Switching Your Careers Website Provider: A 90-Day Plan

Why teams switch (and when to act)

Most teams do not choose to change careers website provider. The provider is acquired, a product is retired, a contract comes up for renewal, or the website simply stops keeping pace with the hiring plan.

The good news is that a provider change is a normal, well-understood project. The bad news is that the first few weeks decide whether it goes smoothly, and most of the risk sits in things nobody checks until it is too late: who owns the content, how the URLs will carry over and what happens to the job feed on the day of the switch.

Decide: separate, replace or rebuild?

There are three real options, and the right one depends on where the problem sits. Answer six questions in the tool below for a steer, then read the table.

Our guide to careers website vs ATS career page explains the first option in detail.

First 7 days: read your contract and protect your data

Do these before you tell anyone you are leaving. They cost little, protect your position and keep every option open.

1. Read the contract. Find the term, renewal date, notice period, price increase cap, and the clauses on termination, transition and data return. Diarise the last date you can give notice.
2. Check ownership in writing. Confirm you own your content, images, design assets, domain and URLs. If anything is unclear, ask now, in writing.
3. Request your exports. Ask for a full export of pages, media, translations, forms and consent records. Put the request in writing and note any fee.
4. Confirm access. Make sure you hold the domain registrar, DNS, analytics, tag manager and Search Console logins, not just the provider.
5. Capture a baseline. Crawl the whole website, and record traffic, applications, page speed and accessibility results so you can prove the new site is better.

The easiest migration is the one where you checked who owned everything in week one.

Happydance

Days 8 to 30: scope and select

Use the first month to turn a reaction into a decision. Write down what you need, ask vendors to prove it and decide with evidence.

• Goals. Write the top three outcomes: for example more applications, faster publishing, better mobile performance or more languages.
• Must-haves. Keep the list short. Editing without a developer, brand control, applicant tracking system integration, SEO and accessibility are common.
• Timeline. Work backwards from your end of life or notice date. Give yourself margin.
• Panel. Include employer brand, talent acquisition operations, an editor, IT or security and procurement.

Run a structured selection with the same questions for every vendor. Our free careers website RFP template has 80 questions, a weighted scorecard and a demo script. If you are earlier in the process, the careers website CMS checklist will help you build a shortlist.

Happydance careers websites are live for brands including Ingram Micro, Criteo, Domino's, National Grid and General Motors. Read how they run theirs in our customer experiences.

Ask every vendor how long migration takes, who does the work, and what a typical customer of your size needs from you. A realistic answer is a few months, not a few weeks, and it depends largely on how fast you approve designs and content.

Days 31 to 60: build and migrate

The middle of the project is where most of the work, and most of the risk, sits. Run the streams in parallel and review them weekly.

1. DesignTemplates and components in your brand, tested on phones first.
2. ContentMigrate priority pages, rewrite weak ones and retire the rest.
3. JobsBuild the job feed and the application route to your ATS.
4. SEORedirect map, metadata, structured data and sitemaps.
5. QualityAccessibility, speed and cross-device testing before sign-off.

Content: migrate, rewrite or retire

For the technical side of the move, follow our careers website migration checklist. It covers crawling, redirects, staging and post-launch checks in detail.

Job feed continuity

Candidates do not care which system holds the jobs. They care that a job they saw yesterday is still there today. Build and test the feed on staging, run the old and new feeds side by side before launch, and agree how expired jobs are handled so you never serve a dead page that still looks live.

Structured data matters here too: job posting markup, valid dates and a clean sitemap help search engines pick up the new site quickly. See the JobPosting schema guide.

Days 61 to 90: launch, redirect and monitor

Launch is not the finish line. Done well, the switch is invisible to candidates and the following two weeks are about proving it.

• Staging sign-off from employer brand, talent acquisition, legal and IT.
• An application submitted end to end on staging, with the ATS receiving the right fields and consent.
• Redirect map loaded and tested: old URL to the closest new URL, one hop.
• Accessibility and speed reports meet or beat your baseline.
• New sitemap submitted, robots.txt checked, canonical tags and hreflang verified.
• Editors trained and able to publish without help.
• Holding messages ready for candidates, recruiters and agencies.

Editor training belongs in the launch plan, not after it. For a sense of what structured editor onboarding looks like, the free Happydance CMS Training Course covers the editor in 72 short lessons.

Monitor daily for two weeks

• Search Console: crawl errors, indexed pages, and impressions for your top 20 pages.
• Applications: compare daily applications and completion rate with the baseline.
• Redirects: spot-check the top 50 old URLs every day, and fix any 404 within a day.
• Speed and accessibility: re-run reports after content changes.
• Support: note every question from recruiters and candidates, and fix the cause.

Content and URL export checklist

This is the part teams most often skip. Use this list in your first week, and download the full version with owner and date columns below.

• Every page as HTML or structured text with titles, descriptions and canonical tags.
• All images and video at original quality, with file names and alt text.
• All translated versions, with the language pairings.
• Forms, sign-up lists and consent records, with the wording and date of consent.
• A full crawl of URLs with traffic, links and rank.
• Analytics, tag manager and consent set-up.
• robots.txt, sitemaps, hreflang and structured data in use.
• Written confirmation of who owns your content, domain and URLs.

What to say to candidates and recruiters

Most switches are invisible to candidates if the redirects and job feed work. Recruiters and hiring managers need more notice because they will notice the editing system, the links and the look.

Keep messages short, positive and practical. The aim is confidence, not an announcement about the old provider.