Google can’t list nearly half of agency job pages.
45%
of 1,195 job pages had no JobPosting data
Add JobPosting data to every job.
Chapter 6 in the report
Candidately ResearchNo. 01
The Staffing Career Site Report 2027 Nearly half of agency job pages can’t appear in Google’s job results.
We reviewed more than 2,300 staffing firm websites and tested nearly 1,200 live job pages. Here is what candidates, Google and AI assistants find.
- Websites reviewed
- 2,322
- Job pages tested
- 1,195
- Length
- 77 pages
- Format
- Free PDF, A4 and US Letter
Five things to fix in 2027.
Nearly half of job pages can’t appear in Google’s job results.
Add JobPosting data to every job.
45%
About 1 in 4 job boards offer job alerts.
Let candidates follow your jobs.
24%
Fewer than 1 in 5 name a recruiter.
Show who the candidate will talk to.
18%
Pay shows on 3 in 4 vendor-built boards, on fewer than half of plugin boards.
Put pay in the job text.
76% vs 46%
1 in 7 staffing firms show no jobs on their own website.
One page per job, on your own site.
14%
Candidates now search with AI, and on their phones.
40M
US adults have used ChatGPT for help with a job search.
OpenAI estimate, report p15
7 in 10
US job applications were made on a phone or tablet in 2025 (71%).
Report p19
More than half
of US job seekers have abandoned an application that was too long (57%).
LiveCareer, report p7
All of them land on the same page: your job page.
What we found on more than 2,300 websites.
Most boards skip job alerts and the recruiter’s name.
1 in 4
boards offer job alerts (24% of 340)
Show pay, offer alerts, name the recruiter.
Chapter 5 in the report
Job alerts24%
Pay shown61%
Recruiter named18%
Whether pay shows depends on how the board is built.
3 in 4
vendor-built boards show pay (76%); plugin boards 46%
Put pay in the job text, whatever your setup.
Chapter 5 in the report
Staffing web vendor76%
Custom build59%
ATS-hosted board58%
WordPress plugin46%
There is no standard job board.
8%
the largest share any one provider holds
Check your setup against the report’s 15 checks.
Chapter 4 in the report
- ATS-hosted board
- Custom build
- Staffing web vendor
- WordPress plugin
- No job board
- Other or not identified
23%
22%
15%
12%
14%
14%
1 in 7 staffing firms show no jobs on their own website.
1 in 7
14% of 2,322 firms; executive search 1 in 3 (33%)
One page per job, on your own site.
Chapter 4 in the report
All firms (2,322)14%
Executive search (171)33%
16 of 356 job pages hide text that only AI tools can read.
It tells AI tools to add a phrase to the application, and it may flag candidates who use an AI assistant openly.
Get the free reportMore than 8 in 10
job pages work without JavaScript (83%)
1 in 25
block an AI search crawler in robots.txt (4%)
Would your job board pass?
0 of 6 answered
Answer all six to see where your board stands.
From the market map to a ten-minute audit.
For agency owners, marketing leads, ATS admins and heads of recruitment.
- 1About this report
- 2Why the career site matters again
- 3What job seekers say
- 4The market: who runs agency career sites
- 5What candidates see
- 6Can Google and AI find agency jobs?
- 7Provider directory
- 8Domain and build decisions
- 9What’s next: AI agents that search and apply
- 10Checklist for 2027
- 11Audit your own job board
- 12Method and limits
“So the question is no longer which job board to buy. It is whether your jobs can be found at all.”
Jan Jedlinski
Co-founder & CEO, Candidately · from the report’s foreword
Get the full report.
Free. Tell us where to send it and the download link appears straight away.
The Staffing Career Site Report 2027
2,322 firms reviewed
1,195 job pages tested
20
27
Candidately ResearchNo. 01
The Staffing
Career Site
Report
2,322 firms reviewed1,195 job pages tested
Want us to check your own job board?
Send us your job board address. We run the checks from the report by hand and email you a short written result.
Free. Written result within 24 to 48 hours.
Job board audityourdomain.com
Written result · example
3 of 6checks passed
What we saw
Google and AI crawlers can read the board, and every job has its own page. The job pages carry no JobPosting data, so they cannot appear in Google's job results.
