Every Loxo account comes with a careers page. It sits at app.loxo.co/your-agency, it is there whether you use it or not, and pointing the “Careers” item in your menu at it is the shortest route from ATS to public job listings. A lot of recruiting firms run exactly this way for years, and many of them are right to.
This is the honest version of that comparison: what the hosted page genuinely does better, what it quietly costs you, and when moving jobs onto your own WordPress site starts to pay for itself. If your website is not part of how you win candidates and clients, the answer is probably “stay where you are,” and this article says so plainly.
What the hosted Loxo careers page does well
It is easy to be dismissive about a hosted careers page when you sell the alternative, so start with what it gets right — more than it usually gets credit for.
- It already exists. Nothing to install, no API token, no template to choose, no developer to brief. The setup cost is one menu link.
- Nothing can go stale. The page reads from the ATS, so there is no copy of your jobs anywhere, no sync schedule, and no webhook to miss. A role closed in Loxo is off the page immediately, without anyone thinking about it.
- There is nothing to maintain. No plugin updates, no PHP version to keep current, no page cache to reason about, no extra code on your site. When something breaks, it is Loxo’s to fix, not yours.
- It costs nothing extra. It comes with the plan you already pay for.
- It does not care what your website is. Squarespace, Webflow, or hand-written HTML — the careers page works the same.
- Applications land properly. A candidate who applies there appears against the job in Loxo like any other source. This is not a second-class path into your pipeline.
There is a structural point underneath all of that. For a great many recruiting firms the website is a credibility document rather than a channel: candidates arrive through referrals, outbound, and the large job boards, and the site exists so anyone who looks you up finds a real business. If that describes your firm, the hosted careers page is doing everything it needs to, and most of what follows solves a problem you do not have.
SEO: whose domain earns the traffic?
The cleanest way to frame the trade-off: every time you post a job, which domain gets stronger?
A hosted careers page can rank, and it can be eligible for Google for Jobs. That is not the issue. The issue is that every result it earns belongs to app.loxo.co — the URL in the search listing, the address the candidate lands on, and the page anyone links to when they share the role. Publish two hundred roles over three years and you have produced two hundred pages of specific, location-tagged content on someone else’s website.
Move those pages onto your own domain and the same postings work for you. Each role becomes a real URL on your site, crawlable like any other page and counted as part of what your site is about — which, for a specialist agency, is exactly what you want to be known for.
Be realistic about how that accumulates. Job pages are not evergreen: roles close, postings expire, and a vacancy filled last spring pulls no traffic today. The compounding happens at domain level rather than page level — a steady flow of relevant content, plus internal links from job pages into the sector and location pages that are permanent. Anyone promising job ads will rank forever is selling you something.
Google for Jobs follows the same logic. Both routes can qualify; the question is whose URL the candidate clicks. On your own site, eligibility comes from JobPosting structured data on each job page and a sitemap that includes job URLs — mechanics covered in the job schema and SEO documentation and walked through end to end in getting your Loxo jobs into Google for Jobs. What matters here is simpler: the enhanced listing points at your domain, and the first thing the candidate sees is your website.
Branding and candidate experience
The hosted page is Loxo’s layout, restyled with your logo and your brand colors. It is tidy, it works on a phone, and it is still unmistakably not your website: the address bar says so, the navigation is not yours, and the structure of the page belongs to the platform.
The bigger cost is not aesthetic. The hosted page is a dead end in both directions: a candidate reading a role there cannot click through to your case studies or your team page, and someone reading your services page cannot see your open roles without leaving your site.
On your own site, jobs are ordinary content. They render inside your theme with your header, footer, and navigation intact, and a listing can be dropped onto any page with a shortcode such as [loxo-jobs]. Put three current roles at the foot of a sector page, keep the full board at /jobs/, and link between them like any other content. The candidate moves between “who this firm is” and “what they are hiring for” without changing domains.
For agencies whose pitch to candidates is the firm — the specialty, the people, the way you work — this is the whole argument. That case is hard to make on a page that belongs to your software vendor.
