Career sites: what content to include, what not to forget, and what to think through carefully #

Your career site is the shop window of your employer brand. The most accurate comparison is an e-shop: the "products" are your open positions, and you want to sell them to the right candidates. Success isn't decided by technology but by content — and content rests on five things: an authentic take on why you (USP / EVP), a clear job listing (with its own filters at larger companies), capturing candidates even without a suitable position into a talent pool, a well-built job detail (variable layout, ideally including pay), and the simplest possible application form right inside the posting. And as with an e-shop, the same rule applies: the site alone won't bring anyone in — it needs marketing to get candidates there.

Before you start: why you? (USP and EVP) #

Before you even build the site, answer this: who are you and why should someone come work for you. This is called the USP (Unique Selling Proposition) — the unique thing that sets your company apart — and the EVP (Employee Value Proposition), the value you offer employees. A candidate should feel it from the content right away.

The keyword is authenticity. Don't try to please everyone — it doesn't work. Speak to the people who genuinely match your company's DNA. A well-defined USP also comes before building the site itself: first get clear on who you are, and only then express it in the content (text, photos, videos).

If you're not sure how to articulate your USP, it pays to bring in someone who does it professionally. A specialized employer-branding agency can help you pin down your USP inside the company and produce the content — including videos, photos, and copy.

Job listing — and when you actually need filters #

With the job listing, first get clear on which category of company you fall into. That tells you whether you're dealing with a simple list or full-blown filtering.

A small or mid-sized company — say a tech company with 80–100 employees and 5–7 permanently open positions — doesn't need strong filters. For a candidate, an interesting job title at first glance, combined with location, rough compensation, and the main requirements, is enough; they'll get the details once they click through. Building filters, sorting, and categories for fewer than seven positions is pointless.

A mid-sized to larger company with 20–30 open positions — especially if it's branch-based or retail, hiring across multiple locations (multi-location) — already needs to show up front which locations it's hiring in and let candidates filter. And it often wants to organize positions by its own categories as well.

Here you'll run into a feature that not every ATS supports: custom filter attributes. The idea is to create your own attributes (identifiers) for positions, which then drive filtering on the career site — so you're not stuck with the industry categories from job boards. Those try to cover every field in the world, which makes them unsuitable for an individual approach: when you want to separate "product people, marketing people, and IT people" and label them that way too. At corporations the categories go even further — not just by field, but for example whether it's a position at a store, at headquarters, or in the back office. A good solution won't stop you from creating several types of categories at once (say your own regions), so filtering isn't limited to just a specific branch.

For a longer list, also think about pagination and how the listing behaves during filtering and display.

Related features: Custom filter attributes for the career site · Custom career site

Don't forget candidates without a suitable position (talent pool) #

Some of the people who like your brand won't find their position among the open ones. Yet they'd still like to work for you — and you don't want to lose them. Some companies call this a catch-all position; in reality it's an inflow of candidates into your talent pool.

Two things go with this. First, the process: such candidates mustn't just be "saved" with nothing happening — there has to be a defined procedure for working with them actively. Second, the form placement: we recommend putting it a bit off to the side, on a separate page, so it doesn't push candidates to apply immediately before they've looked through the open positions.

In the catch-all form (which doesn't lead to a specific position), identify the candidate: ask what role they'd like to do, ideally letting them tag themselves with a category (product person, IT person…). The recruiter then isn't flying blind — even without an open position, they can pitch an interesting candidate internally to their team leads. And don't forget that here, too, you need to handle candidates' personal data properly and get their agreement to be kept in your talent pool (we cover this in a separate section on candidate data and privacy).

Related features: Custom application form · Working with the talent pool · Candidate data & privacy →

Job detail: variable layout and what to include #

When a candidate clicks a position, they land on the job detail. And here it pays to have a variable layout: a back-office posting should be marketed to a different group than an IT posting, so it should look different too.

Variable text, branch, and the assigned team leader / manager are a given. The graphics are more interesting: they can be driven by dynamic attributes that the ATS supports. Imagine a position filed under the "IT" category has a different top banner — different photos or a carousel. The important thing is that these graphics are prepared on the career-site side, not that you'd insert images into the posting in the ATS; it's wired up on the site itself based on the position's attribute. In the same way you can attach a profile of the team lead the candidate will work under, or dynamic benefits — you pick a set of benefits (one for IT, another for back office) and its visual treatment is again prepared on the site.

What we recommend today, and what was still up for debate a few years ago: state the pay. Back to the e-shop analogy — would you buy a product without knowing roughly what it costs? The counterargument "but we're choosing the candidate too, and we're willing to pay differently for each one" only holds in part: even so, you can state a pay range you can offer the candidate.

Application form: less is more #

One recommendation stands out from our data as especially important: have the application form right in the body of the posting — at the end, alongside, up front, it doesn't matter — so the candidate doesn't have to click through anywhere. Often the form only opens on the next step; but when the posting is visible and the form is right there with it, conversion demonstrably rises.

A simple rule also applies: the less you ask for, the higher the conversion. A form with 8–10 fields is nowhere near as attractive as name, email, and phone (optionally a cover letter and CV). And for most positions a CV isn't necessary today — a LinkedIn link is enough, and for some positions just a phone contact. Picture a laborer looking for work after twenty years: the first barrier is often that they don't have a CV and don't know how to make one. A company that asks only for a phone number gains a competitive edge — and the recruiter finds out the rest from prescreening anyway; you won't judge a laborer's skill from a CV regardless.

And one technical detail with a content impact: the form should be connected via the ATS API and able to send hidden source information too. The source is the career site, but how the candidate got there (Facebook, Instagram, other social networks, PPC) is marketing information you want to carry over. Google Analytics will measure that a candidate applied — but whether they reached the interview stage (i.e., proved a certain quality) you can only measure by sending the data inherited from cookies or the URL along with the application. On the same principle, the career site also connects to an employee referral program (we cover it in a separate article): a unique link with the employee's identifier in the URL is written into the ATS on application and matches the candidate with whoever referred them.

Related features: Custom application form · Application source overview · Referral program integration · API

A career site is an e-shop — it doesn't sell on its own #

Back to the opening analogy: building an e-shop doesn't mean you've started selling. Likewise a career site won't bring candidates in on its own — you need marketing to get them to the site.

The advantage of connecting the career site to your ATS is that you post a position with a single click — to your career site and to job boards at the same time. And it works the other way too: when you edit or close a position, the posting is updated or pulled down everywhere at once.

Related features: Multiposting to the career site and job boards

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