Search for a role you advertised two years ago and there is a fair chance the page is still there — still catalogued, still describing a vacancy that was filled long before, still the first thing a candidate finds when they look up that job title alongside your company name. Nobody deleted it because nobody owns expired content.
Every employer that recruits continuously generates pages with a shelf life. A vacancy is accurate for six weeks and wrong for the following six years. Events, seasonal offers and application deadlines behave the same way. In a company that has been hiring steadily through a period of growth, the expired material eventually outnumbers the current material — and it competes with it for exactly the same searches.
Current, expired, and forgotten
Declining figures are not how anyone finds out. What surfaces instead is a complaint — an applicant mentions having replied to what turned out to be a long-closed post, or somebody in recruitment stumbles across their own advertisement from three years ago ranking above the live one. In both cases it gets filed as a one-off. It is nothing of the sort: it is simply what a careers area does when it was built to publish and never given any way to retire anything.
| Type of page | Useful for | Catalogued for |
|---|---|---|
| Open vacancy | Four to eight weeks | Years |
| Careers fair announcement | Until the date passes | Years |
| Application deadline notice | Weeks | Years |
| Role description without a vacancy | Indefinitely | Indefinitely |
The fourth row is the exception and the opportunity. A page describing what a particular role involves at your company — the work, the team, the tools, the progression — does not expire, answers a question candidates ask long before any vacancy exists, and almost nobody publishes one. The first three rows expire and are published constantly.
How a page gets reached at all
Links from pages already known
The usual mechanism. Anything a step or two from a well-known page tends to be picked up; anything only reachable from an expired listing is a different matter.
- Depends entirely on structure
- Expired pages keep their links
Handing over an explicit list
Useful when a careers section is newly built, when postings move to a different system, or when hundreds of expired pages have just been retired.
- Works regardless of depth
- Bounded by a daily ceiling
Expired pages create a specific structural problem that is easy to miss. They accumulate inbound links — from job boards, from social posts, from candidates sharing them — and those links keep pointing at a page describing a role nobody can apply for. That accumulated standing is not lost when the page is handled properly; it is lost when the page is deleted outright, which is what usually happens once somebody finally notices the mess.
What the system will accept, and how quickly
Daily rate and batch size
Worth knowing chiefly because clearing out a careers section moves a great many addresses in one go.
- The ceiling belongs to the account. A thousand addresses a day covers everything inside it. A main site and a separate applicant system draw from the same pool.
- Ten thousand addresses per batch. Accepted in full and processed against the daily ceiling, which puts ten thousand at roughly two working weeks.
- Two batches active, twenty held back. Filing several changes at once means setting the order yourself or letting filing time decide it.
- Nesting to three levels, up to a thousand sitemap files per batch. Generous for a careers area of any plausible size — as long as something genuinely points at the index files.
What a careers clean-up actually costs
Less than expected, which is the useful part.
- Four hundred expired postings clear in a single day. Capacity is not the constraint at this scale, which means a stalled clean-up has some other cause and should be investigated elsewhere.
- Believing each domain brings its own allowance. Running a corporate site alongside a recruitment platform leads people to plan for two thousand daily. The figure does not move: it remains one thousand between them.
- Resubmitting the whole careers section weekly. An automated job that files everything on every publication fills the twenty waiting slots inside a day.
- Filing before the redirects are decided. Every expired address needs a destination before it is filed, or the filing has to be repeated.
For a company of this size that is a reassuring finding. The ceilings that genuinely constrain large sites are not the binding factor here, so if a page has been waiting to appear for months, the answer is not more capacity — it is the page itself. That is a far shorter investigation and it almost always produces a result.
It is also worth being clear about what these ceilings are not. They are not a quality signal, and staying below them earns nothing. They are a scheduling constraint of the same kind as a payroll cut-off or a print deadline, and they deserve the same treatment: know the throughput, order the work by importance, and do not queue what does not need to run.
Retire, redirect, or replace
Deleting an expired posting throws away whatever standing it accumulated, and after two years on job boards that is rarely nothing. Leaving it live means a candidate finds a role they cannot apply for. Neither is right, and the correct answer depends on whether the role recurs.
| Situation | Treatment | Reasoning |
|---|---|---|
| Role you hire for regularly | Turn it into a standing role description | The question outlives the vacancy |
| Role filled, unlikely to recur | Redirect to the careers overview | Keeps the standing, ends the confusion |
| Event that has passed | Redirect to the current events page | Nobody wants last year's date |
| Deadline notice | Redirect and stop publishing these | They expire faster than anything else |
Recording that policy where the whole team can see it — rather than leaving it in one person's head — stops the next recruiter from publishing another dated page out of habit. A shared view in the same environment that holds the coverage data works for this, since the rule and its effects then sit next to each other.
The first row is where most of the value sits and it is a content decision rather than a technical one. A standing description of a role — what the work actually involves, who you work with, what the first six months look like — is useful whether or not a vacancy is open, accumulates standing continuously instead of expiring, and answers the question candidates ask while they are still deciding whether to consider you. Converting the five roles you hire for most often is a week of writing and permanently removes the expiry problem for those five.
Pages that answer a lasting question
Standing role descriptions, relocation information, how the pay structure works, what the first months look like.
- A handful of them
- File deliberately
Anything with a date attached
Individual vacancies, event announcements, deadline notices. Correct for weeks, misleading thereafter.
