Why the career page matters more than you think
For a small or mid-sized business, the career page is not a formality. It is one of the few moments where you control the entire story a candidate sees before they decide to apply. Candidates increasingly investigate an employer before they commit their time: LinkedIn reports that around 71% of candidates research a company first, looking at its website, social profiles and employer reviews. If the only thing they find is a bare list of roles on a third-party job board, you have handed that first impression to someone else.
A strong career page does three things at once. It tells candidates what it is genuinely like to work with you, it answers the practical questions they have before applying, and it makes the act of applying feel low-friction and trustworthy. Get those right and you raise both the number and the quality of applications you receive.
In practice, many SMBs still rely on one of these weaker approaches:
- No career page at all. Candidates are pushed straight to a job board such as Indeed or LinkedIn, with no contact with your brand and no reason to choose you over the company listed directly above and below you.
- A plain list of jobs. Functional, but flat. It tells candidates the title and location and nothing that would make a strong applicant lean in.
- A static page built by an agency. It looks polished on launch day, then becomes a liability: every new role, every copy change and every fresh testimonial needs a developer, a ticket and a delay.
Treegarden gives you a fourth option: a career page builder built into the applicant tracking system. You get a branded, professional careers site that your HR or hiring team can update at any time, with no extra subscription and no technical knowledge required. Every application flows straight into your Kanban pipeline, where bulk CV upload, AI scoring and the rest of your hiring workflow take over.
The career page builder: what you can set up
Treegarden's career page builder is a visual tool for assembling a complete careers site step by step. There is no code to write and no design background needed. You work in the interface, see a live preview, and publish when it looks right.
Full branding: logo, colours and typography
Upload your company logo and a hero banner. Set your primary and secondary brand colours, which are applied automatically to buttons, links and accent elements across the page. Pick a typeface that matches the rest of your materials. The goal is simple: a candidate should feel they have landed on a page that belongs to your company, not on a generic form hosted somewhere else.
Content sections you can switch on and off
Build the page from modular blocks: an "About the company" section for your mission and the work you do, a "Benefits" section for what employees actually get, a "Team" block to introduce departments or people, a "Testimonials" block for quotes from current staff, and links to your social profiles. Each block can be turned on, turned off or reordered to suit the story you want to tell.
Every change is reflected in the live preview the moment you make it. Adjust a colour and the preview updates instantly. That what-you-see-is-what-you-get approach means no unpleasant surprises when you publish.
Visual branding: making the page feel like your company
An effective career page is not only informative, it is a brand experience. The candidate should feel they are on a page that belongs to your company, not on an anonymous form. These are the visual elements worth getting right in Treegarden:
Logo and banner
Your logo sits in the header of the career page. The hero banner is the high-impact area at the top. Use a real photo of your team, a shot of your workspace, or a clean graphic that reflects your visual identity. As a rule of thumb, aim for a wide banner image (around 1920 by 600 pixels) and a transparent PNG for the logo so it sits cleanly on any background.
Brand colours
Set a primary colour for buttons and accents and a secondary colour for backgrounds and supporting elements. Treegarden applies these consistently across the whole page, including the application form, so nothing looks bolted on.
Button style
Choose the look of your action buttons ("Apply now", "View details"): rounded or square corners, solid or outline, with or without a shadow. It sounds like a small detail, but matching the buttons to the rest of your materials is part of what makes the page feel coherent and trustworthy.
Branding tip
Use the exact same hex codes as your main website. If your site uses #2563EB as its primary blue, set that same value in the career page builder rather than picking something "close enough". Candidates notice when colours, fonts and tone match across your site and your careers page, and that consistency is part of what makes a page feel legitimate rather than improvised.
What content to include on the career page
Design earns attention; content earns the application. A career page that converts answers the questions a candidate has before they apply. Here are the sections that matter and what to put in each.
About the company
Do not paste in the "About us" copy from your corporate site. The audience is different. Candidates want to know what it is like to work with you, not how many offices you have. Focus on your mission in plain human terms, the values that actually guide day-to-day decisions, the kind of work your teams are doing now, and where the company is heading.
Benefits and perks
List benefits specifically: flexible hours, remote or hybrid working, extra holiday days, a learning and development budget, private healthcare, pension contributions, wellbeing support. Be concrete. "A great place to work" says nothing; "an annual budget of £1,500 for conferences and courses" says a great deal.
Employee testimonials
Nothing is more convincing than the honest voices of people who already work there. Include short quotes, two or three sentences, from staff across different teams, with their name, role and, where possible, a photo. Keep them real. Quotes that sound too polished or too corporate undercut the trust you are trying to build.
Social media links
Link to your LinkedIn, and to other relevant profiles such as Instagram or X if you are active there. Candidates who are interested will want to look further, so make it easy for them to find your wider presence.
The application form: short, fast, frictionless
The application form is the decisive moment. It is the point where a candidate either applies or gives up, and drop-off here is brutal. SHRM, citing recruitment-data provider Appcast, reports that roughly 92% of people who click "Apply" never finish the application. Long, fiddly forms are a major reason. With Treegarden you control exactly what the form asks, so you can keep it short enough that strong candidates actually complete it.
A form you control field by field
Decide which fields appear. Name and email are required, but everything else is yours to add or remove: phone number, LinkedIn URL, cover letter, portfolio link, or your own custom questions. CV upload is built in, so candidates can attach a PDF, DOC or DOCX directly. As a general rule, the shorter the form, the more people finish it.
