Your recruiters shouldn’t be managing your career site.

When you want something done right, you don’t actually do it yourself — you get a specialist. 

Think about it. When that light appears on your dashboard indicating an issue with your car, do you grab the little manual gathering dust in your glove compartment and solve the problem yourself? No. You get a mechanic. 

The same theory applies to the workforce. 

Employees have been siloed to work specifically at their most optimal output for centuries. Yet, today, we often talk a big game of rolling up our sleeves and doing tedious work ourselves. Noble? Sure. But it often leads to an inefficient allocation of resources — and a worse product. 

This misuse of human labor is especially profound in internal career site management. When recruiters’ time is bogged down with maintaining a career site, they have less time to do what they’re best suited to do: recruit. That doesn’t just mean your team is operating inefficiently, it also limits the overall effectiveness of your career site. 

And I’ll prove it with a little help from my favorite foods. 

The production possibilities frontier and what it means for your career site.

The production possibilities frontier (PPF) is a hilariously superfluous name for a graph that really just demonstrates the concept of a trade-off. Here’s a basic example: 

Any point along that beautiful blue line represents a maximum allocation of resources (labor, time, etc.). The more resources we spend producing apples, the less resources we have for corn, and vice versa.       

Let’s reel this back to career sites before I get too hungry. 

There’s sort of been this mini-renaissance of internal website management; coinciding with the meteoric rise of “easy”  backend editors like Wordpress and Squarespace, more companies have turned to their own teams to develop webpages. Career sites are no exception — TA teams are now being trained to design, upload, and configure the digital job boards. 

Here’s the issue with that: Bestowing recruiters with these additional responsibilities fundamentally maneuvers their job duties away from recruiting. So now the people who are supposed to be determining which candidates are best fit for open roles are suddenly being pigeonholed into website training and maintenance. With recruiter workload already increasing by 28% in the last few years, it’s inane to stretch their purviews into developing template websites that already convert worse than custom-built sites.

Some organizations have attempted a workaround by assigning different roles to site management: mainly employer brand and HR operations teams. Even still, day-to-day maintenance becomes a black hole, and configurability is nowhere near the level it should be at.

Recruiters are people people. Their job shouldn’t be that of a backend web developer.

“For some, [managing a career site] is a labor of love, and for others it’s just a labor,” says Paradox President and Chief Product Officer Adam Godson.

It’s not impossible to imagine that recruiters could manage a fantastic career site. It’s just the time it would take to maintain the site is a massive opportunity cost to doing what recruiters are best at. The PPF ends up looking like this:

You’ll notice this graph looks different than the original one up above. That’s because the ratio of the axes isn’t equivalent — the resources spent on the career site would be much more efficiently spent on recruiting tasks. Devoting your recruiters’ time to managing a career site’s backend isn’t just inefficient — it’s basically organizational malpractice.

How Conversational Career Sites improve recruiter efficiency. 

At Paradox, we believe recruiters should focus on building teams, not websites. So we set out to create a career site that does just that. 

We saw how conversational software increased applicant quantity and quality when employed at an SMS touchpoint — the natural progression would be to add that functionality onto an online job board. Thus, Conversational Career Sites were born. 

What began as a career site you could talk to turned into a funnel that channeled quality talent into your recruiters’ laps. And the best part: we manage Conversational Career Sites ourselves, unshackling your team from the monotony of having to edit and re-edit every page. 

But that’s not the only benefit you gain from owning a Conversational Career Site.

Remember when I said that the blue line of the PPF was the maximum efficiency that the economy could operate at? That was a half-truth. Theoretically, changes to the economy’s external environment can shift the curve entirely, ultimately relocating the maximum resources that can be produced.

Paradox managing the backend of the site maintains the original maximum that the internal team could contribute; adding a conversational nature to the site increases the amount of recruiting tasks that they can perform. The graph ends up like this:

Conversational Career Sites are streamlined, helping convert more candidates, faster. The entire career site’s page count is stripped of its chaff and condensed — instead, candidates receive additional content that is only relevant to them. 

There’s also an AI assistant positioned on the site that transforms the application process into a simple text conversation. Candidates receive open roles tailored to their strengths and location, and are screened right on the base page. When they’re deemed qualified, they’re instantly scheduled for an interview. The conversational application process works — and it has a 92% application conversion rate to prove it.

This is all done automatically, without your internal team having to lift a finger. That means they’re able to do more than they were originally doing, shifting the PPF curve to the right. Meanwhile, your company is receiving more qualified talent and improving your conversion on job advertising spend.

It’s a win-win. And a formula that convinced top employers like McDonald’s, Carter’s, and Fontainebleau to make their career sites conversational. 

The trade-offs to management.

It’s human nature to want to protect what you own. It’s why houses have locks and ideas have patents. That line of logic extends from preventing physical theft to a more theoretical, yet significantly more evil, transgression: brand dilution. 

I get it. Nobody knows your brand as much as you do, and should a problem arise with the website that could harm that precious image, you want to be able to fix it quickly and internally. 

That’s an understandable assertion, but not a bulletproof one. 

Again, we have to think about your career site as a function of your team’s time and energy. It’s not an all-or-nothing trade-off. With Conversational Career Sites, you can leverage agencies like Shaker Recruitment Marketing to design with your brand at the forefront. And since the career site is flexibly built with code rather than a “simple” template designed for anyone to use, you actually have more options and ways to demonstrate your brand image and values. 

I’d argue that you don’t actually want 100% access to your site’s maintenance — you just want a good career site.

When you give your car keys to the mechanic, you’re not just handing over a piece of metal. There’s a fundamental understanding that you believe your time would be better spent on things you’re better at doing. Career sites should mirror that logic. Get a specialist to focus on boosting your career site’s conversion — and let your recruiters use their expertise to sift through all the top candidates applying.