Would you apply to your own company?
Table of contents 6 sections
Why this test is worth more than any SEO analysis
There is a test almost no one does, and it changes more than any technical analysis of your website. You put yourself for ten minutes in the role of a person currently wondering whether they want to work for you – and go through your own career page like a stranger.
That sounds simple and is not. Anyone who built or commissioned their own page never sees it with fresh eyes again. You know where the positions are because you entered them yourself. You recognise the photos because those are your employees. You overlook the gaps because your head fills them automatically. An applicant sees all of this for the first time – and decides in the first seconds whether she stays or goes back.
The eight questions in this article are ordered the way an applicant moves through your page. First they search, then they scroll, then they read, then they decide. If you go through them honestly, you have a concrete list at the end of where you should intervene. That is more insight than most audits deliver – and it costs nothing but time.
The eight questions, sorted by the applicant's journey
Question 1: Is your career page found in five seconds?
Type your company name into Google. Click on your first result. Find the career page – only by clicking, without typing the URL. If you do not find it in five seconds, applicants will not either. Common mistakes: "careers" hidden under "about us", a careers link only in the footer, careers as an invisible dropdown sub-menu.
Question 2: Are the open positions current and concretely named?
Once you are on the page, look at the positions. Are the positions current or have they been there for two years? Are they concretely named – "plumber Villach, full-time" – or generic like "employee (m/f/d)"? A career page with old or empty position lists looks worse than an honest "nothing open right now, speculative applications welcome".
Question 3: Are the conditions there that you would look for at a competitor?
Look for three things on the page: a salary statement or at least a collective-agreement-plus-allowances note, working hours, benefits in kind like a company car or tools. If you do not find them, you know what an applicant does not find. And you know that your competitor who writes these things down has a trust lever against you.
Question 4: Would you trust the people in the photos?
Look at the photos. Are these real people from your business or stock photos? Are first names and roles underneath? Do the photos feel like they are from the last year or from the decade before? An applicant who recognises stock photos has a reserved attitude towards everything else on the page from then on. Authenticity counts more than image quality.
Question 5: After reading, do you know what your first working week would look like?
Read the position you would "apply" to slowly once. At the end, do you know who receives you on Monday, where you start, who you ride with, what you work with? If the job ad consists only of task bullet points and requirement lists, the answer is: you do not know. But applicants apply precisely for a concrete working reality, not for a position list.
Question 6: Can you apply on the phone in under three minutes?
Get your phone. Open the career page. Click "Apply" and fill in the form for a trial – with your own data, sending nothing for real. Does the file upload work with a photo from the gallery and a PDF from the mail attachment? Are the mandatory fields clearly marked? Do you need longer than three minutes? If so, you have just felt what your potential applicant feels.
Question 7: Do you get an answer, and do you know when?
Once you would have sent the form – does the confirmation page state a concrete "you will hear from us by Thursday", or only a "thank you, we will be in touch"? Is a phone number for questions prominent next to the form? Anyone who sees a concrete answer promise leaves the page more reassured. Anyone who sees none wonders whether the application lands in nowhere.
Question 8: What sets this business apart from the other three in the region?
Do you read a sentence on the page that makes you believe it is different at this business than at the neighbour? "We are a young, dynamic team" does not count. Concrete statements count – like "no weekend shifts except emergency standby", "company car privately too", "further training is paid". If you do not find this sentence, your competitor has won the trust lead before the application form is even open.
What Stefan found in his self-test
Stefan, a plumbing and heating contractor in Carinthia with 14 employees, did the test last autumn. With mixed results.
Question 1 he passed – "careers" was clearly in the main menu. Question 2 half: the positions were there, but two of them had been open for over a year without any comment why. Question 3 he failed hard: not a word about pay, working hours, or company car, even though exactly that would have been his real plus points.
