Career sites and how they decide which jobs appear

Create a career site, then understand the contextualization rule that decides which requisitions post to it — including the AND-across-OR-within logic and parent-child inheritance.

foundation13 min readFor ORC Specialist, HCM Functional Consultant, Recruiter, Learner new to Oracle RecruitingRelease FA Latest
  1. 1.Explain what a career site does and where it is configured
  2. 2.State the contextualization rule and apply it to a worked example
  3. 3.Explain parent organization and location inheritance
  4. 4.Recognise that a newly created career site is inactive

A career site that shows the wrong jobs is not a cosmetic problem. Recruiters source from it, candidates apply from it, and time-to-hire metrics are computed from it. If the contextualization is wrong, the whole funnel is wrong in a way nobody notices until a hire is missed.

If you skip this: The most common misreading is treating the context rule as OR everywhere. It is OR within a context and AND across contexts.

What it is, why it exists, what breaks

A career site is an external site your organisation uses to post jobs for external candidates. Its content can be contextualized by location, organization, job category, job function, recruiting type and job requisition flexfields.

One career site can therefore serve many audiences, provided the context is set precisely. That is what makes a single site scalable across a large enterprise.

If the context is too broad, internal or confidential roles leak onto a public site. If it is too narrow, legitimate requisitions never appear and nobody is told why.

Source: ORC-CAREERSITE-011, ORC-CAREERSITE-012

What a career site contextualizes on

Configured contexts, read in order. Within one context the operation is OR; across the contexts that are set it is AND. Listed in order: Location context, then Organization context, then Requisition, then Career site.

A career site publishes the requisitions that match the context configured on it. Within a single context, for example location, the operation is OR: a requisition matching any one of the configured locations qualifies. Between the contexts that are set, for example location and organization, the operation is AND: the requisition must satisfy every configured context. So a site with one UK location and one UK Operations organization context publishes only UK requisitions in that organization. There is a second rule that catches people out: a parent context also publishes its children, so a site scoped to UK Operations will publish requisitions belonging to a child organization unless the organization context is narrowed.

A parent organization or location context also publishes its children, which is the rule that catches people out.

What to take from this: Two rules, and reading them in the wrong order is the mistake. Within one context the operation is OR; between the contexts you set the operation is AND. Then a third rule catches people out — a parent context publishes its children, so an organization context can widen the site without anyone editing it.

Source: ORC-CAREERSITE-011, ORC-CAREERSITE-012

Career site lifecycle

A career site moves through these states in order, and each transition is owned by a named actor.

A career site is created with the status Inactive, which means nothing is public from it yet. It is then configured: contextualization dimensions are chosen to select which requisitions qualify, and content pages are selected to control what the site looks like. If no custom content pages are selected, the template splash page is used as the fallback, so an unconfigured site looks generic rather than broken. The site is then activated, which is what makes the matching requisitions public. Activation is the point where a contextualization mistake becomes a public mistake, which is why the context should be tested against sample requisitions before activation rather than after.

Activation is the point at which a contextualization mistake becomes a public mistake, so test the context against sample requisitions before activating rather than after.

What to take from this: A career site starts Inactive, so nothing is public until it is activated. With no custom content pages selected the template splash page is used, which is why an unconfigured site looks generic rather than broken. Test the context against sample requisitions before activating, because activation is where a context mistake becomes public.

Source: ORC-CAREERSITE-013, ORC-CAREERSITE-014

A UK-only career site shows a US job

A career site is created with two contexts set: one location (United Kingdom) and one organization (UK Operations). A recruiter expects it to show only UK roles.

  1. 1.The site is created. Its status is Inactive, so nothing is public yet.
  2. 2.Content and theme are configured, and the site is activated.
  3. 3.A US Operations requisition appears in the search results.
  4. 4.Checking the requisition: it belongs to US Operations, but US Operations is a child of the organization set on the site, so parent-child inheritance pulls it in.

Takeaway: Inheritance is doing exactly what it is documented to do. The fix is to narrow the context, not to remove the location rule — the OR within the location context never applied because the organization context matched by inheritance.

