Careers Presence Before Anybody Applies

TL;DR

• The core decision: whether you're solving an information problem or a persuasion problem, because the first is cheaper and usually the real one.
• When doing nothing is right: when suitable people apply and the ones who join say the job matched the description.
• What has to be true: somebody outside can work out what the job involves and what the place is like.
• How the options split: by whether the content answers a candidate's questions or states the organisation's ambitions.
• Decision rule: if a suitable person can't tell whether they'd want the job, that's not a branding gap.
• Outcome to expect: fewer applications from people who'd hate it, more from people who'd be good.

The Careers Page Nobody Could Use

Somebody suitable finds your role. They're currently employed, mildly curious, and deciding in about ninety seconds whether to read further.

They go looking for what the job actually involves and find a list of responsibilities written in the passive voice. They go looking for what the team is like and find a values statement. They go looking for whether the arrangement would work around their situation and find nothing. They go looking for what people who work there say, and end up on a site you don't control, reading reviews of variable age and obvious axe-grinding.

They don't apply. Not because they've decided against you, but because they can't assemble enough information to decide for you, and applying has a cost.

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This is the shape of most employer branding problems, and it's why so much money gets spent in the wrong place. The usual response is a campaign: photography, a video, a narrative about what makes the organisation distinctive. That work is sometimes worthwhile and it's answering a question the candidate didn't ask.

What they wanted to know was what the work is, who they'd be working with, and whether the arrangement fits their life. Those are information problems. They're cheaper to fix than a campaign, they don't require a budget, and they have the property that a campaign doesn't: they help somebody decide accurately rather than making them feel positive.

So the reframe worth holding is that your careers presence is an information problem before it's a persuasion problem. Fix the information and a surprising amount of the persuasion takes care of itself, because the people who read it and still want the job are exactly the people you wanted.

When You Genuinely Do Not Need to Act Yet

Your current setup is genuinely fine. Suitable people apply, and the ones who join say the job matched what they were told. That second part is the real test and it's rarely checked. If both hold, you have a working careers presence regardless of how it looks.

Friction is starting to show. Applications are plentiful and mostly unsuitable, or candidates arrive at interview with a wrong idea of the role, or somebody joined and was surprised by something basic. Those are information failures and they're fixable in an afternoon.

It has become a real cost. Roles are staying open, the people you want aren't applying, or new hires are leaving early because the job wasn't what they expected. At that point the gap between what you communicate and what's true is doing measurable damage.

The edge case that forces it. You're hiring in a market where candidates have many options and compare employers directly, or you're competing for a skill set where reputation circulates, or you're unknown in a market you need to hire from. All three raise the stakes on information specifically, because an unknown organisation with a vague description is easy to skip.

Five Questions This Reader Asks at 11pm

What is employer branding, in practical terms? Everything a potential candidate can find out about working for you before they apply, whether or not you produced it. That includes your careers pages and job adverts, and it also includes review sites you don't control and whatever your employees tell people privately. You author some of it and you own none of it.

Is it worth it for a smaller organisation? The campaign version, usually not. The information version, yes, and more than for a large one. A well-known organisation benefits from people already having a rough idea of what it's like. An unknown one starts from nothing, which means a candidate's entire impression comes from what you wrote, making the specificity of that writing unusually consequential.

What should a careers page actually contain? Enough for somebody to work out whether they'd want to work there. What the teams do in concrete terms, what the working arrangements actually are, what the hiring process involves and how long it takes, and something honest about the current state of things. Most careers pages contain none of that and quite a lot about values.

Should we respond to reviews we don't control? Sometimes, and rarely in the way organisations want to. Defensive responses read badly to everybody and confirm the complaint to anybody inclined to believe it. A response that acknowledges something specific and says what changed reads well. The more useful work is usually addressing whatever generated the review, because that's the thing candidates are actually reading about.

How do we know if any of this is working? Two signals worth more than anything else. Whether applications are from people who could do the job, and whether new hires say the role matched what they were told. The second is the one nobody measures and it's the clearest indicator of whether your careers presence is accurate rather than merely appealing.

What a Candidate Is Trying to Find Out

Candidates have a short list of questions, they're remarkably consistent, and most careers content answers none of them.

The fourth row produces losses nobody counts. When working arrangements aren't stated, candidates assume the most restrictive version, because that's the safer assumption. People who'd need some flexibility and would have been excellent simply don't apply, and there's no evidence anywhere that they considered it.

