A career page decides whether an interested person becomes an applicant. This overview shows what belongs on the page, what has to go, and which models are realistic for SMEs – without marketing speak.
No obligation and free – clear recommendations for your recruiting page.
In most businesses the recruiting budget flows into job ads, listings, posters, and referral bonuses. What almost no one consciously decides: what does the career page actually look like, the one interested people land on as soon as they google your name. The ad brings the click – the career page decides whether it becomes an application.
This sequence is often overlooked. Applicants today almost always look at the business before they apply. They google the company name, they look at the career page, they scroll through the team, they search for concrete conditions. What they find there – or do not find – usually decides whether the application starts. Long before you meet them.
That is exactly why the career page is the most invisible recruiting decision in the business. It costs no ad budget, it appears in no marketing report, and yet it decides in the background about half of the lost applications. Anyone who invests in ads and neglects the career page burns money at the second-to-last hurdle.
Stefan, a plumbing and heating contractor in Carinthia with 14 employees, long believed his career page mainly had to present the business well. Company history, values, quality promises. For three years hardly any applications came in, even though he regularly advertised positions. When he started talking openly with applicants about what they had looked for on the page and not found, a consistent list emerged.
Applicants look for four things – and they look for them fast:
What applicants do not look for: company history with founding year, abstract value promises, stock photos of laughing employees, the word "dynamic". This content is not wrong, it just sits in the wrong place. Anyone who answers the four real questions cleanly has already left more than half the competition behind – simply because the competition talks here instead of answering.
The basic kit
Each with job title, location, employment type, and one sentence on "what it's actually about".
Pay as a range or collective-agreement minimum plus concrete allowances, working hours, special arrangements.
Real faces from the business. No stock photos.
A clear answer to "what do you do in your first week with us".
Filled in under three minutes – short, clear, with optional CV upload.
With photo, first name, and phone number – no anonymous info@ mailbox.
"You will hear from us within three working days." Concrete and kept.
A few concrete sentences – not as self-description, but verifiable.
Most job ads sound the same: "We are looking for YOU as a motivated addition", three tasks in bullet points, not a word about money. What works is plain language: what you concretely do on Monday, with whom, and what you get paid for – three clear sentences.
Instead of "Journeyman, plumbing and building technology (m/f/d)", the title reads "Plumber with experience – Carinthia, company car included". The text: two maintenance jobs and a heating replacement in Villach, with Stefan and Markus, collective agreement plus 15 percent allowance, company phone and tools provided.
Andrea runs a 38-room hotel in the Carinthian mountains. Instead of "Service staff wanted", it now reads: "Breakfast-room service, May to October, board and lodging in-house, tips shared, days off plannable." It no longer sounds like an ad – it sounds like an offer you can actually think about.
Every applicant recognises within two seconds when "woman with headset laughing at laptop" sits on the page of a plumbing business. The trust the page built up before collapses.
The boss in work clothes in the workshop. The apprentice on the first day. The team in the break room, unposed. Plus first names and roles – not all surnames need to be there, that is a trust question and belongs in a team discussion, including GDPR consent of those shown.
A one-off photo shoot costs between 800 and 1,500 euros depending on region and effort and delivers material for two to three years. If the budget is not there, smartphone shots in daylight plus a few honest sentences get you considerably further than stock material. Authenticity counts more than perfection.
Applications today come predominantly from the phone. The apprentice sits in the break, the journeyman on the couch after work, the seasonal worker on the train. A career page whose application form is cumbersome on the phone loses exactly the applicants you actually want to win.
Belongs on the form:
Stays out:
✗Date of birth, gender, favourite hobby, school grades, previous salaries. Clarify that in conversation – and much of it you are not even allowed to ask.
After submitting, you need a clear confirmation page with a concrete next sentence, and the phone number prominently next to the form for everyone who prefers to call right away. This combination looks unspectacular and in practice makes the difference between three applications a month and twelve.
The three-gears question
For recruiting to run, three gears have to mesh. The career page is only one of them.
Does anyone know your business at all? Without awareness, no one lands on your career page – however good it is.
Do you show up where applicants search? Ads and local reach bring the qualified traffic to the page.
Does the page turn interest into an application? That is the job of the career page – the third gear.
The career page is the third gear: it turns interest into an application once someone is on the page – but it can do nothing if no one finds it or does not know the business at all. If your positions have been open for months and even a cleanly built page does not bring applications over the threshold, the bottleneck usually lies not in conversion, but in visibility or awareness.
This is exactly where the performance recruiting of our sister agency comes in. Nordsteg builds the first two gears: targeted ads on Meta and Google, local reach in your catchment area, qualified traffic to your career page. Welle West builds the third – the page that turns this traffic into applications. Anyone who wants to honestly check which gear is jamming has a diagnostic question instead of a blanket answer.
Built for you or maintained yourself
You get a cleanly built career page with all eight building blocks, an introduction for the person who types the positions in the business, and take over the maintenance yourself.
Sensible for: businesses with office staff who find time for regular updates, and a manageable volume of positions.
The page stays in monthly contact with us. We update job openings, swap images, check the application flow, keep the page technically current.
Sensible for: businesses without an internal maintenance routine and with regularly changing positions. A clear monthly item.
We build the page and keep it current, Nordsteg takes over paid visibility – funnels, ads, tracking.
Sensible for: businesses that genuinely want to grow and for whom recruiting is a permanent, plannable item – not an emergency response to an acute shortage.
Eight building blocks are the basic kit: open positions with a clear job title and location, concrete conditions (pay, working hours, allowances), real team photos, a description of the first working week, a short application form, a named contact person with photo and phone, an answer promise, and a few concrete sentences about what you do differently as an employer. Everything else is decoration.
Realistically between roughly 2,500 and 8,000 euros as a one-off project, depending on scope, industry, and photo material. On a subscription model with ongoing maintenance, career pages usually range between 80 and 250 euros per month. Anyone running the career page together with performance recruiting additionally budgets the ongoing ad spend. A serious range depends on the volume of positions and the desired depth of maintenance – not on round flat prices.
As soon as you are looking for more than two employees or regularly hire seasonal staff, yes. For very small businesses relying mostly on referral recruiting, a lean careers section on the existing website can be enough. The rule of thumb: if you have positions open longer than three months or regularly run ads, a dedicated career page almost always pays off.
Job openings at every change, so monthly to quarterly depending on the business. Team photos at least every two to three years. Read through the business description once a year to check it still holds. Test the application form and answer promise technically once a year. Anyone who maintains nothing has, after eighteen months, a page that feels frozen – and applicants sense that immediately.
If your business is known in its region and applicants google you specifically, the page is often enough. If you compete for active reach in a market with a skills shortage, you additionally need paid visibility. The career page is a prerequisite, not a guarantee – it converts existing interest into applications, but it does not generate the interest out of nothing.
A job board is the search engine where your ad competes against a hundred others. A career page belongs to you, becomes your own reputation platform over time, and deepens the impression your business leaves. The two complement each other – the job board brings reach, the career page builds trust. Anyone who only relies on job boards loses applications exactly where the career page would have caught them.
A career page is not a decorative add-on to the website, but a tool of its own that needs ongoing maintenance. Which model fits your business, we clarify in a short, no-obligation conversation.
Nikolaigasse 22
9500 Villach, Austria
Phone: +43 4242 93081
Email: office@wellewest.at
Mon–Fri: 09:00–17:00
