Just think: Job boards, such as Indeed, LinkedIn, and Monster are general job sites that cast a wide net – for both job seekers and employers. But as an organization centered on your industry, you can provide job seekers with a focused collection of job opportunities. You can also provide employers with a stream of highly qualified candidates that they can’t find anywhere else.
So, what does it take to make the most of this opportunity for your organization?
How to Become Your Industry’s Go-To Career Destination
Here are three ways to make your association’s online career center THE destination for your industry:
1. Offer top-notch job posting and distribution tools.
Employers in your industry need to fill jobs that require specific skills and industry knowledge. By offering a job board, your association can provide employers with access to highly qualified candidates – your members and prospective members.
At a minimum, your career center should offer employers these capabilities:
Job postings – Employers can pay a fee to easily post job opportunities.
Candidate screening and management – Provide employers with functionality to screen and manage applicants.
But, to become THE career destination for employers, be sure to offer additional options to maximize exposure of their job postings and improve the return on their investment. For example:
Job alert email – Introduce a job email to your members. Employers are often willing to pay extra for this distribution of their jobs to potential candidates.
Jobs feed or widget – Add one of these to your member and prospective member e-newsletters with recently posted jobs that employers pay extra to promote.
Banner advertising – Allow employers to maximize their recruitment efforts by placing banner ads on your job board. Banner ads direct job seekers from your career center to the employers’ job posting(s).
Social media outreach – Let employers pay an added fee to put their job postings in front of passive job seekers through your social media networks. This approach helps employers extend their recruitment reach beyond the pages of your career center.
Re-targeting campaign service – Offer a re-targeting service to get employers’ job openings in front of potential candidates after they’ve left your career center.
Here’s how it works:
- Job seekers visit your career center.
- The job seekers then move on to browse other websites.
- The job seekers see an employer ad that appears on the sites they spend time on.
- The job seekers click through to a link of the employer’s choice.
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2. Provide unmatched career resources.
According to the Member Engagement and Loyalty Study, job opportunities are tied for the number one reason people join a professional membership organization. It also remains a high-value benefit throughout the member career journey.
Your career center should provide the basic ability for job seekers to easily search and apply for relevant job opportunities. But to take it to the next level, also provide them with career resources to help them land the job and grow their careers. For example:
Career path mapping – Give your members a clear roadmap to reach their professional goals. For example, using Career Journey by Community Brands, you can give members an online tool to map out their career path based on the job they want. It gives them a path to get there, including the skills, learning, and job titles they need to reach their goals.
Résumé review – Offer free résumé critique through your career center.
Job seeker articles, tips, and recommendations – Offer articles and other content including résumé writing tips, interview techniques, job search ideas, and tips on social networking.
Career coaching – Connect members with certified career coaches to help with things like job search strategies, interview tips, and résumé writing.
Networking – Integrate social media with your career center site to allow job seekers who view a job in your job board to see any LinkedIn connections they have who work at the company. This technology integration helps them open doors to new opportunities.
Professional education – Use your career center to promote your association’s online learning courses and credentials. For example, recommend relevant learning courses that will make your members more qualified for the jobs they seek.
3. Get the word out.
For your career center to become THE destination for your industry, employers and job seekers must know about it. But, how do you market your job board and drive sales if you don’t have dedicated staff to identify and connect with employers or work with recruitment ad agencies? An ideal approach is to work with a third-party team that has experience in your industry.
For example, YM Careers offers traffic and engagement services to market jobs to the professionals in your space, driving them to your career center as the go-to source for their career growth. YM Careers also offers job posting sales services that can help you showcase your job board to employers who need it. The services include:
Outreach – The job posting sales team reaches out to employers who have relevant job openings that are not yet on your career center.
Messaging – The team explains why employers should use your job board to access the high quality, hard-to-find talent in your member base.
Sales – Dedicated career center sales representatives, an ad agency team, a lead generation team, and a sales leadership team work with employers to choose the right recruitment product and channels to attract high quality candidates and optimize each employer’s budget.