- Hundreds of them over time
- Redirect when they expire
Recruiting teams sometimes resist the second column, and the objection is understandable: every posting was real and somebody put work into it. The counter-argument is not sentimental. A closed vacancy that outranks the open one costs applications directly, and a candidate who reaches a dead posting rarely goes looking for the live version — they conclude the company is not hiring and move on. Nothing is being discarded; the address survives and points somewhere useful.
When the careers section lives somewhere else
Applicant tracking systems typically host the vacancy pages themselves, on their own address. That is convenient for the recruiting team and creates a familiar situation: a substantial part of what candidates search for sits on a property the company does not control, under a name that is not its own.
- Ask whether it can run under your own address. Most providers can put the careers pages on a subdomain of yours. It is minutes of work at their end and is usually not done because nobody asks.
- Where it cannot, publish the answers on your own site. The application form can live anywhere. The role description, the relocation information and the salary range belong on a page you control, because those are what gets searched for.
- Link both ways. Your page links to the application, the application system links back. Without that, neither supports the other and both are weaker than one would have been.
- Check what the provider does with expired postings. Some remove them immediately, discarding the accumulated standing; others leave them live forever. Both are wrong, and neither is your decision unless you ask.
The second point is the workable answer in most cases and it inverts the usual arrangement. Instead of treating the applicant system as the careers section and your own site as a signpost to it, treat your own site as the place where questions are answered and the applicant system purely as the form. Keeping track of which roles have a page in one workspace stops a project of that size from stalling halfway through.
Redirects from three years of hiring
A careers section that has been through one system migration accumulates redirect chains nobody deliberately created. The migration pointed old posting addresses at the new system; a later restructure pointed the new system's addresses somewhere else again. What remains are addresses passing through two or three stops.
At this scale the wasted capacity barely registers, which is why the problem gets ignored here. The reason to fix it anyway is different: every chain slows the page down for the candidate, and a chain routed through an address belonging to a system you no longer use will eventually end nowhere at all. Collapsing them is an afternoon and belongs in the same week as the expiry clean-up.
Establishing that anything changed
Submitting an address amounts to asking; it secures nothing. Confirmation arrives in exactly one form — the address showing up in the reporting with impressions beside it — and several weeks pass before that happens. The interval in between yields no information whatever, and it is in that interval that people, out of sheer impatience, submit the very same address again and again, burning allowance to no purpose.
A procedure that holds up: submit the address a single time, leave it entirely alone for seven days, and only then look at whether coverage moved. Should a fortnight elapse with a properly submitted address still missing, the fault has shifted to the page and away from the mechanism. Three explanations account for nearly all such cases — no internal link points at it, the same text sits under a second address, or the body only materialises in the browser after loading. Tracking it through a connected environment reveals which of the three is in play, and does so without anybody keeping a spreadsheet alongside.
Arranging the steps so each one counts
Order counts for more here than in most projects, because each stage invalidates measurements taken before it. Handing pages over before the expiry policy exists wastes the handover; reading reports before establishing that pages are delivered at all rests the reading on an incomplete record.
| Step | Task | Effort |
|---|---|---|
| One | Confirm careers text ships in the delivered source | A morning |
| Two | List every posting published in the last five years | An hour from the system |
| Three | Write standing descriptions for the five recurring roles | A week |
| Four | Redirect the rest, one hop each | An afternoon |
| Five | File the standing descriptions, most-searched first | Minutes |
The opening step is a technical review matter and permits no postponement, because every later stage stands on its result. Establishing which job titles and which relocation topics people are genuinely searching — and hence which descriptions deserve writing first — is the province of keyword research, not of whichever post happens to be hard to fill this month. Shaping those into pages that inform rather than sell falls under content strategy. With a single account behind all three, the sequence holds together on its own: whatever one stage produces is on screen for the next.
Check which of your postings are still being found
Questions from recruiting and IT
Should we delete expired vacancy pages?
No. Deletion discards the standing they built up on job boards and in shared links, which after two years is rarely nothing. Redirect each one, in a single hop, to the careers overview or to a standing description of that role. That ends the confusion for candidates and keeps what the page had accumulated.
What is a standing role description?
A page describing what a particular role involves at your company — the work, the team, the tools, the first six months — independent of whether a vacancy is open. It does not expire, it answers what candidates ask while still deciding whether to consider you, and the current vacancy is attached to it rather than replacing it.
Does each of our domains get its own thousand a day?
One allowance covers all of them. It is granted to the account rather than to any individual domain, which means the corporate site and the recruitment platform are drinking from the same well. Tidying a careers section seldom runs into that wall, since four hundred addresses go through inside twenty-four hours — but if something bigger is under way in parallel, somebody still has to say how the day is divided.
Our vacancies sit on the applicant system's own address. Can we change that?
Often yes. Most providers will host the careers pages on a subdomain of your own domain; it is a small change at their end and usually goes unmade because nobody requests it. Where it genuinely cannot be done, put the role descriptions and relocation information on your own site and leave the application form where it is.
Should we file a submission every time we publish a vacancy?
For the standing descriptions when they change, yes. For individual vacancy pages it is rarely worth it — they expire before the effort pays off, which is the argument for standing descriptions in the first place. An automation that files on every publication just fills the queue with entries that will be obsolete before they matter.
Two weeks after handing a page over it still has not appeared. Why?
At that stage the handover is not the cause. Check three things about the page: whether anything on the site links to it, whether identical wording sits at a second address, and whether the content is part of the delivered document or built afterwards. On a careers section the first is the usual answer, because those pages are often linked only from a list that itself is not linked from anywhere.
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