For years, career sites usually fell into one of two categories. The first was focused on employer branding, giving candidates a place to learn about a company’s culture, values, and people. If they wanted to explore job opportunities, they would then leave the site and search for roles in the company’s applicant tracking system (ATS). The challenge was that employers had little way of knowing whether the content on their career site was actually helping candidates move forward.
The second type was the ATS-based career site. Candidates could view basic company information, search for open roles, and apply directly. While this made it easier to drive applications, it often focused more on the number of applicants than on attracting the right candidates.
Today’s job seekers expect something different. As candidates have become more informed and selective in how they search for jobs with digital transformation and AI, the career site has become much more than an information page or application portal. It’s now a key part of how companies attract, engage, and convert top talent.
For many talent acquisition leaders, the question remains: who should own this asset? Corporate Marketing? IT? Or be operated by a specialized technology partner?
Let’s find out!
Why ATS Career Sites Were Built and Why They’re Showing Their Age
In the past, the goals of a career site were simple: publish jobs, capture applications, structure candidate data, and feed job inventory to job boards and aggregators.
ATS career sites were able to easily meet those goals. However, their template-driven design creates limited differentiation for a company to establish a strong employer brand. Secondly, ATS’s were never meant to drive organic traffic; therefore, they have limitations in today’s search-driven ecosystem, both on Google and in ChatGPT (SEO & GEO).
Today’s career sites need to do more. Your ATS career site should prioritize candidates’ needs over recruiter and operations needs. This means:
- Improving candidate experiences by creating a simple and engaging application journey that helps candidates find and apply to jobs more easily.
- Increasing organic visibility by optimizing your career site so your jobs and employer content rank higher in search results.
- Supporting GEO and AI discoverability by structuring your content so AI-powered search tools can easily understand and surface your jobs and employer brand.
- Driving candidate conversion by using clear calls to action to help turn interest into applications.
Although the ATS will always be essential for basic hiring operations, it is not always the best choice for an AI-ready employer brand experience.
Why “Just Put It on the Corporate Website” Creates New Problems
Moving career content to the corporate website seems like an easy way to gain control over your content. Yet, it often creates more challenges than it solves.
Challenges also come with misaligned priorities.
The Corporate Marketing team often focuses on customers, revenue, product positioning, and corporate reputation. On the other hand, Recruitment Marketing teams focus on candidates, employer brand, talent attraction and conversion. These priorities don’t always align, as TA teams’ employer brand content finds itself competing with corporate priorities.
Additionally, TA teams can struggle to get timely updates, approvals, or content published when the Corporate Marketing team is focused on corporate priorities.
What if IT owns it? Security becomes the main priority, which can slow down innovation; candidate experience becomes secondary, and experimentation becomes difficult.
Giving other teams ownership of your career site can provide your company with control over the content, yet it can also introduce operational bottlesnecks, affecting your daily operations and slowing hiring and employer brand initiatives.
Why More Employers Are Turning to Specialized Career Site Partners
For TA teams looking to prioritize candidate experience and employer branding, external, specialized partners can be a good option. These teams provide additional support and specialized knowledge to help address important initiatives that may otherwise receive less attention.
For career site partners, the focus is not simply posting jobs. Instead, the focus is on increasing engagement, driving organic traffic, lead capture, improving application completion, and optimizing conversions.
Specialized career site partners can offer several advantages, including:
- Faster Content Publishing: Publish new content without waiting on corporate web or IT teams by using self-service tools and managed support.
- Continuous Content Creation: Improve discoverability by keeping your career site fresh with role-based content, employee stories, location pages, and EVP messaging.
- Better Measurement: Optimize recruitment marketing performance by tracking more than just website traffic. Measure data like applications, qualified candidates, source attribution, and hires.
- Candidate Conversion: Increase engagement and completed applications through specialized experiences, lead capture, and application optimization.
- Advanced Candidate Engagement: Nurture candidates with CRM integrations, personalized experiences and remarketing capabilities.
A career site partner allows you to focus on talent attraction while using technology and expertise built to meet your recruitment marketing goals.
Now, What’s Right for Your Organization?
Before deciding who should own your career site, ask yourself these questions:
How important is employer brand visibility?
This takes time and knowledge. If you are comfortable with Indeed, Glassdoor, Reddit, and third-party review sites shaping your company’s narrative, an ATS career site may be enough. However, if you want more influence on how candidates and AI platforms understand and portray your employer brand, you’ll need to optimize and increase your content.
How well-known is your brand?
The more recognizable your brand becomes, the harder it is to cut through the noise of online conversations and competing narratives. If brand protection and consistency matter to you, design customization becomes critical.
How important is candidate conversion?
Are you reviewing surface-level data like sessions and users, or are you looking into apply clicks, drop-off rates, and retargeting opportunities? If converting high-intent candidates is a priority to you, your technology should reflect that.
Can you sustain ongoing content creation?
A simple, cookie-cutter template career site no longer suffices. AI platforms prioritize organizations that continuously publish high-quality employer brand content.
Do you have the resources to manage it?
Lastly, every approach has its trade-offs.
When it comes to who is managing your career site, an ATS is the easiest operationally. Hosting it on your corporate site gives you the most internal control. A specialized partner will give you the strongest recruitment marketing focus.
The right choice depends on whether your organization views hiring as an operational process or a strategic growth function.
You don’t have to manage your career site alone. If you’re looking for a partner that understands recruitment marketing and can help you attract, engage, and convert more qualified candidates, Appcast Career Sites can help.
