A candidate has searched for a role, seen your agency's name, and decided you look like the kind of specialist who might actually place them. They click through to your website, ready to apply.
And then one of two things happens.
That candidate doesn't email you to complain. They don't fill in a form to tell you they couldn't find anything. They just leave, and go and look at someone else. This is what makes it such an expensive problem: it produces no evidence.
If you're investing in paid search, sponsored job ads, social, employer brand work, or SEO, you are spending money and effort to get candidates to your website. Every one of those channels is designed to deliver someone to a page where they can act.
If your live roles aren't on that page, or can't be found on it, the spend still happens. The click still happens. The intent still exists. It just evaporates at the final step.
Organic traffic makes the loss even more significant. Candidates arriving from Google or AI tools like ChatGPT or Gemini already know what they're looking for. They have intent. If they can't quickly find a relevant live vacancy, they'll simply move on.
In our experience, agencies almost never make a decision to leave their website empty.
The jobs live in idibu and the CRM. The website is somewhere else. Getting a role from one to the other is a manual step, and manual steps are the first thing to go when a consultant is busy.
So the job goes out to the boards, because that's where the pressure is. The website gets it later, or not at all. Multiply that across a team over a quarter and the pattern becomes clear: it isn't that anyone forgot once, it’s that the workflow relies on somebody remembering every single time.
The same thing happens in reverse when a role is filled. Removing it from the website is another manual step, so filled roles sit there for weeks.
An empty careers page is a missed opportunity. A stale one actively works against you.
Candidates are quick to draw conclusions. A role posted two months ago is assumed to be gone. A page full of roles like that suggests an agency that isn't especially busy, or isn't especially careful, and that impression carries over to how seriously your live roles get taken.
Search engines and AI systems reach much the same conclusion, for different reasons. Freshness is one of the clearest relevance signals in recruitment, because it correlates so directly with whether a role is genuinely open. A job posted hours ago is probably live. A job posted months ago probably isn't. Systems that curate and recommend opportunities weight accordingly.
Trustworthiness is also a technical signal, not just a brand one. Accurate, current job data reinforces it. Expired roles left sitting on a site erode it. And in a high-trust category like recruitment, AI systems are selective about which sources they surface at all.
Stripped back, there are four things:
None of that requires a new website. It requires the site to be connected to the system where your jobs already live.
It's a lightweight code snippet that goes onto a page on your existing website. Your live vacancies pull through from your idibu account automatically - along with your categories, locations and filters, set up the way you already have them. When something changes in idibu, it changes on your site. Applications come straight back into idibu and into your CRM.
Practically, that means:
Three display options cover most preferences: a stacked list, a grid, or a carousel for highlighting a handful of roles on a homepage.
Most of the work of candidate attraction is genuinely hard. Getting your live jobs onto your own website shouldn’t have to be.
If your careers page isn't currently showing your live roles, that's the easiest and cheapest improvement available to you this quarter.
Speak to your idibu account manager, or email am@idibu.com and we'll walk you through it.
Get in touch and we'll show you how idibu handles distribution, candidate response and your website in one place.
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