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.

A group of American students and job-seekers was asked vote on the most satisfying company recruiting page. The winner? Deutsche Bank of Germany, for the second year in a row.

So what’s so great about it? One draw seems to be interactive videos of current employees talking about their experiences at the company, and how they like investment banking in general.

That may be impractical for small companies without a budget to shoot videos, but the site certainly has cues anyone can take. The most informative section is the FAQs, which more or less tells you everything you would possibly want to know about working for the company.

The highlight is the “Application FAQ,” which includes questions like “Is investment banking right for you?” “What should a candidate expect in a typical interview?” and “What’s the biggest mistake a candidate can make in an interview?”

And of course, it doesn’t hurt that the site is easy to navigate and plenty of pictures of smiling faces (presumably happy employees).