I officially have a bee in my bonnet about getting more organisations to set up a redirect page so that wherever their vacancies page is on their site visitors only have to type /jobs at the end of their homepage URL to find it. A huge number of organisations already do this but I can't think of a good reason why the rest - who do have a vacancies page - don't also do this.
This isn't about sites who don't have a vacancy page (that's a separate problem, I shall deal with that one next perhaps...) but sites who have a 'work with us' or 'recruitment' or 'vacancies' page somewhere within their website and it might take a bit of searching to find it. If you've gone to the bother of having a page in the first place, why not make it more discoverable.
1. Get a vacancies page on your site. I don't mind if you don't have enough jobs becoming available to warrant it, but it makes it easy to bookmark once we've found it for future reference (and gives you an extra place to stick some interesting content about how you're a great place to work.
2. Set up a redirect so that yourwebaddress.co.uk/jobs points to wherever you've put your vacancies page.
3. Add an RSS or email alert system so that your new jobs can be pushed to subscribers.
I may well have taken leave of my senses of course but I've now sent the email below to some of the umbrella organisations whose members are professionals, businesses or directors of businesses, in the hope that they can help me. Fingers crossed.
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Dear CBI, CPID FSB and IoD
I have noticed that a number of organisations have a really useful page on their website which is of the style http://companyname.com/jobs or http://www.companyname.co.uk/jobs
This means that a visitor to that company's homepage would only have to type /jobs at the end to be taken straight to their vacancies page which they can then bookmark.
I've also noticed that plenty of organisations don't do this, despite having a vacancies page on their website (which is usually findable by searching for it). One might have to search for jobs, vacancies, recruitment, careers, employment, work for us or work with us before arriving at the hoped-for page though because there are a variety of ways of referring to vacancies.
Since the first situation seems an order of magnitude more helpful to everyone than the second I can't help thinking that a "/jobs" page on all organisations websites could be some sort of 'industry standard' - particularly at a time when lots of people are looking for jobs. Another advantage is that this wouldn't impact on any website 'renovation' where pages get moved around, as the /jobs page can easily be set up to redirect to wherever needed.
For example http://www.tesco.co.uk/jobs or http://www.tesco.com/jobs both resolve to http://www.tesco-careers.com/
My interest in this stems from running a job vacancies blog for people wanting to find employment in science communication, noticing that some companies did have this, noticing that others didn't, wondering why, and deciding to see if I can do anything about it.
Assuming you don't think it's too crazy an idea from a random stranger, is there any way it can be communicated more widely to members to encourage them to adopt this?
Many thanks,
Jo
Jo Brodie - http://www.linkedin.com/in/jobrodie
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