Stop what you're doing for a second. Pick up your phone. Go to your firm's website and try to find the careers section. Then try to apply for one of your open roles.
I'll wait.
If your experience was anything like what I see when I do this with clients, you've just spent ninety seconds hunting for a link that wasn't in the main navigation, landed on a page with a stock photo of people who definitely don't work for you, scrolled past three paragraphs about being "passionate about our people," and then hit an application form that asked you to upload a CV from your phone's file system. At which point you gave up, because of course you did.
That page is the landing page for every single penny you spend on recruitment marketing. Every LinkedIn ad, every campus visit, every job board listing, every referral link - they all point there. And right now, it's probably converting about as well as a shop with the shutters half down.
I was with a marketing director at a 200-person consulting firm a few months back. Smart, commercially minded, genuinely good at her job. She'd just signed off on a £40k graduate recruitment campaign - campus events, targeted LinkedIn ads, sponsored content, the lot. I asked her when she'd last tried to apply for a role on her own website from her phone. Long pause. "I haven't."
So we did it together, right there in the meeting room. The careers section was three clicks deep from the homepage. The page itself had a paragraph of copy that could have been written by literally any professional services firm in the country - something about "a collaborative culture where your development matters." There was a stock photo of a diverse group of young professionals laughing around a laptop. They were not, I can confirm, employees of that firm. And the application form required a covering letter, a CV upload, a diversity monitoring questionnaire, and three professional references. For a graduate role. Before the first interview.
She looked at me and said, "We've been wondering why our application numbers are down."
Our careers page has all our open roles on it and a link to the application portal. That's what candidates need.
I understand why that feels sufficient. It ticks the functional box. But think about it this way: your client-facing website isn't just a list of your services with a "contact us" button, is it? You've invested in messaging, in case studies, in thought leadership, in making the case for why a prospect should choose you over the firm in the next browser tab. Your careers page deserves the same treatment - because candidates are making exactly the same kind of comparison.
I should say: I've made this mistake myself. Early on, I was so focused on what the careers page said that I never actually tested what it did. We had decent copy, a clear enough structure, and I thought that was the job done. Then someone on the team tried to apply for their own role as a test - just to check the process - and the form broke on mobile. Completely broke. Blank screen, no error message, nothing. We have no idea how long it had been like that. We have no idea how many people tried and walked away. That's the thing that still bothers me about it: the data just showed a low application rate. It didn't show us why.
I've looked at hundreds of these pages over the years, and the same problems come up with almost comical regularity. So let me just go through them.
The page is buried. If your careers section isn't in your main navigation - or it's hidden under an "About" dropdown that requires three clicks to reach - you're only showing it to people who already know they want to work for you. The candidate who's casually browsing, the one who might be persuadable, never finds it. And that "casually browsing" candidate is often the best one, because they're not desperately job-hunting. They're selectively considering.
The copy is interchangeable. "We are passionate about our people, we offer excellent training, and we believe in work-life balance." I could paste that sentence onto the careers page of any firm in your sector and nobody would notice. It differentiates nothing. It's the recruitment equivalent of saying your restaurant has food.
There's no actual culture content. A photograph of smiling colleagues in a meeting room is not culture content. It is the absence of culture content wearing a thin disguise. Culture content is a third-year associate explaining what surprised them about the firm. A project spotlight that describes what the team actually did on a piece of work. A photo someone took on their phone at the Friday team lunch - slightly blurry, badly lit, and ten times more credible than anything a stock library can offer.
The application form is doing too much, too early. If you're asking for a covering letter, a full CV, a diversity questionnaire, and three references before the first screening conversation, you're not filtering for quality. You're filtering for completion resilience. The best candidates - the ones with options - will abandon that form and apply somewhere easier. And you'll never see data on the ones you lost, because abandoned applications don't show up in your ATS as "nearly applied."
And then there's mobile. LinkedIn's data shows that over 60% of job searches start on mobile. Glassdoor puts mobile application initiation at around 50%. If your application process requires a desktop - because the form times out, the document upload breaks, or the fields don't autofill - you're not facing a minor usability inconvenience. You're structurally excluding yourself from a huge portion of the candidate market at the exact moment they're most motivated to act. This is the one that gets me, honestly, because it's so easy to check and so rarely checked.
When I see a professional services careers page that actually works - and they do exist, even if they're outnumbered - there are usually a handful of things present that most firms haven't thought to include.
Real stories from real people at specific career stages. Not an HR-written profile that reads like it was approved by committee. A first-person account from an actual person - a second-year trainee, a newly promoted manager, a partner who joined laterally - talking about what their week looks like, what they've learned, what they wish they'd known before joining. These are absurdly easy to produce. You sit someone down for twenty minutes with a list of questions candidates actually care about - "What does a good week look like here?" "What's the most interesting thing you've worked on recently?" "What do you wish you'd known before you started?" - and you write it up. No photographer needed. No budget needed. Just editorial time and a willingness to let real people sound like real people.