Source: ORC-CAREERSITE-012, ORC-CAREERSITE-013

Configuration model

Navigation paths

  • Setup and Maintenance > Offering: Recruiting and Candidate Experience > Functional Area: Candidate Experience > Task: Career Sites ConfigurationORC-CAREERSITE-010

Objects

Career site

An external job-posting site, created with a name, code, default language and template.

Risk if wrong: The name is the public browser title, so it is customer-visible immediately.

Template

Supplies the structure of the site. If no custom content pages are selected, the template splash page is used.

Risk if wrong: The site looks wrong in a way that is obvious to candidates and invisible internally.

Context

Decides which requisitions appear in search results, using OR within a context and AND across contexts.

Risk if wrong: Wrong jobs published, or the right jobs hidden. Both are silent failures.

  • Within each context the OR operation is performed; among all contexts that are set, the AND operation is performed.
  • If an organization or location is set as a context, requisitions for that parent and for its child organizations or locations are posted.
  • A newly created career site has the status Inactive.
  • If no custom content pages are selected for the site, the template splash page is used.

Source: ORC-CAREERSITE-010, ORC-CAREERSITE-011, ORC-CAREERSITE-013, ORC-CAREERSITE-014

Common mistakes

Wrong: Reading the contextualization rule as OR across all contexts.

Symptom: A site scoped to one country and one business unit shows requisitions from other countries.

Fix: OR applies within a single context. Across the contexts you set, all of them must match.

Wrong: Not accounting for child organizations and locations.

Symptom: A requisition for a child business unit appears on a site scoped to its parent, which looks like a bug.

Fix: Parent context publishes child requisitions by design. Narrow the parent or accept the inheritance.

Wrong: Assuming a created site is live.

Symptom: The site exists and is configured but appears nowhere externally.

Fix: A new career site starts in the Inactive status. Activation is a separate configuration step.

Wrong: Selecting no custom content pages and expecting a blank site.

Symptom: The site shows the template splash page instead.

Fix: That is the documented fallback when no custom content pages are selected.

Diagnosing it

Symptom: A job is not appearing on the career site where it should.

Category: configuration

  1. 1.

    Is the career site in an active state?

    If no: Nothing is public from this site regardless of context.

    Evidence to capture: Career site status

  2. 2.

    Does the requisition match every context set on the site?

    If no: The AND across contexts failed. A requisition matching one context is still excluded.

    Evidence to capture: Each context dimension against the requisition attributes

  3. 3.

    Does the requisition sit under the parent organization or location, rather than the child?

    If no: Inheritance is one-directional. A parent context does not pull in a sibling or an unrelated child.

    Evidence to capture: Organization hierarchy position of the requisition

  4. 4.

    Is the requisition itself in a state that permits posting?

    If no: The requisition is not yet eligible for a career site regardless of context.

    Evidence to capture: Requisition status and any pipeline posting configuration

Confirm: Confirm the requisition appears in the site search results, then apply as a candidate would to verify the whole path works.

A career site has two contexts set: a location and an organization. A requisition matches the location but belongs to a different organization. Does it post? State the rule you used.

Answer shape: No. Within each context the operation is OR, but across the contexts that are set the operation is AND. Both the location and the organization must match. Then note that a parent organization context also publishes its child organizations, which is a separate inheritance rule.

Memory hook: OR inside a box, AND between boxes.

Source evidence

The setup path, the contextualization rule, the inheritance behaviour and the Inactive status were all read directly from Oracle's Create a Career Site page on 2026-10-05, which was itself last modified on that date.

Release scope: FA Latest

Recorded gaps

  • The page read does not describe the activation step or the theme, page layout and translation configuration tasks, so this lesson does not teach them.
  • Job requisitiondepends on

    What a career site shows is determined by the requisitions that match its context.

  • Job application flowteaches

    Once a candidate finds a job on the site, the application flow governs what happens next.

  • Candidate selection processteaches

    The application enters a candidate selection process with phases and states.

An auto-graded assessment is attached to this lesson: assessment-orc-career-sites

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Career sites and how they decide which jobs appear · Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM · HCM Studio by Digi Tracks · www.digitracks.net · contact@digitracks.net

Claims: ORC-CAREERSITE-011, ORC-CAREERSITE-012, ORC-CAREERSITE-013, ORC-CAREERSITE-010, ORC-CAREERSITE-014

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