The golden rule for application forms is simple: only ask for what you genuinely need at this stage. Do not demand a full postal address, references or other admin in the first form. You can collect those later, once a candidate has progressed. A tight form of three to five fields will almost always be completed by more people than one with ten or more, so save the detailed questions for a later step.
GDPR and consent
Treegarden includes a GDPR consent checkbox in the application form by default. Candidates give explicit consent to the processing of their personal data before they submit. The consent wording is editable, and cookie consent on the careers page is handled automatically, so your data-protection basics are covered from day one. This matters for UK and EU candidates in particular, where lawful processing of applicant data is a clear requirement.
SEO and a clean URL: helping candidates find you
A beautiful career page is worth nothing if nobody finds it. Treegarden includes built-in SEO controls so your page and your roles show up in search when candidates look for opportunities like yours.
A clean, custom URL (slug)
Instead of a generic address full of IDs and parameters, your career page gets a tidy, memorable URL, for example app.treegarden.io/careers/acme-co. That is an address you can put on your website, share on LinkedIn, print on a card, or drop into an email signature without it looking like a tracking link.
SEO fields on every job
Each role you publish has its own SEO fields: meta title, meta description and a custom URL slug. These help search engines index and display your listings correctly, so someone searching Google for, say, "React developer London" or "customer support specialist Austin" can land on your role directly rather than on an aggregator.
Automatic structured data
Treegarden generates JobPosting structured data (Schema.org markup) for every listing automatically. That markup lets Google surface the key details, job title, company, location and contract type, right in the search results and in the Google Jobs experience, which improves visibility and click-through.
Built-in builder vs. a page from scratch: what is it worth?
There are three common ways an SMB can put a career page live. Here is how they compare.
Option 1: a page built from scratch (agency or in-house)
- Cost: typically several thousand dollars or pounds for design and development
- Time to launch: roughly four to eight weeks
- Updates: a developer is needed for every change
- ATS integration: has to be custom-built, at additional cost
- Upside: maximum design flexibility
- Downside: high cost, dependence on the agency, ongoing maintenance
Option 2: a dedicated career-page platform (such as Teamtailor or SmartRecruiters)
- Cost: a separate monthly subscription on top of your ATS
- Time to launch: one to two weeks
- Updates: visual interface, no code
- ATS integration: partial, usually requires API configuration
- Upside: polished templates and good visual quality
- Downside: an extra monthly bill and a more fragmented link to your ATS
Option 3: a career page builder built into the ATS (Treegarden)
- Cost: included in your Treegarden plan, with no extra subscription
- Time to launch: an afternoon, not weeks
- Updates: visual interface, any time, by your own HR or hiring team
- ATS integration: native, so applications land straight in your pipeline
- Upside: no added cost, tight integration, instant updates
- Downside: less design freedom than a fully bespoke build
Our recommendation
For most SMBs, a career page builder inside the ATS is the right call. It gives you enough control to reflect your brand, the link to your pipeline is native rather than a fragile sync, and there is no separate bill to justify. A fully bespoke page only earns its higher cost when you have very specific design requirements or an unusually strong consumer brand to protect.
Elements of a career page that converts
Across the career pages that work and the ones that quietly lose applicants, the same handful of elements make the difference. Build these in.
1. A hero section with real impact. An image or short video that captures what your company actually feels like. Skip generic stock photos and use real shots of your team or workspace.
2. A clear value proposition. In two or three sentences, say why someone would want to work with you. Not "we are a market leader", but something specific like "we build software used by thousands of small businesses, and we give you room to experiment".
3. A visible list of open roles. Candidates arrive with one job in mind: to see what is available. Your roles should be visible immediately, or after one short scroll at most. Filters by department, location and contract type are essential.
4. Concrete benefits. Not "flexible hours" but "we work from home on Fridays". Not "competitive salary" but "we review pay twice a year against performance and the market". Specifics are believable; vague perks are not.
5. Genuine testimonials. Two or three quotes from real employees, with name and role, ideally spanning different teams and levels of seniority so different candidates can see themselves in them.
6. A transparent application process. Explain in three or four steps what happens after someone applies. For example: "1. We review your CV within 48 hours. 2. A 20-minute phone call. 3. An interview with the team. 4. An offer." Candidates value knowing what to expect.
7. A clear call to action. A visible "Apply now" button, high contrast, placed where candidates expect it. Never make someone hunt for how to apply.
A career page is not a one-and-done project. It is a living tool that should be updated with new roles, fresh testimonials and current information about the company. With the Treegarden career page builder, those updates are a click away, with no agency, no code and no extra cost.
The payoff from a good career page compounds: more applicants, better applicants, and applicants who are genuinely interested before they ever speak to you. In a market where talent has options, your career page is the first argument you get to make. Make it a strong one. To see the builder in action with your own branding and roles, book a demo.
Frequently asked questions
What is a custom career page?
A custom career page is a branded, hosted page where you publish your open roles and show candidates what it is like to work at your company. Unlike a generic job-board listing, it carries your logo, colours, content and application flow, so it feels like a natural extension of your own website rather than a third-party form.
Why does the career page matter more than you think?
It is usually a candidate's first real contact with your company. LinkedIn reports that around 71% of candidates investigate a company before they apply, checking the website, social profiles and employer reviews. A clear, branded page with honest information makes strong candidates more likely to apply, and more likely to finish your application form.
How can an ATS help with a custom career page?
An ATS like Treegarden includes a career page builder, so you can set up a branded, SEO-friendly careers site without code or a separate subscription. Every application lands directly in your Kanban pipeline, ready for bulk CV upload, AI scoring and the rest of your hiring workflow, with no fragile integrations to maintain.