Applications and data
The application ends up in the same place either way: in Loxo, against the job. That is worth stating plainly, because “own your application data” is usually oversold. What changes is everything around the submission.
- The candidate never leaves your domain. The form sits on the job page, collects name, email, phone, and a resume, and posts it straight to Loxo. Your analytics see the whole path from landing page to submitted application, so you can tell which pages produce candidates. The job application form documentation covers the rest.
- Spam protection is yours to set. The form supports Google reCAPTCHA v3, off until you enable it and enter a score threshold — a deliberate step rather than something you inherit.
- Consent is worded by you. An optional consent checkbox can be turned on, with the label and the link to your own privacy policy under your control — the usual requirement when collecting resumes from candidates in the EU or UK.
- You get per-job numbers. Views are tracked per job, and applications are counted two ways: the ones submitted through your form, and Loxo’s own total across every channel. Set the onsite number against Loxo’s total and you can see what share of a role’s applicants your website produced — as a proportion rather than exact arithmetic, since the two are counted and refreshed differently.
Two limits belong alongside that. The form’s fields are fixed — name, email, phone, resume, plus the optional consent box — with no setting for adding your own, and nothing is retained in WordPress: no local copy, no stored resume. Running the form on your own site buys control of the experience and visibility into the funnel, not a second candidate database.
Effort and cost
The hosted page is free and takes no work at all. That is the bar the alternative has to clear.
Running the board yourself with LoxoWP needs three things: a WordPress site, which you probably already have; a Loxo plan with API access, for the agency slug and API token; and the plugin itself, commercial software on an annual license. Setup is genuinely an afternoon rather than a project — connect the API, run the first sync, place the listing on a page, fill in your company name, URL, and logo so the structured data is complete, then optionally switch on reCAPTCHA and the Google Indexing API.
The ongoing effort is the part people overestimate. Syncing is automatic either way: webhooks push changes from Loxo as they happen, with a scheduled sync behind them, and nobody re-types a job. The real ongoing costs are duller — one more plugin to keep updated, and jobs that now depend on your own hosting. If your site is slow or down, so is your job board and so is the apply button. The hosted page carries none of that exposure, which is a fair point in its favor.
| Hosted careers page | Own WordPress job board | |
|---|---|---|
| Setup | None — link your menu to it | An afternoon: connect, sync, place, configure |
| Ongoing effort | Zero; Loxo runs it | Plugin updates; sync is automatic |
| SEO value to your domain | None — rankings accrue to the hosted page | Every posting is a page on your domain |
| Google for Jobs | Possible, but the listing points at Loxo | Possible, and the listing points at you |
| Branding | Loxo’s layout, restyled with your logo and colors | Your theme, navigation, and internal links |
| Application data | Lands in Loxo; nothing measurable on your side | Lands in Loxo, plus on-site views and application counts |
The verdict
Stay on the hosted careers page if your website is not a growth channel and you are not planning to make it one. That is not a fallback position; it is the right answer for a lot of firms. The signals are easy to read: you do not publish content, nobody looks at organic search numbers, and roles get filled through your network, outbound, and the boards. An on-site job board would buy you something you would never notice.
Move the jobs on-site as soon as either search or brand starts to matter. Search, because you want to appear for “quantity surveyor jobs Bristol” on your own domain, and every posting should be adding to your site instead of someone else’s. Brand, because the thing you are selling to candidates is your firm, and routing them to a vendor’s URL at the decisive moment undercuts it. In practice the two arrive together, usually when somebody decides the website should generate inbound rather than just exist.
None of this is a one-way door. The hosted page does not disappear when you build your own board, and starting with it while you find out whether the site attracts anyone is a sensible sequence; switching later costs you only the time you were not building up your own domain. Once your own board is live, point the “Careers” link at it and let that be the page people find and share.
If your marketing site runs on WordPress and this sounds like your situation, see how LoxoWP handles it — the sync, the job pages, the schema, and the application form, in one plugin. The add-ons page covers what sits on top of it, including the free Auto-Extend add-on that keeps expiry dates on your postings realistic.