Do we need a careers page if we already advertise on job boards?

The two do different jobs

A job board is distribution. It puts your role in front of people who are looking, and it is very good at that — it is why we run multi-board advertising as a product.

What a board cannot do is tell a candidate what you are like. Every listing on a board looks broadly the same by design, because the board's job is comparison, not persuasion. So the candidate reads your advert, forms no particular impression of the company, and does what almost everybody does next: searches your company name.

That search is the moment a careers page exists for. It is the only point in the process where the candidate is actively looking for reasons to say yes and you have nothing standing between you.

What happens when there is nothing there

They find a homepage written for customers, a Companies House record and whatever anyone else has said about working for you. None of it was written for someone deciding whether to hand you the next few years of their working life.

That is not a neutral outcome. The CIPD's 2024 survey found 64% of UK organisations that tried to fill a vacancy had difficulty attracting candidates and 69% reported increased competition for well-qualified talent. In a market like that, the candidate has other options open in other tabs, and one of those employers has answered the questions you left unanswered.

The economics are the real argument

An advert is rented. It works for the four weeks it runs and then the listing comes down, taking with it every person who read it, liked the look of you and was not quite ready to move.

A careers page is owned. Build it once and it works on every vacancy you post from that day on — this year's hires and the ones three years from now. That is why the sums work out differently from how they first look: you are not comparing the page against one advert, you are amortising it across every role you will ever run.

It also captures the people an advert cannot. Somebody who is six months from moving will not apply to a vacancy, but they will join a talent pool or an alert list if you give them one. An advert has nowhere to put that person. A careers page does.

When you genuinely do not need one

If you hire once every two or three years, a careers page is hard to justify and we will say so. Advertise the role properly, and spend the money on the advert.

If you hire only through personal networks and never advertise, the same applies — though it is worth noting that this usually stops working at about the point the founder stops knowing everybody.

Everywhere in between, the question is not really whether you need one. It is whether the version you already have is doing anything. A "Careers" link that goes to a job board listing page is not a careers page; it is a redirect to somebody else's website with your competitors advertising on it.

What good looks like

One page or several, on your own domain, that answers what it is like to work there, what the culture is, what the hiring process involves, where the company came from, and what each role is worth. Vacancies listed as real pages that a search engine can index in their own right, not loaded in by a widget that a crawler sees as an empty box.

That is what we build as career sites, and there are five working examples on that page you can open and click through rather than take on trust.