7 benefits of a careers site that converts
Seven things a careers site that turns visitors into applications gives a frontline employer, from speed on a phone to knowing which spend works.
A careers site that converts turns more of the people who land on it into finished applications, and it tells you which of those people came from where. For a large frontline employer, that means less of your budget spent on visitors who leave, and a clear view of which channels actually bring the people you hire.
That is a narrower definition than most careers site pitches use, and it is deliberate. A careers site can look beautiful, carry a brand film and win awards, and still lose most of its visitors between the job page and the end of the application. Conversion is the measure that tells you whether it is doing its job. Here are the seven things we think a site built around that measure gives you.
1. It works where your candidates are, which is on a phone
Most frontline candidates arrive on a phone, often between shifts at another job, from a listing on Google or a job board. A site built for a desktop and tested on office wifi fails them before they have read a word. A site that converts is built to open quickly on a mid-range phone over a patchy connection, and it is structured so search engines can index every role properly. That second part matters more than people expect, because a role that cannot be found never gets the chance to convert anyone.
2. People find the right role instead of scrolling for it
A list of vacancies asks the candidate to do the work. Someone who wants evening shifts near home should not have to open twenty listings to find out which ones qualify. A good site lets people find roles by what they care about: location, hours, the kind of work, whether it suits a student. With the Candidate Agent on the front door, they can simply ask, in their own words, and see the nearby roles that fit. The agent also answers questions about shifts, locations and interviews from your own approved content, at the hours frontline candidates are actually looking, and hands to a person when judgment is needed.
3. The application gets finished
This is where most careers sites lose most of their visitors. The apply button leads to the ATS’s own form, with a login, a CV upload and the same questions for every role. A site that converts keeps the candidate in one place and replaces the form with conversational apply, an application that adapts to the role and the region, asks only what that job needs, and finishes in minutes. The completed application is posted into your ATS with every answer in its field.
4. Nobody is excluded by the design
Accessibility is not a separate project; it is part of conversion. If some candidates cannot read the contrast, navigate by keyboard or use a screen reader, you have narrowed who can apply without meaning to. Every inploi careers site is built to WCAG 2.1 AA, and the application is held to the same standard, because a site someone can read but cannot apply through has not met it. The accessibility widget adds controls in the candidate’s hands, and it works on careers sites we did not build as well as ours.
5. One site for every brand, location and language
Large frontline employers rarely hire under one name. A group might run several restaurant brands, a leisure business several sites with different roles, a care provider several regions. A site that converts can carry every brand, location and language you hire in, each with its own pages, job search and application, without asking the central team to maintain a dozen separate sites.
6. You know which spend is working
The ATS tells you who applied. It does not tell you where they came from, what it cost, or where the people who did not apply gave up. A careers site sits between the channels and the ATS, so it can see all of that. With analytics and attribution, every application and every hire is traced back to its source, and budget can move towards the channels that deliver hires and away from the ones that only deliver clicks.
Côte is the clearest example we have. After rebuilding its careers site and application with inploi, and moving its hiring spend onto job distribution, it cut its cost per hire by 71%, and it maintained hiring volumes despite a 78% reduction in its monthly recruitment marketing budget. The Côte story sets out how.
7. Your team can change it, and your ATS stays
A careers site that needs a ticket to engineering every time a campaign changes will fall behind the business. In Studio, your own team edits pages, copy and imagery and publishes campaign pages under your rules and sign-off, with templates that keep everything on brand.
Just as important is what does not change. The careers site pulls live jobs from your ATS and pushes completed applications back, in both directions, across 100+ integrations, so your ATS stays the system of record and nobody has to learn a second one.
What this does not do
It is worth being clear about the limits, because careers sites are often sold as doing everything. A careers site does not screen candidates for you. On inploi, scoring applications is the job of the Hiring Agent, which reads every application, explains its score in plain sentences and leaves every yes and no to your team; structured screening is in development with design partners. The careers site’s job is to get the right people to a finished application and tell you where they came from.
What to do next
If you already have a careers site, look at four numbers: the share of visitors who start an application, the share who finish, how long it takes, and which sources bring the people you hire. If you cannot get those numbers easily, that is the first gap. If your provider is being retired or absorbed into an ATS vendor, we have written about what to do when your careers site provider is retired.
You can see what an inploi careers site includes on the careers sites page, and read more of our thinking under careers sites.
