What should a careers page include?

The six questions to answer

Write the page around what the candidate is trying to find out, not around what you would like to say.

1. What is it actually like here? Not the values page — the day. How work arrives, what a good week looks like and what a bad one looks like. Candidates trust specifics and quietly discount adjectives, so "we are passionate about quality" does nothing and "most people are in by half eight and the phones start at nine" does a great deal.

2. What is the culture, honestly? How decisions get made, how mistakes are handled, whether people go home on time. Include what you are not good at yet. The employers who publish the unflattering part get believed about the rest, and the ones who publish only the flattering part get believed about none of it.

3. What happens if I apply? Number of stages, who they meet, what gets asked, how long it takes and when they will hear back. Not knowing is one of the cheapest reasons in hiring for a strong candidate to stop halfway through a process.

4. Where did this company come from? The backstory. Who started it and why, what it looked like at six people, what it is trying to become. People join a direction, not a vacancy.

5. Are there people like me here? Real employees, named, in their own words. Not stock photography. A candidate is trying to picture themselves in the room and cannot do it from a photograph of a handshake.

6. What is it worth, and what comes next? Pay, progression, who they would report to, and what the first six months look like. If you will not publish a salary band, say what determines it — silence reads as bad news.

The structural half nobody thinks about

A careers page can answer all six perfectly and still be invisible.

The common pattern is a page that loads its vacancies from a recruitment system on somebody else's domain. A person sees the jobs. A search engine sees an empty page. An AI assistant, asked who is hiring or what a company is like to work for, has nothing it can quote.

So each vacancy needs to be a real page at its own address with JobPosting structured data on it, your company details need to be consistent everywhere they appear, and the page needs a sitemap that gets submitted. This is unglamorous and it is the difference between a careers page that attracts candidates and one that only serves the candidates you sent there yourself.

What to leave out

Stock imagery, an unattributed "our people are our greatest asset", a benefits list that is legally required anyway, and an application form that asks for twenty fields before it will accept a CV.

Also leave out any vacancy that is no longer open. Publishing an expired role is worse than publishing nothing: it wastes the one candidate who was right for it and tells search engines your page is stale.

Why the honest version outperforms the polished one

The CIPD's Resourcing and talent planning report 2024 found 41% of organisations had a new recruit resign within their first 12 weeks. A careers page written as a recruitment advert contributes to that, because it sells a version of the job the first fortnight then contradicts.

A careers page written honestly does two useful things at once: it attracts the people who want what you actually are, and it filters out the ones who would have left in March. Both of those are cheaper than the alternative.

If you want to see the six questions answered in practice rather than described, there are five worked examples on our career sites page — a care group, a groundworks contractor, an accountancy firm, a software business and a general office employer, each built around a different one of these problems.