Too often, HR departments get stuck with a careers page or section of their company's website that is: hard to find, difficult to update, and doesn't offer job candidates much in the way of information or functionality. Sometimes the address to go to the careers area is absurdly long, e.g. www.companyx.com/content_pages/hr_dept/careers/open_positions.html. Other times, the career page or pages can be buried within the website's navigation menu, making them difficult for even a web savvy user to locate.

That's why a standalone career website can be a terrific way to meet the recruitment needs of your organization. At Mary Pomerantz Advertising, we recently helped to launch a career website for Suburban Propane. This new career website makes it easier for prospective job candidates to quickly locate Suburban's current career openings. In addition, the new career website will help Suburban's HR department to build their recruitment brand.

Located at suburbanpropane.jobs, this site incorporates a number of innovative features that help to make it a very successful recruitment tool. The first of these is the unique ".jobs" domain that identifies it as a recruitment site and helps it rise to the top of search results when job prospects look for jobs online.

Since it is a standalone career site, it can also have a much larger number of pages than the career area on a traditional corporate site. At Suburban they chose to include a number of pages such as "Our History", "Our Mission", "Career Development", and "The Suburban Way", in addition to the listing of openings that is found on many sites. This enabled them to describe facets of their company such as their commitment to community service that gave a much fuller picture of their company culture to prospective employees.

The site was also designed to be easily updated and expanded by Suburban's HR staff. This was accomplished through the design of a content management system that lets employees edit content and even add pages and features to the site through an easy-to-use web browser interface. This system is also integrated with their current applicant tracking system, making it a breeze to keep track of applicants and positions without having to enter data multiple times into different systems. The content management system is so simple to use that the HR staff was up and running on the system after only a 45 minute online video conference walkthrough with the Mary Pomerantz Advertising web development team.

At Mary Pomerantz Advertising, we know that HR departments have numerous responsibilities placed upon them – and shrinking time and budgets to work with. That's why we are so pleased when we can design work-saving web sites that help our HR colleagues get their jobs done quickly and effectively.