Blueprint for a Profitable Career Center: Part 2
An Association’s 14-Point Checklist of Top Features and Factors to Consider Before Purchasing an Online Career Center
In part one of our two-part series, we outlined seven checklist points that associations should consider before implementing an online career center. This time, we unpack an additional seven vital areas to consider to make the best, informed decision on the right partner for your association. Without further ado, here is the rest of your checklist resource.
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Create Value With Third-party Integrations
Third-party integrations allow associations to diversify their online career center offerings to stand out from competitors and deliver enhanced educational content to help members advance their careers. They make it easy for your software applications to work together and afford associations the freedom of choice and flexibility for future technical growth.
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Focus On Job Posting Quality (Not Quantity)
Building career centers for thousands of associations has taught us that the total number of jobs on a career center is not the most important metric for success. If you’re being told otherwise, you are getting a narrow and inaccurate picture. The practice of taking jobs from other sites and placing them on your site is an industry practice known as “backfilling” which:
- Reduces the value to your paid advertisers
- Damages the association’s ability to establish direct relationships with employers
- Minimizes the value to job seekers, as the site is often filled with less-relevant jobs
- Promotes competing job boards, giving value to your competition
Takeaway: beware of vendors who promote backfilling.
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Craft Your Own User Experience
Having worked with associations for decades, we know how job seekers really think. It is essential to find a product that allows them to search, scan and save their jobs the way they want. Your association will want to consider easy keyword searching, filters, the ability to save jobs, and more.
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Safeguard Your Site
Boost visitors’ confidence in your site and your Google rankings with a SSL-secured website. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is the standard security technology for establishing an encrypted link between a web server and browser. This link ensures that all pages within your career center remain secure. The browser will typically indicate that a page is secure with a green padlock and a URL that begins with https:// instead of http://. To assure visitors that their sensitive and personal information is safe, Google flags any site that does not have a SSL certificate as “not secure.”
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Design For Employer Ease Of Use
Don’t forget about building a positive user experience for your employers, too. These products also provide opportunities to upsell and generate more revenue. Partnering with your employers and taking their feedback into account when you select your job board set up is essential. By doing this, you’re creating an experience you know your end-users will be pleased with. Many partner vendors have unique options, such as Naylor Career Center’s “Featured Jobs” widget that provides your employers increased exposure and earns your association additional revenue. Weigh the benefit of each vendor’s different offerings with your end-users in mind.
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Don’t Overlook Your Dashboard
Your career center dashboard is more than pretty charts and graphs. Your analytics and reporting tools should allow you to quickly visualize and contextualize your data instead of wasting your time trying to interpret it.
Dashboards should, at minimum, show these key metrics:
- Web Analytics
- Revenue
- Mobile Analytics
- New Job Seeker Registrations
- Average Daily Jobs
- Resumes
- New Employer Registrations
- New Jobs Posted
- Job Applications
- Additionally, queries should allow users to compare prior periods.
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Expand Your Reach With Networks
Embrace networks. Every day, Naylor proves the adage “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” By linking together career centers from related association industries, we create valuable online networks of shared jobs and resumes. And by allowing only associations to join our networks, we not only expand an individual association’s reach, but we also strengthen the bonds between the allied associations.
It’s a win-win.
Naylor Association Solutions develops and implements solutions with the association customer solely in mind. Our entire approach to our business is designed to make associations successful. And, the good news is that we’ve made it easy for your association to integrate all 14 checklist items above with our suite of solutions. If you’d like to learn more, you can download our ebook here.
We invite you to learn about Naylor’s Career Center and Job Board — the leading and only career center solution endorsed by ASAE. Here’s how: Schedule A Consultation
