You are in HR or a hiring manager for the XYZ Company. When was the last time you did a simple Google search for 'XYZ Jobs' or 'XYZ Careers'? Don't lie, I will bet you have not done a search like that for quite a while. If you haven't for some time, go ahead right now and do the search, I'll wait here until you get back.
Okay, good. What did you find? Hopefully for you, your corporate jobs site came back at the top, or at least in the first two or three results on the first page. If your site is nowhere to be found, or is buried in the list and not easily recognizable as your jobs site, you have already, perhaps quite unwittingly put up the first hurdle for your applicants.
Here is a simple example of two really large organizations, FedEx and UPS, and how they rank with 'Company Name Jobs' searches.
First, take a look at what you find when searching for 'FedEx Jobs'
The link most job seekers are after, is the fifth result down, does not have much descriptive information to clue in the job seeker that it indeed, is the main corporate jobs page. It also has a long and confusing URL that has FedEx's ATS vendor's name (HodesIQ) embedded in the string. Altogether not intuitive and not applicant friendly.
Compare that result to the same search for one of FedEx's main competitors for business and for talent, UPS:
The main corporate job site is the first result, a simple tag line that makes it totally clear what the applicant will find there, and there are sub-links to important parts of the site clearly laid out (Application Center, Job Search). This is exactly the result you are looking for with a simple Google search on 'Company Jobs'.
The interesting thing is after you find the main careers site for both of these companies, they are really very similar. They both have the expected employee video testimonials, sections with 'Life at' content, reasonably simple search and application procedures.
They are pretty decent, save for the fact that one of them, UPS, is much, much easier to find quickly in Google search, and the other FedEx is not easy to find at all.
If you are like most, you spend quite a bit of time on your Corporate Jobs pages, making sure your instructions are clear, your links to benefits information and job listings are working, and maybe even making sure you have some nice employee testimonials and perhaps some cool video. You may have even partnered with a slick new ATS vendor that has enabled 'social sharing' so visitors to your site can easily share a job listing with their Facebook friends, or LinkedIn contacts, or maybe even send a Tweet with the listing out to everyone's favorite social network, Twitter.
But before you do all that, take a quick look at the simple Google search I described above. You may be spending time, effort, and budget on sites and systems that many job seekers will have trouble finding.
And if your results are more like FedEx and less like UPS, then do another Google search, for 'Search Engine Optimization', don't worry, you will get tons of hits on that - I promise.