Which pages Google can list
- /jobsGoogle can list it
- /jobs/senior-backend-engineerCannot be listed: no JobPosting data
Against the report
Same gap as 45% of the 1,195 job pages tested for the report.
Fix first
- 1Add JobPosting data to every job.
- 2Put pay in the job text.
- 3Take filled jobs off the board.
Every job in a page Google and AI search can read.
A branded job board and career site for staffing firms, on your own domain and synced with Bullhorn. Applications flow straight back into Bullhorn.
Questions about the report
On 307 boards checked both ways, the script and the researchers agreed on 100% of JobPosting results. Method and margins of error are in chapter 12.
What is The Staffing Career Site Report 2027?
A 77-page study by Candidately of how staffing agency career sites work for candidates, Google and AI assistants. It covers 2,322 staffing firm websites and 1,195 tested job pages, and closes with a 15-check list for 2027 and a seven-step audit you can run in ten minutes.
How was the research done?
We opened 2,322 staffing firm websites in Chrome and read their page code (10 to 19 October 2026), tested one live job page on each of 1,195 job boards and robots.txt on 1,585 (26 to 28 October), and checked 356 job boards by hand from a random sample of 408 firms. On the 307 boards checked both ways, the script and the researchers agreed on every JobPosting result. We never applied to a job or logged in.
Who is the report for?
Agency owners, marketing leads, Bullhorn and ATS admins, and heads of recruitment: anyone who decides what runs the career site and what a candidate finds on the job page.
Is it free, and which formats are there?
Yes. Fill in the short form and the download link appears straight away. The PDF comes in A4 and US Letter.
Can you check my own job board?
Yes. Send us your job board address and we run the checks from the report by hand, then email you a short written result within 24 to 48 hours.
About the research
How the 2,322 websites and 1,195 job pages were checked, and what the figures can and cannot tell you.
Method and limits, in full
- Review
- 2,322 staffing firm websites from Candidately’s database of staffing firms, built from public industry rankings and our own market research. It is a target list, not a random sample of the market: it leans toward Bullhorn users (53%), the US (75%), the UK (11%) and temp and contract staffing (66%). Each website was opened in Chrome and its page code read, 10 to 19 October 2026.
- Job page tests
- A script opened each of the 1,819 job boards identified in the review in Chrome on a desktop (US connection), found one live job and tested that page: JobPosting structured data, the HTML the server sends without JavaScript, URL format, canonical tag, meta robots and X-Robots-Tag, robots.txt rules per crawler and the sitemap, 26 to 28 October 2026. 1,195 job pages were tested. On the other boards no job could be reached automatically (478), the job page did not load (78), the board blocked the browser or failed to load (57), or the jobs had no URL of their own (11). robots.txt was read for 1,585 boards.
- Hand checks
- 408 firms drawn at random from the 1,819 firms with an identified job board, in proportion to job board type; 356 boards tested on 26 and 27 October 2026. A researcher judged pay, job alerts, named recruiter, search, filters, host and whether an account is needed, and recorded a short evidence snippet for each. 29 randomly chosen pages were re-tested blind by a second researcher: 220 of 232 judgments matched (95%).
- Accuracy
- On the 307 boards tested both by the script and by hand, the two agreed on 100% of JobPosting and hash-URL results, 98% of robots.txt results, 99.7% of noindex results and 95% of raw-HTML results.
- Margins
- Shares for all 340 client boards are accurate to about ±5 points at 95% confidence. Smaller groups, such as one job board type, have wider margins (chapter 12 of the report). Each page is one job on one day.
- What we never did
- No applications were submitted, no Apply buttons were clicked, no forms were sent and no logins were used.
- Limits
- The boards the script could not open are mostly ones that load jobs with JavaScript or behind buttons, so the shares are, if anything, slightly favorable to agencies. Some Bullhorn identifications rest on a Bullhorn marketing script that can remain on a site after a firm leaves Bullhorn. This edition includes no survey of agency candidates.
- Public research
- Studies published 2024 to 2026, each checked at the original publisher. Each figure states its group in the text or footnote.
