Career page success: Why you should swap out inactive roles for prospect posts

3 mins, 26 secs read time

There’s a new pattern in job posts: roles are posted even if a company isn’t actively hiring for that position. Given the current employment and economic environment we’re in, it’s understandable that some job boards are unfortunately becoming bare. What wasn’t clear was why roles remained posted if the companies weren't hiring. After some digging around in the Greenhouse network, we found most of the companies had one of two reasons for this: either they don’t want it to look like they’re not hiring or they want to build a pipeline for when their roles open again.

Let’s talk about why you shouldn’t keep roles live on your career page if you’re not hiring.

Why you should remove inactive roles from your career page

Empathy for the applicants

It’s a tough market out there for candidates. With unemployment rates at an all-time high, many talented and eager applicants are vying for precious open roles. Think about the job search spreadsheets these candidates are tracking that now have “Role actually closed” listed next to your company name. Which leads to other big reasons you need to take inactive roles off your site.

Your employer brand

It doesn’t send a great message to applicants who never hear back from your company after applying since the role wasn’t open to begin with. Most if not all companies want to show that they are honest and transparent, and you don’t want to send the wrong message from this first touchpoint by being vague or unintentionally deceptive.

Data cleanliness in your system

It’s a great practice to constantly build pipelines of candidates even if you don’t have any active openings, but it will muddy your pipeline data and candidate source data down the line if you have true candidates mixed in with your prospective candidates.

Why you should add prospect posts instead

Prospect posts allow people to express general interest in applying to roles at your company even if they don’t see any current listings that are applicable to their skillset. Prospects posts are general applications to the company that aren’t tied to a specific role. When you see “Interested in future opportunities?” posted on a company’s job board – that’s a prospect post.

Here’s why we recommend switching from inactive jobs to prospect posts.

Transparency

Candidates know what they’re applying for because they are completing a general interest application. They’re excited about your company and they can tell you why they’d like to work with you while still knowing that it’s for a prospective future role rather than an immediate hire for something specific.

Organization

When set up well, prospect posts attached to a CRM will be a great source of clean data for your recruiting organization. Keeping your prospect pipelines separate from your active candidate pipelines will ensure cleaner candidate tracking and give you an accurate picture of your team’s activities and performance.

The best practice would be to have prospects express interest in specific departments, specific locations or even specific roles. You can track them in organized prospect pools and set up nurture campaigns in order to keep them engaged with your brand. (Way better than being the company they never heard back from, right?)

Setting up for success in the future

Building pipelines of candidates will give you a head start when your team is ready to hire again. A great CRM with structured prospect pools means you’ll have a group of engaged prospects to reach out to when you get back to actively hiring.

The concerns that we’re hearing about the optics of a bare career page and the instinct of the great recruiters in our network to continuously build pipelines are understandable. But we hope that you’ll consider implementing prospect posts to satisfy those real concerns and good instincts. Prospect posts are an ideal alternative that will set you and your candidates up for long-term success by building relationships in a transparent and structured way.

Learn how to build healthy pipelines of passive candidates with prospect posts by reading our Guidance article.

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