Elvis Costello said it best: "One day you're going to have to face the deep dark truthful mirror. And it's going to tell you things I still love you too much to say."

Well I don't love you at all. I don't know you, so here goes: Your career site blows.

I talk with a lot of people from a lot of corporate recruiting organizations. And when it comes to discussing their career sites, conversations get cut short. "We know it sucks, we're really busy with other things. No time to focus on it."

"But you are sending all your potential candidates there and only converting 10% of your visitors to applicants," I say. "Really? Well, we can't focus on it right now. Maybe later," I often hear.

Honestly, most people I talk with know nothing of what happens on their career sites, even though it is the foundation of their entire recruiting effort.

Even the ones who have the means to measure it, at least on the surface, don't monitor their sites to understand the key online recruitment metrics and adjust their approach.

The recruiting function needs to pay attention to reality. The reality is that they have sunk a lot of money into career sites that at on one hand work beautifully and on the other hand sabotage their efforts to engage high value talent every day. 

It's so simple to fix, but they don't.

Why? Many reasons, none of them good:

"We did a brand overhaul already last year." Yes and it looks great. But you bolted it on top of a poorly designed navigation flow that buries your jobs, and an application process that kills any buzz built up by your employment branding work.

"We already have more candidates than we can handle." Yes, but your career site is designed so that only the most desperate will find and apply for a job. That's why you have such a hard time finding skilled, hard to fill positions.

"Our marketing department handles that." No they don't, obviously. I am a marketer and I can tell you that your marketing department spends nary a nanosecond of thought on your career site. Not unless you push them...hard.

"We know our application sucks but there's nothing we can do about it." Some ATS' are better than others, but you don't have to replace your ATS. There's always something you can do to improve what you have and most of the time, and your ATS provider usually has more bells and whistles than you know about or use.

"We didn't know that we lose 90% of our traffic." Well now you do.

Download this free white paper, "Five Keys to a Passive Candidate-Friendly Career Site." It tells you everything you need to know to whip your site into shape, why you need to do it. Take it to your recruiting leadership. Show it to your marketing department and web master and use it as the foundation of a blueprint to fix your flow and make your site a magnet for passive candidates.