Day-in-the-life content for the roles you struggle to fill. If you're perpetually struggling to hire into a specific team or level, there's a decent chance candidates don't actually understand what the job involves. A candidate who can see specifically what the first six months of a training contract looks like - what the induction covers, what their first piece of real work might be, what the supervision structure is - can make a much more informed decision than someone reading a list of competencies.
Honest progression paths with actual timelines. The firm that shows a cohort's progression from graduate entry to senior roles over ten years - with specific examples, including the people who moved sideways, or took a secondment, or left and came back - is demonstrating something about its culture that no amount of "we invest in our people" copywriting can replicate. I worked with a law firm last year that added a simple visual timeline showing three different career paths people had actually taken through the firm. Applications for training contracts went up 34% within two months. They didn't change anything else.
Salary transparency. I know this is complicated. Partnership structures, banded pay systems, regional variations - I get it. But the evidence is hard to ignore. Indeed's own data shows that job postings with salary information receive up to 30% more applications, and in every client conversation I've had about careers page changes in the last two years, adding some form of salary indication has been the single highest-impact change. You don't have to publish exact figures. A range, or even a band indication, removes a specific barrier at the consideration stage. The absence of it, when candidates have four other tabs open, is actively working against you.
A simple, mobile-friendly first-stage application. Name, email, which role, and a 150-word statement of interest. That's it for stage one. Collect the CV, the references, and the diversity data later - after you've established mutual interest. A two-stage process where the first gate is low and fast is a better initial filter than a wall of fields that only the most persistent candidates get through.
Something concrete you can do today. Get your phone - not your work laptop, your actual phone - and walk through this:
Does the careers page load in under three seconds on a 4G connection? Do the form fields autofill correctly from your mobile keyboard? Can you upload a document from your phone's file system without the form breaking? Does the form actually submit successfully from a mobile browser? After submitting, do you receive an immediate confirmation email that tells you what happens next and when - not just "we received your application"?
Each one of those that fails is a candidate drop-off point. And the maddening thing is that it doesn't show up in your application data. You can't measure the people who tried to apply and couldn't. You only see the ones who got through. Which means your ATS data is giving you a comfortingly incomplete picture of reality.
One objection I hear a lot: this all sounds great, but we don't have budget for a careers page overhaul right now. Fair enough. But most of what I've described above doesn't require budget. It requires editorial effort and someone willing to actually produce it.
Team Q&As structured around questions candidates genuinely have. Project spotlights that describe a piece of work - the type of problem, the approach, what the team learned - without compromising confidentiality. Photos of your actual office taken by someone on the team with a phone camera. Training programme content that gets specific: "We fund ACA qualification for all graduate joiners, with 30 days of study leave and a £2,000 annual study budget" lands completely differently from "we are committed to professional development."
These aren't social media content ideas. I'm not suggesting you start doing TikTok dances in the office. These are substantive, specific pieces of content that sit on your careers page and do the work of differentiating your firm from the seventeen others a good candidate is considering. They're the recruitment equivalent of the case studies and thought leadership you already produce for your client-facing marketing.
Careers pages suffer from the same convergence problem as the rest of professional services websites. Everyone benchmarks against each other, copies the same structure, uses the same language, and ends up with a page that's functionally identical to every competitor's. The firms that break out of that pattern are the ones candidates remember.
You don't need a sophisticated marketing automation stack to measure whether your careers page improvements are making a difference. Four metrics will tell you most of what you need to know, and your ATS probably already tracks at least two of them.
Application volume - total applications per role, tracked month on month. Simple, but it's your baseline.
Application quality - ask your hiring managers whether the proportion of applications that merit a first interview has changed. Track it as a ratio. Ten good applications out of thirty is a better outcome than fifteen good ones out of two hundred.
Application completion rate - the proportion of candidates who start an application and finish it. If this is below 60%, your form is the problem, not your employer brand. That's friction, not lack of interest.
Source tracking - where did the candidate find you? Organic search, LinkedIn, a job board, a referral? This tells you whether your upstream recruitment marketing spend is pointed at the right channels, and whether the careers page itself is discoverable enough to justify investing in its content.
None of this requires new tools. It requires someone deciding to look at the data and asking the right questions about it.
Every recruitment marketing investment your firm makes - the campus visits, the LinkedIn campaigns, the employer brand work, the job board subscriptions - is driving traffic to one destination. Your careers page. If that destination underwhelms, every pound spent upstream is working harder than it needs to. You're paying to generate interest and then dissipating it at the point of conversion.
The firms that treat their careers page as a genuine marketing asset - with the same rigour they apply to their client-facing website - are seeing better candidates, higher application rates, and lower cost per hire. The firms that treat it as an administrative necessity are spending more on attraction to compensate for a destination that doesn't convert.
If you want a structured review of your firm's careers page against the criteria that drive application volume and quality - with specific, prioritised improvements you can act on - book a careers page review. We've also put together a careers page audit checklist that covers the failure modes and content formats described in this piece, designed so you can assess your current page in about thirty minutes. Download the careers page audit checklist and see where you stand.
Your careers page is probably the most visited, least optimised marketing asset your firm has. And unlike most digital improvements, fixing it doesn't require a platform migration or a six-figure budget. It requires someone deciding it matters enough to actually look at it. Preferably on their phone.