearly impossible to conclude every applicant is of higher quality compared to those who came from other sources.
• “I want applicants to complete an equal opportunities form.” To make informed decisions about equal opportunities, you need adequate quality data. However, very few applicants will complete this information, and some will make it up, so the quantity and quality of data are lacking. Could the priority instead be getting applications so that you have the option of correcting inequality in employment?
• “I want applicants to tick a box that they haven’t lied on their application.” If applicants are prepared to lie on their applications, they’re probably happy to tick a box! When you find out they have lied, you’re unlikely to have much recourse despite the fact they ticked a box.

Notice all the statements above start with “I want...” What about what a great applicant wants?

Interestingly, some job sites have become so tired of being blamed for this problem (which is almost entirely the employers’ fault) that they first capture jobseekers’ applications on the job site and only then redirect them to career pages. In this way, a job site can prove that it generated applicants, even if it didn’t convert through the employer career page.

3. Jobseekers face technical obstacles to applying for jobs

Some problems most jobseekers face include:

• They see an expired closing date: Job adverts with expired closing dates give an unprofessional impression, another reason closing dates should be avoided. I recently worked with an employer who constantly recruited for the same jobs but forgot to update the closing date, which was at that point one year out of date! No wonder they weren’t getting any applications – they looked incompetent.
• They don’t like registering: Many jobseekers think registering will take too long so don’t continue.
• They don’t want a lengthy application process: Jobseekers just want to enter their contact details and possibly upload their CV to finish their application. One jobseeker in a focus group summarised this problem beautifully: “It should be as easy to apply for a job as it is to buy something off Amazon. Instead, it is often easier to apply for a passport than a job.”
• They don’t like application forms: Most applicants baulk at regurgitating information when they’ve already spent considerable time preparing their CVs. They consider the hiring manager to be lazy.
• They don’t like early requests for references: Some application forms ask for employment references, but jobseekers become concerned their current employer will be contacted.
• They want to use their mobile devices but cannot: Most employer career pages I’ve researched aren’t mobile responsive, creating terrible usability issues.
• They don’t like needless barriers: 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.

‍

4. Information about the company is too prominent

Employers often place company information at the top of an employer career page, creating a barrier to jobseekers who first want to find jobs! Our usability studies were unequivocal: jobseekers immediately want to see jobs at the top of a page. Consequently, while company information is interesting, it must be after job vacancies.

Compounding this, employers typically use jargon and self-aggrandising statements that jobseekers rarely believe (not every employer can be the “best”). Or the content is so dull that, as one jobseeker summarised, “There’s nothing here to differentiate them from any other employer. I don’t trust them; I’m going elsewhere!”

Despite how much you love your company, most candidates will only properly review information on a career page once they’ve secured an interview to prepare themselves for inevitable questions such as, “What do you know about our company?”

‍

Finally

Employer career pages don’t have to perform so poorly. I know I’ve been critical of career pages so far, but this is to make the point that they deserve their bad reputation.

But don’t let that stop you trying to improve results. I worked with a business that followed my recommendations and placed an advert on their career page for geothermal engineers in the hope of finding one. A year later, they had employed 10!

As another example, the HR director of Compass Group, which employs over 40,000 staff, recently described their old employer career page as “dodgy” and “bumpy”. By reducing the application process to five minutes, their application rate increased by 46% (Compton-Harris, 2023, Panel discussion at Indeed Futureworks 22 June 2023, London). This significant increase in performance means jobs are more likely to be filled, and they need to spend less on other Applicant Attraction Channels.

‍

Additional Resources

• Recruiting Book: The Secrets of Great Recruitment - How to Recruitment Great Employees.
• Downloadable PDF guide; Why Most Employer Career Pages Fail (& How to Make Sure Yours Doesn’t).
• Article; Career Pages; Why Employers May Need One and How to Avoid Common Mistakes.
• Article; Advantages & Disadvantages of Using Employer Career Pages for Recruiting Staff.