How to build a career site RFP: the criteria that actually matter

Most career site RFPs are built backwards. Procurement teams copy criteria from the last cycle, add a few rows about "AI features," and send it out. Vendors respond with polished decks, inflated feature lists, and case studies cherry-picked to match whatever criteria you listed. Everyone looks capable on paper.

Six months later, you are raising IT tickets to change a job posting, your mobile application rate is flat, and the "dedicated support" you were promised has become a shared inbox.

The problem is not the RFP process. The problem is that most evaluation criteria do not reflect what actually determines long-term success with a careers site platform. This guide outlines the criteria that do, and the red flags that signal which vendors to remove from your shortlist.

See how Happydance scores against each of these criteria

The criteria that actually matter

1. ATS integration depth

Your careers site lives or dies by its connection to your applicant tracking system. Ask vendors not just whether they integrate with your ATS, but how. A real integration means job postings sync automatically, candidate data flows cleanly in both directions, and application rates are traceable back to source. What you want to avoid is a workaround that requires manual exports, causes data loss between systems, or breaks every time either platform updates.

Ask for a technical integration specification, a list of supported ATS platforms, and confirmation of how frequently integration health is monitored post-launch. See how Happydance handles ATS integration.

2. Time to launch

The industry standard for a full careers site implementation is two to four months. Some vendors stretch this to six. Every month your old site stays live is another month of underperforming candidate conversion, missed applications, and employer brand inconsistency. Ask every vendor for a documented implementation timeline with milestone accountability, not just a headline number.

The best-performing platforms deliver a fully launched, ATS-integrated careers site in or fewer. If a vendor cannot commit to that or explain why theirs takes longer, treat that as a significant gap worth pushing on before you advance them.

3. Mobile optimisation

According to Gartner's 2025 research, career sites account for 60% of total applications. Yet most enterprise careers sites were not designed mobile-first; they were desktop builds adapted for smaller screens. The difference in candidate experience is real. A truly mobile-optimised site means the apply flow, job search, content pages, and media all render properly on a phone without pinching, loading delays, or broken forms.

Ask vendors to walk you through a live apply flow on mobile, not just show you a screenshot. Ask specifically whether their platform is mobile-first by architecture, or mobile-responsive by adaptation.

These are not the same thing.

4. Content control and design flexibility

One of the most underestimated costs of a poor careers site vendor is the time your team loses waiting for updates. If your team has to raise a support ticket to change a job posting, update a hero image, or add a new page, that is not a technology problem. That is a workflow problem that compounds weekly.

A proprietary CMS with genuine content control means your talent acquisition and employer brand teams can manage the site without IT involvement. Evaluate this by asking for a live walkthrough of the editor, not a demo video.

Ask directly: what can your team change without submitting a ticket?

See what direct content control looks like in practice.

5. Support model, not just SLA hours

"24/7 support" means very little if what you receive is a shared ticketing queue with a multi-week resolution time. The support question in your RFP should go beyond availability hours and ask about the model itself:

• Is support tiered?
• Is there a named contact?
• Can you escalate design and content requests, or only technical faults?

High-performing platforms operate a concierge model. That means a named team that knows your site, your brand, and your tech stack, and can act on requests without starting from scratch every time.

Ask for the:

• average first-response time
• average resolution time
• percentage of requests resolved in the first interaction

Learn about the Happydance support concierge.

6. Candidate experience analytics

You need to know more than how many people visited your careers site. You need to know where they dropped off, which job pages converted and which did not, how your mobile apply rate compares to desktop, and whether your content is moving candidates toward application or away from it.

Ask vendors for a live demo of their analytics dashboard, not a slideshow. Ask specifically whether the platform can surface conversion rate by job page, time-on-site data, and application completion rates.

According to Withe's 2024 job application research, 92% of candidates who click "Apply" never complete the process. That kind of drop-off is rarely an accident; it reflects sites that were never measured at the page level. See what Happydance analytics surfaces.

7. Migration support and content transition

Switching careers site platforms means moving existing content, rebuilding page structures, and preserving SEO equity across redirects. Vendors who downplay this either lack experience with enterprise migrations or are not planning to be accountable for the outcome.

Ask for a documented migration process, a named migration lead, and their specific approach to maintaining search engine authority during the transition. A vendor that cannot answer these questions in detail has probably not done this at scale.

Red flags in vendor proposals

Not all RFP responses tell you what you actually need to know. These are the patterns worth watching for.

Vague AI claims. "AI-powered" is not a differentiator anymore. Ask when AI capabilities were built into the platform, what they specifically do, and whether you can see them working in a live environment. Features announced in the last 12 months are not the same as capabilities built into the platform's architecture over years of development.

Implementation timelines without milestones. A vendor who says "eight to twelve weeks" without a week-by-week breakdown does not have a repeatable process. Implementation delays almost always trace back to a lack of structured methodology, not client complexity.

Support described in hours, not models. If the entire support section of a proposal describes availability hours but says nothing about who handles your account, how escalations work, or what "support" actually covers, that is a gap to push on before you sign.

Careers site features buried inside an ATS. Some of the largest platforms in this market sell careers site capabilities as a module within an applicant tracking system. That means the careers site is not the core product; it is an add-on. Decisions about your site follow the ATS roadmap, not a standalone careers site team with dedicated product investment. Purpose-built platforms have a fundamentally different relationship with your long-term site performance.

Proposals heavy on screenshots, light on process. A polished deck with generic statistics tells you nothing about what working with that vendor looks like six months in. Ask for a reference call with a client at the same company size, in the same industry. Ask that client what they wish they had known before signing. Read Happydance customer experiences.

See how Happydance scores on your criteria

Book a Happydance demo and bring your shortlist. We will walk through each of these criteria live, so you can evaluate exactly what your candidates would experience from day one.

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