Some webpages change very little. Others, like Career pages, change more regularly. How best to manage this content?

Well, there are many paths. However, in order to make your website easy to find, navigate, and manage, we have a recommendation about how to do this.

Our recommended path

Job opportunities come and go. They have a posting date, and a closing date, and a bunch of related information. The trick is that we don’t really want people finding old postings. And if users do happen across old postings, we want to avoid confusion about timing. Most importantly, we want people to find the current, and most recent postings easily. So we recommend a combination of editing an authoritative Careers page, and posting a short blog post that piques prospective workers interest, and then links to the careers pages.

Have a Careers page with all the information

By having an authoritative Careers page website visitors and job-seekers have a single best place to go for the most up-to-date information about workplace opportunities. Careers pages are a bit of a web convention and users look for them. And if you do a good job of keeping your Careers page up to date, you never have to worry about people finding old PDFs, or incorrect information, and wasting their time or yours.

For large organizations with lots of openings and closings, some additional subpages might be required to manage the information load.

Use blog posts to “point” to your Careers page

Here’s the key point. Don’t post all of the information in a blog post. Because blog posts are moments in time, write short posts with a few key details about the job posting(s), including closing dates, and then link to the Careers page. By doing this, if someone comes across an old post, they will still find their way to the current Careers page and the correct information. Also, by linking to a Careers page from a time-stamped post, you don’t have to go back and make edits to your posts.

This allows you to focus all of your editing energy on an authoritative Careers page (or section). And you never have to worry about having duplicate information on your posts and pages.

Over time, this linking structure will also signal to Google, and the folks searching for your job opportunities, that the Careers page is the best place to look for information.

Follow up thoughts

• Add a feature image to your Careers page so it looks great when you or others share it!
• Avoid PDFs by putting all the information on the Careers page or a subpage
• If you insist on having PDFs, then
  • link to the PDF from the Careers page, not the post
  • and make sure you also post the information that is in the PDF directly to the page
  • make sure you signal to users that the link is for a pdf