The company’s “Careers” Web page is one of HR’s most powerful recruiting tools. But that doesn’t mean all of them are designed to make the biggest impact.

Not putting the proper care into building the page could cost a company some qualified candidates — after all, no matter how applicants hear about a job, they’ll almost always head to the company’s Web site before doing anything.

Here are four big mistakes many companies make on their Careers Web page, according to CTO Joe Rotella, speaking at the 2009 Society for Human Resources Management conference in New Orleans:

1. Using a generic e-mail address to collect applications — People want to talk to people, Rotella says. It looks better to the candidate if the company lists the HR manager or a recruiter’s address instead of “hr@company.com.”
2. Hiding the important information — The most useful or most interesting information should appear on a page before the user has to scroll. Keeping the pages arranged correctly involves working with IT to test the site on different browsers and configurations.
3. Ignoring what the audiences wants – The key question when making any decision about the site should be, “What does the target audience want to see.”
4. Dumping all the information into an FAQ section – Rotella calls FAQs the “junk drawer of the Web.” All relevant info should have already appeared in other sections, he said.

Tags: careers site, Joe Rotella, SHRM, Web page