Careers Page: Find Applicants Through Your Own Website

The scale can be documented. On an annual average, around 390,000 (KOFA) vacancies for qualified staff could not be filled arithmetically because no suitably qualified unemployed people were available. Small companies alone accounted for around 177,000 (KOFA) of them, and 71.7 percent (KOFA) of the gap sat with small and medium-sized businesses overall. In parallel, the labour administration reported a stock of roughly 630,000 (Federal Employment Agency) registered job openings in September 2025. The bottleneck shows most clearly in time: the average completed vacancy period - the span between the desired start date and the day the position is deregistered - stood at 169 days (Federal Employment Agency) in the rolling year to September 2025. For roles at skilled-worker level, meaning completed vocational training, it was even higher: around 180 days (Federal Employment Agency) on the 2025 annual average. Half a year without the second fitter or the second journeyman is not a statistic for a business with eight people; it is a hole in the calendar.

In vocational training the picture is similar, only earlier. As of the 30 September reference date, around 54,400 (BIBB) company training places remained unfilled, which corresponds to 10.6 percent (BIBB) of all places offered by companies. At the same time, around 84,400 (BIBB) young people had still not found a training place and were keeping their request open. Around 476,000 (BIBB) new contracts were signed. Put differently: there are businesses without an apprentice and young people without a place who simply do not find each other. A substantial part of this matching problem is a visibility problem. A business that does not explain online what it trains, how the first day works and whom to contact does not show up in the shortlist at all. One paragraph about training on your own page costs nothing and is visible all year - unlike an advert that expires after four weeks.

The most common brake sits right at the end of the careers page: a form that demands a CV, references, date of birth and postal address as mandatory fields. Someone who is only just weighing up whether the business suits them drops out there - above all on a phone, where files have to be hunted down first. Three details are enough for a first contact: a name, one way to get in touch and a few sentences about the request. Everything else is settled in conversation. Anyone who wants to send documents straight away can do so through an optional attachment field, but does not have to. The fact that every extra mandatory field costs completions applies to applications just as it does to customer enquiries - the evidence is in the article on the contact form with fewer fields.

What happens afterwards matters just as much as the short form. An automatic confirmation with one sentence about the next steps removes the doubt about whether the message arrived. State a realistic response time and stick to it - in many trades the speed of that first reply decides who gets to the interview first. If there is no time for wording in the daily routine, hand the text over: through our website copywriting service we write the sections after a short conversation, in your tone of voice and without HR jargon. A phone number right next to the form belongs there too, because some interested people would rather call than type.

With the first application you process personal data, and in a sensitive constellation at that. The legal basis is usually the initiation of an employment relationship (Federal Data Protection Act, section 26). Already at the point of collection you have to inform people about the purpose, the legal basis, the storage period and their rights (General Data Protection Regulation, Article 13) - on the careers page a short, comprehensible note with a link to the privacy policy, placed right at the form, is enough. The principle of storage limitation applies as well (General Data Protection Regulation, Article 5): data may only be kept in identifiable form for as long as the purpose requires. What you do not collect in the first place needs neither protection nor deletion - another argument for a short form.

The route there matters just as much. Applications should be transmitted in encrypted form; a valid certificate is the basis for that, and without a padlock symbol an application form inspires little confidence - the article on the SSL certificate and the "not secure" warning explains why. Set up a dedicated mailbox for applications as well, accessible only to the people involved in the selection. Forwarding to private addresses or into open group mailboxes is among the most common avoidable mistakes. And when you reject an application, delete the attachments too instead of leaving the email sitting in the inbox.

Many businesses hang their job advert on the website as a PDF file. That is convenient, because the document exists for the notice board anyway - but for search it is the worst route. A PDF is hard to read on a phone, barely linkable and awkward to update. For structured job data that lets search services recognise an advert as such, a separate indexable HTML page per position is what is intended (Google documentation); there you can record the title, location, working-time model and an end date, and expired adverts are removed or marked as closed. In practice that means one subpage per position under a descriptive address, linked from the careers page. Creating, changing and switching off those pages is something we take on if you wish, as part of website maintenance.