The fifth row is the cheapest thing on this list to fix and it's almost never done. Publishing what the process involves and roughly how long it takes costs a paragraph, removes a meaningful barrier for people who are currently employed and have to plan around it, and signals that you've thought about the candidate's side at all.

The sixth row is worth thinking about because the vacuum fills with something worse. In the absence of a reason, candidates assume the least flattering explanation for why a role is open. Saying it's a new role, or a replacement for somebody who was promoted, or growth in a specific area, removes an entirely unnecessary worry.

Five Diagnostic Questions You Can Self-Assess Against

Can a stranger tell what the job involves? Give a job advert to somebody outside the organisation and ask them to describe the role back to you. The gap between what they say and what the job is measures exactly what your writing is achieving.

Do new hires say it matched? Ask people at a few weeks whether anything surprised them. The surprises are specific, they repeat, and each one is a thing your careers presence failed to communicate.

What does somebody find when they search for you? Do the search yourself, in a private window. Whatever's on the first page is your employer brand, whether or not you made any of it, and most organisations have never looked.

Search the role as well as the organisation, because that is what candidates actually type.

Are your working arrangements stated anywhere? Not implied. Stated. This is the single most common unanswered question and the one where candidates default to the pessimistic assumption.

Is the process described? How many stages, what happens at each, roughly how long. If not, every candidate is guessing, and people who are currently employed guess conservatively.

Six Ways Organisations Present Themselves to Candidates, Reviewed

A careers page listing roles and nothing else

The minimum: open positions, an apply button. It earns its place because it does the mechanical job, and for organisations whose roles fill from applications it may be sufficient.

Where it falls short is for anybody who doesn't already know you. A list of roles assumes the reader has decided they're interested in the organisation and only needs to find a position, which is true for well-known employers and false for everybody else. Somebody encountering you for the first time has no way to form a view.

Add the information layer before anything else: what the teams do, what the arrangements are, what the process involves. It's an afternoon of writing and it does more than a campaign.

There is a structural point worth getting right at the same time. A roles list that sits behind two clicks from your main site, on a subdomain with a different design, tells a candidate something before they read a word. Whether the careers section feels like part of the organisation or like a bolted-on system is noticed immediately, and it is frequently a consequence of how an applicant tracking system was configured rather than any decision anybody made.

A produced brand campaign

Photography, video, a narrative about what makes the place distinctive. It earns its place where the organisation is genuinely unknown to a population it needs to reach, and where there's something true and specific to say.

Where it falls short is that production quality is not information. A polished video about a culture of innovation tells a candidate nothing they can use to decide, and it's expensive. It also sets an expectation that the rest of the experience has to meet, and a strong campaign followed by a slow, silent hiring process is worse than neither.

If you do this, make it specific enough to be falsifiable. Anything that could be said by any organisation in your sector is decoration rather than communication.

The test worth applying before signing anything off is to imagine a direct competitor publishing the identical piece. If it would work for them without alteration, it says nothing about you, and it will be read that way. Most produced campaign material fails this test comfortably, which is why it so often produces warmth and no applications.

Employee stories and day-in-the-life content

People describing their actual work. It earns its place because it's the closest most candidates get to knowing what the job is really like, and because specificity is inherent to the format: a real person describing a real week produces detail that no corporate copy does.

Where it falls short is selection and staleness. The people who volunteer are the happiest, which is fine and slightly obvious to readers. Content also ages badly, and a story from somebody who has since left is worse than nothing if a candidate notices.

Keep them current, include at least one person whose account isn't uniformly positive, and let them describe the difficult parts. Credibility comes from the unflattering detail.

Interviewing for these is a skill worth applying rather than sending a list of questions. Asking somebody what they do on a Tuesday, or what they found hardest in their first month, produces usable specifics. Asking what they love about working here produces a sentence that could have come from anywhere, which is what most of this content consists of and why so little of it is read.

An unusually specific job advert

A role description that says exactly what the work involves, including the parts that are dull. It earns its place as the highest-return item in this entire article, because it's free, it's the thing candidates actually read, and specificity does two jobs at once: it attracts people who want that work and repels people who'd be unhappy.

