An owner of a 40 person contracting firm told me he had lost three good hires in a year to a competitor who paid the same money. His conclusion was that the market was broken. My question was what a candidate finds when they look him up.

His website had a services page from 2019, a contact form, and no photographs of anyone who worked there. His careers page listed two job titles with a paragraph each, ending with the line send your resume to info@. His competitor had twelve short staff profiles, photos of job sites, and a page explaining how they train apprentices.

The market was not broken. One of those two companies looked like a place a person could build a career and the other looked like an email address.

Candidates research you the same way buyers do

Anyone considering a job at your company runs the same process a prospective customer runs. They search your name. They read your website. They check LinkedIn to see who works there and how long people stay. They look for reviews. They ask someone in their network whether they have heard of you. Increasingly they ask an AI assistant what your company does and what it is like to work there, and take that summary as a starting point.

The difference from a customer is the stakes and the information gap. A customer can sign a contract with an escape clause. A candidate is choosing where to spend forty hours a week for the next several years, with almost no information beyond what you have published and what strangers have said.

That is why silence reads badly. When a candidate finds nothing about your company, they do not conclude you are modest. They conclude you are small, struggling, or not worth the risk, and they apply somewhere that gave them something to hold on to.

In Metro Vancouver this matters more than it did five years ago. A skilled tradesperson, an experienced estimator, or a good accountant has options, and the cost of living here means they are comparing more than the salary. They are comparing whether your company looks like it will still be here in five years and whether they will learn anything.

What a job seeker finds when they search your company

Five places, roughly in this order, and each one has a common failure.

Your website. The failure is that it addresses only buyers, so a candidate cannot tell how many people work there, what the work is actually like, or whether anyone has stayed. A site with no people on it is a site nobody wants to join.

Your LinkedIn company page. The failure is a page with 80 followers, a logo, and no post since 2023. Candidates read post frequency as a proxy for whether a business is active and growing.

The LinkedIn profiles of your staff. This one you influence rather than control, and it carries real weight. A candidate checks how long people have been there. Five people with six-plus years each is the single strongest recruiting signal a small company can have, and it costs nothing to make visible.

Review sites and Google reviews. Candidates read customer reviews for evidence of how a company treats people, since a firm that treats customers badly rarely treats staff well.

An AI assistant. This is newer and it is now common. Somebody asks a chat tool what your company does and whether it is a good employer, and the answer is assembled from whatever public material exists. If the only public material is a thin website, the answer is thin. If your details differ between your site, your Google listing and your LinkedIn page, the summary comes out confused. Keeping those consistent is a maintenance job, and the same work that helps AI tools describe your business correctly to buyers helps them describe it correctly to candidates.

The careers page most small companies have

It lists the open roles. That is the entire page.

This is the weakest possible version, because it only works on a person who has already decided to apply. It does nothing for the larger group: people who are quietly open to a move, who heard your name from a friend, and who are deciding in ninety seconds whether to keep reading.

The second weakest version is the one with three stock photos and a paragraph about how people are our greatest asset. Every candidate has read that sentence on forty websites. It carries no information, which makes it worse than blank space because it also signals that nobody put effort in.

A careers page also has a job when you have no openings. Good people look before they need to move. A page that tells them what it is like to work there, with a line saying you are always interested in hearing from experienced estimators, collects candidates for the opening you will have in four months.

What the careers page should say instead

Six things, and none of them require a budget.

How many people work there and how long they have been there. Say it plainly: 38 people, and 11 have been here more than five years. A number a candidate can check against LinkedIn is more convincing than any adjective.

What the work is actually like on a normal day. Not the mission. The day. What time it starts, what the projects look like, how much of it is field versus office, who you work alongside. Candidates are trying to picture themselves in the job and most pages give them nothing to picture.

What you pay, or at least a range. Job postings in British Columbia are now expected to include pay information, and the practice has spread beyond the legal requirement because candidates filter out postings without it. Hiding the range costs you applicants before anyone speaks.

How someone grows there. What the last three promotions were. Whether you pay for tickets, certifications, or courses. This is the question that separates a job from a career and most small firms have a genuinely good answer they never wrote down.

Photographs of real people in the real workplace. Not stock. A candidate looking at your actual shop, your actual office, your actual crew, gets more information in three seconds than from six paragraphs.

A named person to contact, with an email that is a human name. The send it to info@ line tells a candidate their application goes into a void, which is often accurate and always discouraging.

One piece of content, two audiences

Owners resist this work because it sounds like building a second marketing programme for a different audience. In practice most of what you already make serves both, with a small change in framing.

A project write-up aimed at customers shows the result. The same write-up with two sentences about which crew did it, what was difficult, and how they solved it becomes a recruiting asset, because a candidate reads it as evidence of interesting work and a team that gets credit.

A post about a technical problem your industry is dealing with proves expertise to a buyer and signals to a candidate that they would learn something working there. Skilled people want to work with people who are better than them.

A photo set from a site visit or a shop floor serves a sales page and a careers page equally well.

The practical move is to add one line to your content process: when something gets published, ask whether it should also appear on the careers page or be shared by staff. That costs a minute and roughly doubles the audience for work you were doing anyway. If you are building a content process from scratch, the structure in the content engine guide works the same way for both audiences.

What to do about review sites

For a company under 50 people, employer review sites hold a handful of reviews at most, and one unhappy former employee can dominate the page. Owners either ignore this or panic about it, and both reactions cost something.

My position is straightforward. Read what is there. If a criticism is accurate, fix the underlying problem, because a fixed problem stops generating new reviews and an unfixed one does not. Respond once, briefly and without defensiveness, to anything factually wrong. Then stop.

Do not run a campaign asking staff to post positive reviews. Candidates recognise a burst of five-star reviews in one week, and the pattern damages you more than the original complaint. What works is asking departing people who leave on good terms whether they would be willing to write something honest. Some will.

Google reviews from customers matter here too, and they are easier to influence legitimately. A steady flow of customer reviews signals an active, decent business to candidates as well as buyers.

When the owner's own profile is the recruiting asset

At companies under 30 people, the owner's personal presence outperforms the company page, and by a wide margin.

The reason is simple. Candidates at a small firm are choosing a boss more than a brand. They want to know whether the person running it is competent, fair, and going somewhere. A company page cannot answer that. A person posting regularly about the work, the industry, and the decisions they are facing answers it every week.

Practically, that means the owner posting on LinkedIn once a week about real things: a problem the company solved, something they changed their mind about, a person they hired and why. Job openings posted by an owner reach more of the right people than the same post from a company page, because it arrives in feeds with a face attached.

This overlaps with the sales benefit of an owner being visible, which is why I treat it as one activity rather than two. For a family business in particular the owner's presence carries added weight, and that dynamic is covered in the post on marketing a family-owned company.

The takeaway

Search your own company name and read the first page of results as a candidate would. Then look at your careers page and ask whether a good estimator with three options would pick you based on what is there.

Fix the careers page first, with real numbers, real photos, a pay range, and a named contact. Then add one line to your content process so the work you already publish reaches both audiences. Hiring is a decision a stranger makes with limited information, and giving them more of it is marketing work whether or not marketing is the department that owns it.