Your careers page is often the most visited and the least maintained

In many Quebec businesses, the careers page ranks among the three most visited pages on the site. It is also the one nobody has been assigned, which explains the expired postings and the forms that lead nowhere.

The imbalance comes from governance. The product page belongs to marketing, the careers page belongs to human resources who have no access to the site, or to marketing who do not have the current openings. It lives between two teams, updated when someone remembers.

The cost is direct and it shows in time to hire. A candidate who applies and never receives an acknowledgement applies elsewhere. A posting displayed for eight months signals a business that cannot recruit, which your competitors read as clearly as your candidates do.

There is also a commercial cost few businesses anticipate. A buyer evaluating a supplier looks at whether it is stable. An empty careers page in a tight sector raises a question about your capacity to deliver, and nobody will ask it out loud.

The traffic comes from somewhere other than your campaigns, which is why it stays under the radar. It comes from searches on your company name plus the word jobs, from recruitment platforms pointing back to you, and from word of mouth among current employees.

The minimum that changes everything

One named person, with the access to publish and remove a posting without going through a vendor. That is the only structural element, everything else follows from it.

A maintained careers page also serves your sales, which justifies taking it out of the human resources budget. It shows a business that is hiring, therefore one with projects ahead, which a buyer reads as a sign of solidity.

Then three simple things: a date on every posting, an automatic confirmation on every application, and filled positions removed the same day. None requires budget, all require assigned responsibility.

The design framework, with its three readers, is set out in designing for three readers.