Where it falls short is nerve. Specific adverts describe real trade-offs, and there's a persistent worry that naming the unglamorous parts will deter people. It does deter people, which is the point, and the ones deterred are the ones who'd have left within a year.

Write what an ordinary week looks like. This is the cheapest, most effective thing available and it's the one most organisations skip in favour of adjectives.

It is also the piece that most benefits from being written by the hiring manager rather than edited into house style afterwards. A description in somebody's own words, including the slightly awkward phrasing, reads as a real person describing a real job. The same content smoothed into corporate voice loses precisely the quality that made it worth reading.

Presence on review sites you do not control

What former and current employees say publicly. It earns attention because candidates read it, frequently before anything you wrote, and it carries credibility precisely because you didn't produce it.

Where it falls short as a thing to manage is that you mostly can't. Responses help at the margin when they're specific and non-defensive. Soliciting positive reviews is visible to readers and damages the thing you were trying to improve. The content also skews toward people with strong feelings in either direction.

Read it for information rather than managing it for impression. The recurring specific complaints are usually true and usually fixable, and fixing them changes what gets written next.

Pay particular attention to complaints about the hiring process itself, because those come from people who experienced only that and have no other axe to grind. A review describing a slow process or an interview that went nowhere is unusually reliable evidence, and it is about the one part of the organisation a candidate will definitely encounter.

Whatever employees say privately

The conversations candidates have with people who work for you, which is the most trusted source available to them and completely outside your control. It earns its place at the top of the credibility hierarchy, which is why it matters more than everything else here combined.

Where it falls short as a lever is that it can't be managed, only earned. Employees describe their actual experience, and anybody attempting to script that produces something transparently hollow.

The only intervention available is making the experience worth describing well. That isn't a careers presence project. It's worth stating plainly because it's where the money would be best spent and it never appears in a branding budget.

There is one adjacent thing you can do, which is to make sure employees know what is open. People are asked about their employer constantly and cannot pass anything on if they have no idea you are hiring. That costs nothing and turns a large number of private conversations into something useful, without asking anybody to say anything they do not mean.

The Decision Table

The last row is the one worth acting on before anything else if it describes you. A good careers presence increases the number of people who apply and raises what they expect, so a slow or silent process disappoints more people more sharply than it did before. Spending on attraction while the process is poor makes the problem larger rather than smaller.

The second row is the most common misdiagnosis. Plenty of unsuitable applications feels like an attraction problem and is almost always a description problem: a generic advert invites everybody who's vaguely interested to try their luck, because there's nothing in it that would tell them not to.

It is worth checking before concluding anything, because the fix is different in each case. Read a sample of the unsuitable applications and ask whether these people could reasonably have known they were not suitable from what you published. If they could not, the advert is the problem. If they could and applied anyway, that is a different situation and largely outside your control.

The Gap Between the Message and the Process

Everything above is about what candidates learn before applying. What happens next determines whether any of it was worth doing.

A careers presence makes a promise, implicitly. It says this is what we're like, and a candidate who applies is testing that claim against the first real evidence they get, which is your hiring process. If the content says you value people's time and the process leaves them waiting three weeks in silence, the content has been contradicted by something more credible than itself.

This matters more than it sounds, because the contradiction is worse than the absence. Somebody who applies to an organisation with no particular presence and experiences a slow process concludes the process is slow. Somebody who applies after reading about how much you value candidates concludes you say things you don't mean, which generalises to everything else you've said.

Three specific mismatches recur.

Warmth in the content, silence in the process. The most common by a distance. Content emphasising people and care, followed by an application that receives an automated acknowledgement and nothing for a fortnight.

Speed implied, slowness delivered. Language about moving fast and being decisive, followed by a process with four stages and a two-week gap between each. Candidates notice this one particularly because it's a direct claim about behaviour.

Flexibility described, rigidity encountered. Content about accommodating different working patterns, followed by interview scheduling that offers three slots in a single working day. This one is noticed by exactly the candidates the flexibility was meant to attract.

The useful discipline is to read your careers content as a set of claims and then check each one against what a candidate actually experiences. It's an uncomfortable exercise and it locates the gap quickly.

The honest version of the advice is that where the two conflict, fix the process rather than softening the content. Content is easier to change and the process is what people believe, because it's what happened to them rather than what somebody wrote.