Question 4 surprised him. The photos were real – he had no stock photos – but they were from 2019, two of the three people shown had long since left the business. Effect on an applicant: irritating to off-putting. Question 5 he passed, because he was used to going through the first week with applicants at the first conversation anyway – he had written that into the job ad too. Question 6 was a disaster: on the phone the keyboard covered the send-button field, so that he could not find it himself. Question 7 without an answer promise, question 8 with the standard "modern family business" sentence.
Six questions with clear room for improvement, two passed. In the three months after the adjustments, more applications came in, without anything being changed in the ad budget – simply because the page answered questions that were previously open. More on the structural solution is in the article on the eight building blocks of a career page that brings applicants.
Which question fails most often
From our own audit practice there are three questions that score poorly on most SME career pages.
Question 3 (conditions) is the most common failure. The inhibition to name salary or concrete benefits in kind is large – mostly unfounded, because the competition knows the market range anyway. The risk of losing applicants through silence is considerably higher than the risk of informing competitors through openness.
Question 6 (mobile application) is the second most frequent weak point. Very many application forms were built on the desktop and never tested on the phone. That does not stand out in normal operation, because the owner rarely goes to their own career page on the phone – applicants almost always do.
Question 8 (differentiation) fails not from a lack of differentiation, but from a lack of concretisation. Many businesses have real advantages over the industry standard – they just write them in phrases instead of concrete sentences. Anyone who replaces "flat hierarchies" with "you talk directly to the boss, because there is only one" has the same content in a credible form.
What you do with the results after the test
An honest test list with three columns is the most usable starting point for the next step. Take the "doesn't fit" points, sort them by effort, start with the easiest.
Adding conditions costs an hour of writing and an evening of thinking about what you actually concretely offer. Having the mobile form tested costs half a day from someone who knows what they are doing. Formulating an answer promise costs ten minutes – plus the discipline to then keep it. Renewing team photos costs either a photo shoot or an afternoon with a smartphone in good light.
Anyone who turns all "half fits" points into "fits" points has, within a few weeks, a career page that performs noticeably better – without new software, without a new designer, without a new budget for ads. In some cases, however, the page is not the actual problem at all – more on that in the article on when a career page does not solve a recruiting problem.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does the self-test really take?
Eight to fifteen minutes, if you engage with the questions in a focused way and do not dodge into "but-with-us-it's-different" explanations. Anyone who honestly notes what they see instead of what they know is finished faster than they think. The actual work comes afterwards: turning the "doesn't fit" points into a list with next steps.
Should I do the test myself or ask someone in the business?
Both bring insight, but differently. You yourself discover gaps that disappear in everyday life. An outside person beyond your business – the tax adviser, the neighbour, your sister's son – sees things you have long got used to. Ideally you do the test yourself and then ask an outside person for a second round.
What if I fail six of eight questions?
That is more often the norm than the exception. Most SME career pages have grown over the years without ever being systematically checked. Anyone who knows about six outstanding sites has the fastest lever right in front of them – every single improvement works immediately, you do not have to tackle everything at once.
Do I have to re-test the career page after every change?
No. Once a year a full self-test, plus a short check after larger adjustments, is enough in most cases. Anyone who updates positions or adds a new employee to the team photo does not have to run the whole test – this routine maintenance belongs in the quarterly rhythm.
What does a professional career page review cost?
Realistically between roughly 200 and 600 euros for a one-off audit with a documented list of concrete measures, depending on scope. Anyone who does it themselves with the eight questions from this article arrives at similar insights – the external review pays off above all when the implementation of the measures is also to go into external hands and you need a clear briefing basis.
What you can do this week
Block fifteen minutes in your calendar, get a pen, paper, and your phone, and go through the eight questions honestly once. Note "fits", "half fits", "doesn't fit" for each question. What you have in front of you at the end is the most concrete plan for the next iteration of your career page that you can get in a quarter of an hour.
Anyone who wants to take the step from the test to the structural rework will find the bigger picture in the overview of career pages that bring applicants – including the question of which model fits your business and volume of positions.
