There are many reasons individuals become members of professional associations. Mid- to late-careerists join associations to share their experience and expertise with new professionals. Early careerists typically join associations within the first five years of employment for networking, mentoring, and employment opportunities.
Associations with job boards see more early careerist enrollment than those without.
If you’re interested in increasing your Millennial membership demographic, consider adding a job board to your list of member benefits. Once you’ve decided to add a job board to your list of member benefits, it’s time to decide whether to outsource your job board. Here are five reasons in favor of outsourcing.
1. Raising Awareness
A successful job board strategy is built around driving user traffic. Therefore, advertising is the most effective way to increase job board awareness and encourage users to visit your site. User traffic would include reaching your members as interested job seekers and attracting employers with open jobs to create a profitable job board.
Running an internal job board means additional tasks for your marketing team. Emails, widgets, and banner ads are the best way to make members aware of the career resources available on your association job board. Well-placed ads can even attract new members to join your organization after visiting the career center.
However, reaching employers can be more challenging without links to talent acquisition and hiring managers.
2. Driving Revenue
In addition to being a sought-after member benefit, job boards generate a valuable source of non-dues revenue. When you outsource your job board management, dedicated sales representatives do the work of cultivating employer relationships to ensure a consistent supply of jobs is posted to your job board.
Outsourcing means your staff would not be responsible for handling requests or help with posting jobs, navigating the site, and suggestions for successful recruitment. Instead, those duties would be the responsibility of an experienced sales member who takes care of all that for your associations’ staff.
3. Customer Support
If you’re wondering how much time goes into answering user questions about online job boards – the answer is a lot.
Hosting a job board in-house subjects staff to endless questions from association members looking for their next job opportunity, resetting passwords, troubleshooting platform issues, etc, thus taking time away from higher value tasks.
Instead, leave those questions to an experienced and professional customer service team with a 97% or higher customer satisfaction rating.
4. User Analytics
When introducing a new member benefit, it’s crucial to report metrics on how that new asset is performing. However, gathering metrics can be tedious and time-consuming if you don’t have the right software platform to generate those stats automatically. Having access to user analytics right in your career center platform (and even better, when integrated with your AMS), puts insightful, actionable data right at your teams’ fingertips to drive better engagement, and revenue in the form of non-dues and member dues revenue.
5. Advancing Technology
The last reason for outsourcing your association job board is to ensure your members have the latest advances in industry technology. Online job boards today are much different from those of the past.
Leading job board software will include:
- Algorithms and AI to match users with the most exciting jobs
- ReCAPTCHA integration for user authentication
- PCI compliant payment processing system to protect against identity theft
Therefore, as new trends develop and technology advances, the task of technology maintenance and updates will rest solely with your provider.
While there are many advantages not to host and manage your association job board in-house, a simple recap is that your staff will save time, your organization will save money, and your members will enjoy a valuable member benefit.
