Hiring freeze? 4 ways to supercharge your careers website

On January 20, 2025, The US Government issued a state-sanctioned hiring freeze set to last for 90 days, sending shockwaves across the American recruitment landscape. 

But hiring freezes aren’t new. Many organizations, particularly in times of economic uncertainty, pause hiring as a strategic measure. According to a recent report by intellizence, thousands of companies—including major players like Amazon and Airbus—have implemented hiring freezes in the past year alone.   

For candidates, these pauses in hiring can be frustrating. For companies, they’re a necessary measure to control costs, improve efficiency, and protect cashflow. But while hiring may be on hold, your recruitment strategy doesn’t have to be.  

Your careers website is your shop window. Even if your store is currently closed, potential customers—job seekers—are still browsing. Taking the time to optimize your careers website during a hiring freeze can help to boost visibility and increase engagement in the long run—so you’re ready to hit the ground running when hiring resumes.  

Here’s how to make the most of this time by supercharging your careers website:  

Transform your employer brand storytelling 

Storytelling is one of the most effective tools in your recruitment arsenal. But crafting compelling narratives takes time—making a hiring freeze the perfect opportunity to focus on it.  

Great stories come from clear purpose, strong emotion, and meaningful connection. They need to help candidates feel what it’s like to work at your company, so they need to be centered around human experiences.  

• Start by defining the purpose of your story—do you want to inspire, reassure, or challenge perceptions? 
• Then, focus on your audience—what do candidates care about beyond job titles and benefits? 
• Bring your careers website to life with protagonists—real employees sharing real experiences. 
• Capture the conflict or struggle they faced (a career pivot, imposter syndrome, a challenging project) and show their transformation—how they grew, found purpose, or made an impact. 
• And finally, make the call to action clear—whether it’s joining a talent community or engaging with content, make sure candidates have a compelling next step to follow during the hiring freeze. 

Following these steps will ensure your storytelling is strategic, engaging, and impactful. You’ll create undeniably compelling stories candidates will remember—ensuring they return to your careers site when hiring resumes.  

Struggling to craft compelling stories? Download our storytelling matrix—a tried-and-tested framework for creating stories that stick.  

Use behavioral insights to sharpen your hiring strategy 

When hiring is in full swing, recruitment teams are often too busy filling roles to take a step back and ask: Who are we actually trying to attract?.  

A hiring freeze is a great opportunity to build meaningful candidate personas—detailed representations of your ideal hires. 

Start by defining demographics: age, location, education, and experience level. Then, dive deeper into motivations: Are they looking to climb the corporate ladder, increase market exposure, or find work-life balance? What challenges might they be facing in their job search? 

Now you understand your personas’ key priorities and perspectives, you can harness real behavioral insights to refine your hiring strategy.  

Use Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager to track engagement across your careers website—from page visits to bounce rates. Identify friction points and use these insights to optimize content, application flows, and calls to action.  

For a more streamlined view, features like the Happydance analytics dashboard consolidate all the insights you need in one place—from on-page conversion insights to channel insights. By leveraging these insights, you can test, refine, and adapt your strategy based on real data—not guesswork.  

You’ll create a more personalized, engaging candidate experience that will not only attract top talent when hiring resumes, but also improve efficiency.   

Reimagine your candidate experience while hiring is paused 

A hiring freeze is the perfect opportunity to take a step back and refine your candidate experience—ensuring it’s even more impactful when hiring resumes.  

Map out each stage of the candidate journey to ensure a seamless and engaging experience. Every interaction—from job ads to application—should be consistently on-brand to help candidates feel connected to your company before they even apply. 

Then, take some time to focus on one of the most critical touchpoints in the journey: job descriptions. Instead of treating them as a list of responsibilities, incorporate empathy, curiosity, surprise, insight, and action to capture attention and help candidates imagine themselves in the role.  

To really stand out, highlight an unexpected aspect of the position that differentiates it from similar roles elsewhere—giving candidates a compelling reason to choose your organization over competitors.  

Finally, clearly define the Give & Get proposition. Candidates should not only understand the benefits, but what it takes to thrive in the role—such as resilience in the face of harsh realities and challenges.   

By using this time to refine your candidate journey, you’ll be better positioned to attract the right talent and drive better recruitment outcomes when it’s time to scale up again.  

Steal market share with stronger SEO 

If you want to dominate search results, it’s time to optimize your careers website for the way job seekers—and AI—search for information.  

• Focus on creating detailed, high-value content that addresses what candidates really want to know—such as role-specific insights, employee growth stories, and location-based pages.  
• Use conversational, question-based headings (e.g. What’s career growth like for software engineers at [your company]?) to match how people naturally search on both Google and GPTs.  
• Boost SEO performance by improving page speed, optimizing metadata, and ensuring mobile friendliness.  

By aligning your content strategy with AI-driven search trends and candidate intent, you’ll ensure your careers website ranks higher, reaches further, and attracts better applicants when you have live jobs again.

Turn this hiring freeze into an opportunity for long-term success 

Hiring may be on pause, but your talent strategy shouldn’t be. Now’s the time to focus on strategic storytelling, persona-driven insights, employer brand refinement, and SEO and GPT optimization to ensure you stand out when hiring resumes.  

But taking the time to strengthen your careers website today, you can position your company as a leading employer—so you’re ready to hire faster and smarter when the time comes.  

Want to discuss practical ways to supercharge your careers website?  

Get a free website audit to uncover opportunities for optimization. Our team will inspect every aspect of your careers website—from content to performance—and deliver a personalized report you can use to supercharge your site.