Companies make these mistakes on their career pages – Human Resources

If the spark doesn’t fly on the careers page, potential applicants quickly lose interest. What is important here in order to leave a credible impression and generate applications? Every year, the Cologne consulting agency NetFed examines the career pages of 50 top German companies with regard to their career communication and makes recommendations for the companies’ job portals. All DAX40 companies and ten other unlisted companies that are among the largest corporations in Germany in terms of sales and number of employees are examined.

The career pages were evaluated in three categories. Category A dealt with the “insight into the company” and examines how values, attitudes towards diversity, digitalization and the presentation of employees and company stories are communicated.

Under the title “Ability to dialogue”, information on dialogue and contact offers, social media channels used and additional information offers such as events or trade fairs were evaluated in category B. Category C finally dealt with the “application”. Here, the support in the job search, digital features, targeted target groups as well as accessibility and AI optimization of the career website were evaluated. The analysis of this year’s HR benchmark report was available to the human resources industry in advance.

Checklist for good career sites

According to NetFed, a good career website in 2026 will primarily be characterized by the following criteria:

Reliable figures are missing on career websites

In general, the experts classify the career pages of the 50 companies as more professional than ever before. Aspects important to applicants such as diversity, further training, work culture, work-life balance, benefits and transparent information about the application process can be found on most websites. But this is exactly where there is a problem:

“When I compare the career pages of the fifty largest German companies today, I read similar statements fifty times,” says Christian Berens, Managing Director of NetFed. “None of this distinguishes Company A from Company B. The real question is: How does a talent know the difference? This is exactly where many career gigs remain too vague.”

They could become more precise by providing tangible evidence – for example in the form of numbers that are mentioned. And this is exactly where companies have slacked off, according to the analysis.

DEI numbers are increasingly rarely mentioned on careers pages

Although all 50 career sites examined state that companies are concerned with diversity, only 32 percent show the proportion of women in the company. In particular, the key figures for women in leadership positions show a significant decline compared to the previous year: in 2025 the proportion was 52 percent, now it is only 30 percent. Information on the inclusion rate is even further behind at just 10 percent and only 8 percent of companies even name sources for their information.

The fact that numbers are handled more carefully – especially in the area of ​​diversity – could also be due to the DEI backlash and the aftermath of US President Donald Trump’s executive orders. Because of the executive orders, some companies have decided to no longer collect diversity numbers or share them publicly.

There is not enough concrete information on most career websites regarding equal pay, salary information and further information on fairness and comparability. If companies do not provide evidence of the culture they practice, a credibility gap arises, says NetFed. Finally, no information is provided that proves that the culture is really as described on the career pages.

How GEO-optimized are the career pages?

Concrete information is also preferred by the AI ​​when it searches for suitable job offers for users based on their prompts or search entries.

“AI systems compare, weight and recommend. They don’t prefer the prettiest statement, but the most reliable one,” says Berens. “Anyone who does not substantiate content will not only lose credibility in the future, but also visibility.”

Most companies already show technical skills here. 78 percent have current job advertisements and 70 percent use structured data that increases AI visibility and highlights content such as job advertisements, contact persons, events or frequently asked questions so that search engines can understand them better and display them more specifically.

This means that important requirements have already been met in order to achieve digital visibility and make tenders machine-readable. However, complete GEO optimization has not yet been achieved. When evaluating, AI is also based on strong trust signals, which can be guaranteed in particular through traceability, source management and reliable information.

In order to find out how GEO-optimized a company’s career pages are, the human resources industry has developed a free tool:

In addition, AI-related training is only visibly anchored in 18 percent of companies. Here too there is still room for improvement.

Career pages: Still not a consistently convincing candidate experience

The European Accessibility Act (EAA) should not be forgotten either. This came into force in June 2025. The regulation states that, among other things, companies must make their career websites barrier-free. NetFed’s investigation shows that the correct implementation is often missing. The career pages are already largely “much more structured, more understandable and more comprehensively explained than in previous surveys”, but the processes “would not automatically be easier, more accessible or more user-friendly”.

Many companies have already integrated comprehensive explanations or application tips into their application process, but in actual application they are often even more complicated than necessary. For example, there is a lack of low-threshold access or one-click applications. According to NetFed, the goal in the future should be not only to explain the complicated application processes, but also to consistently simplify them for applicants.

The career websites of the following companies are most likely to have met the criteria mentioned. The websites were evaluated based on 123 criteria. Information had to be discoverable within the first 30 seconds of viewing the page. A total of 1,000 points were achieved.

These are the top ten companies with the best career sites

Tonia Schöler is a volunteer at Human Resources.