How to make it easier for people to find your jobs

How to make it easier for people to find your jobs by Jo Brodie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://brodiesnotes.blogspot.com.
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Dear organisations, companies, charities, people who employ other people...

There are lots of people looking for jobs at the moment and many of them will be spending some time looking online, so let's make it easier.

Although there's an almost limitless supply of websites that list job vacancies most organisations will also post their own jobs on their own website in addition to advertising elsewhere. Sometimes they can be a bit hard to find and require hopeful candidates to spend time hunting on your website.

Here's my big suggestion for making it easier for everyone to find your latest job vacancies.

Create a page which has the following type of address
http://www.yourwebsite.co.uk/jobs

This means that anyone visiting your site only has to type /jobs at the end of the address of your homepage to be immediately taken to your page about jobs.

Most web users know or have learned, through experience, that clicking on the organisation's logo (generally on the left hand side of the page) will return them to the homepage. I'd love it if people could similarly learn that typing /jobs was a quick shortcut that would always lead them to a page of info about working at your company.

It also provides people with a page that they can bookmark and link to (eg on sites where vacancies pages are collected). It's even better if you set up an RSS feed on it so that your new jobs are sent to RSS subscribers whenever you make a change on that page.

Possible objections
1. People can use our search box to find jobs
I'm sure they can, if they're on your site. But should they search for job, jobs, vacancy, vacancies, work with us (for us) or recruitment? Do all those words lead them to your page on jobs?

2. Way ahead of you, our jobs page is at http://www.yourwebsite.co.uk/vacancies
Fantastic. Any chance you could humour me and set up a /jobs page that redirects to your vacancies page as well?

Don't forget, after a website reshuffle, to point your new http://www.yourwebsite.co.uk/recruitment to the http://www.yourwebsite.co.uk/jobs page though.

3. We're a small company so we don't have a page on jobs
Well... can't force you, but would it damage your Google ranking to have a page saying that jobs will be posted there when they become available?

How about using such a page to talk about what a great place you are to work, perhaps some profiles celebrating the diverse mix of skills and backgrounds of your members of staff, and why they've chosen to work there.

4. Well we do have a jobs board
Great but that's you advertising jobs at other organisations (very helpful of course) but is it easy for people to find out how they can work with you too?

See also - my other regular bleats on this topic :)

• Thoughts on job vacancies pages part two (24 December 2011) 
• Dear companies / organisations everywhere – why not make it easier for people to find your jobs? A little bit ranty :) (8 February 2012)
• Organisations that make it easy for you to find their jobs (9 February 2012)