There is a narrow exception worth naming. Sometimes the content describes an ambition the organisation genuinely holds and has not yet reached, and softening it feels like giving up on the ambition. The workable version is to say so: describing something as what you are working toward, rather than as what you are, is both more accurate and more credible than either the claim or its removal. Candidates are considerably more forgiving of an honest work in progress than of a promise that turns out to be decoration.

Where Careers Presence Goes Wrong

The first row is the failure that defines this whole area. Values statements are written for internal audiences and published for external ones, and they're interchangeable between organisations, which means a candidate reading yours learns nothing that distinguishes you from anybody else. The space they occupy could hold a description of what somebody actually does.

The underlying reason is usually ownership rather than intent. Careers content tends to be written or approved by people whose job is how the organisation presents itself, and the specifics about what a role involves sit with hiring managers who were never asked. Moving the job detail to the person who knows it, and leaving the presentation layer to do the framing, fixes most of this without anybody losing an argument.

The fourth row is a credibility problem people underestimate. Readers know which employees volunteer for these pieces. A set of uniformly positive accounts reads as curated, which causes people to discount all of it including the true parts. One account that mentions something genuinely difficult makes the rest believable.

What to Put in Writing

The fifth row is the feedback loop almost nobody builds, and it's the most reliable source of information about this available to you. New hires know exactly where your careers presence misled them, they remember it clearly for a few weeks, and they'll tell you if asked directly. Each surprise is a specific thing to fix.

Ask it as an open question rather than offering a list, because a list gets confirmed and an open question gets answered. What surprised you produces things nobody would have thought to ask about, which is exactly the category you are looking for. Keep a running note, because the same two or three items recur and the repetition is what tells you which gaps are worth closing first.

Questions to Ask Before You Commit

On the job. Can a stranger describe the work back to you? A bad answer is roughly.

On arrangements. Are they stated or implied? A bad answer is that it's discussed at interview.

On the process. Is it published? A bad answer is that it varies.

On stories. Does anybody mention something difficult? A bad answer is that they're all positive.

On claims. What does your content promise? A bad answer is nothing specific.

On reality. Does the process match the promise? A bad answer is mostly.

On ownership. Who wrote the job detail? A bad answer is the marketing team.

What Getting This Wrong Costs

The first cost is the suitable person who never applied. They read a generic description, couldn't tell whether the work would suit them, and moved on. There's no record of this anywhere: they don't appear in your pipeline and they never told you they looked. It's the largest cost in this area and it's completely invisible, which is why budget goes to campaigns rather than to specificity.

The second cost is the applications you did get and didn't want. A vague advert invites speculative applications, which consumes review time and makes the pool look weaker than the market actually is. Organisations in this position frequently conclude that suitable people aren't available, when what's happened is that the description attracted the wrong population and repelled nobody.

The third cost is the early departure. Somebody joins with an inaccurate picture of the role, discovers the reality in their first month, and leaves within the year. That gets recorded as a hiring mistake, and the cause was frequently an advert that described an aspirational version of the job. Asking new hires what surprised them is the cheapest possible detection for this and it takes minutes.

The fourth cost is reputational and compounds quietly. Somebody who leaves early because the job was misdescribed tells people why, and the account is credible precisely because they took the job. In a small market that single explanation reaches more relevant people than any campaign does, and it cannot be corrected by publishing something better afterwards.

So before commissioning anything, do the two free exercises. Give a job advert to somebody outside the organisation and ask them what the job is. And ask three recent hires what surprised them. Between them, those tell you what your careers presence is actually communicating, which is usually different from what you intended and always more useful than a brand exercise.

When You Are Ready to Go Further

None of this needs a budget. It needs a description of what an ordinary week involves, working arrangements stated plainly, the hiring process published with rough timings, and a sentence in each advert saying why the role is open.

Then read your existing content as a set of claims and check each against what a candidate experiences. Where they conflict, the process is the thing to change, because that's the version people believe. This exercise is uncomfortable and quick, and it locates the specific contradictions rather than leaving a vague sense that something is off.

After that, build the loop. Ask every new hire, at a few weeks, what surprised them about the role or the organisation. Write the answers down. The same two or three things will recur, and each one is a precise gap between what you communicated and what's true, which is the only genuinely reliable measurement available in this area.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Candidates are trying to decide, not to be impressed. Give them enough to decide with.

An ordinary week, stated plainly, beats anything a budget can buy.