For example, the footer and the header tend to have more or less the same links in them on every page. Lets just suggest that those were, Jobs, About, logo with link to homepage, Breadcrumb, Privacy statment, contact, sitemap and accessibility information.

For me looking at this list, there are a bunch of links there that really very rarely get accessed. These would be items like Privacy Statment, About, Jobs and Accessibility information. Why not reduce the number of links here, by just having the about link on the page, and the other links located on the about page.

Ok maybe if your company gets lots of people looking looking for jobs… then it would be wise to have another domain such as http://jobs.myCompany.com, get it into webmaster tools from google and let it do the rest.

The main thing being here that you will have reduced contention against your primary pages by a factor of 3 on every page.

Secondly by setting up either the Logo or just the breadcrumb to have the link to the homepage, you will have reduced contention against your catagories.

By choosing to remove the link from the logo, it will mean that accross the site with a common menu that they homepage will not have as many links as the catagories. As on the homepage the breadcrumb is not clickable.