You are buying leads for work you cannot staff. The page that fixes that is a mailto link.

Every page on your site is built to bring in more work. Then somebody asks whether you could actually take on another twenty jobs a month, and the room goes quiet.

The page that would fix that is usually an email address in the footer.

Which constraint are you buying

This is worth being blunt about, since we sell the other thing.

If your calendar is full and your problem is that you cannot put a third van on the road, more enquiries do not help you. They queue, they wait longer for a quote, and some of them go elsewhere while you look busy. Spending on lead generation into a staffing bottleneck converts marketing budget into slower response times.

For a lot of trades right now, the growth page on the website is the recruiting page. That is an unusual thing for an agency to say and it is the honest reading of most of the businesses we talk to.

What a good one contains

Not your mission. The reader is a person with a job already, deciding whether yours is less annoying.

So: what the pay actually is, in a range rather than as competitive. What the hours are and how often they are not those hours. Whether they get their own truck. Who they would be working with, and whether they will be sent out alone in the first month. What the vehicle policy is, what happens with tools, and how call-outs work at the weekend.

That is the same argument as the About page, aimed at a different reader. Specifics rather than adjectives, because every competitor also claims to be a great place to work, and a claim everybody makes carries no information. The photographs do double duty here too, since the pictures that reassure a customer about who turns up also tell a candidate who they would be standing next to.

The markup nobody in the trades uses

There is a documented way to put a job into Google's job search experience, and it is not reserved for companies with a recruiting department.

Google says you can improve the job seeking experience by adding JobPosting structured data to your job posting pages, and the feature is available across all of North America. The required properties are modest: the date posted, a full description, the hiring organization, and the job title, with a country included in the location.

The documentation states no minimum number of openings. One role qualifies.

The obligation attached to it

This is the part that makes a careers page different from every other page you own.

Google says jobs no longer open for applications must be expired, and gives three ways to do it: set the validThrough date in the past, remove the page so it returns a 404 or 410, or take the structured data off. That is a maintenance duty with a deadline, which nothing else on your website has.

It is also the failure everybody makes. A careers page advertising a role that was filled in 2024 wastes the time of the people you most want to hear from, and tells them something about how the company runs before they have met anybody. Same problem as a dormant social account, with a higher cost.

What the page cannot do

Markup does not fix an offer.

If the pay is below the market and the weekends are unpredictable, a well-structured page will simply deliver that news more efficiently to more people. The page is a distribution problem solved; it is not a substitute for the thing being distributed.

And it competes with a channel you already have, because the best hire most trades make comes through somebody on the crew. Worth asking them before you write anything, and worth remembering that a page showing your actual people is what they will forward.

If you are turning work away and your careers page is a mailto link, book a strategy call. It is the cheapest page on the site to build and the one most likely to change what next year looks like.