Career Center Best Practices
Whether your career center is a seasoned, well-oiled machine or new to your association, there is always going to be room for improvement. To build a career center that works for your association, it’s essential to look at the best practices in the industry and establish how you can implement them into your current plan. We’ve identified the top four areas of career center optimization to help you gain valuable insight and start the conversation about implementing new tools and integrations to your career center and job board to increase member engagement and generate additional non-dues revenue.
Visibility – Your career center is a core member benefit that draws in job seekers, employers and potential new members. However, this benefit may be wasted on those audiences if members cannot find it or don’t know how to access it. Think about how job seekers view the viability of your career center if they have difficulty locating it via your website or a Google search. These are missed opportunities for you to grow your talent pool for employers and engage potential new members.
Here are a few places to include your career center to elevate its visibility:
- Media Kits
- Website Navigation
- Job Board RSS Feed
- External Communication Promotion
- Ads in Association Newsletters
- A Job Seeker Registration Booth at an Upcoming Event
- Social Media Posting
Integrations – Technology opens a whole new world of opportunity and growth for career centers. One of the many benefits of tech growth comes in the form of integrations. A few career center providers offer best-in-class, third-party integration options. The key to deploying integrations properly within your career center lands in finding the right fit and mix of platforms to include, and to establish how quickly and/or often you want to introduce a new integration based on staff, member benefits, and integration costs which can vary by provider.
Here are the different areas in which your association should consider integrating various parts of the career center with other platforms:
- Association Management Software
- Member Data Platform
- Integrations with Social Media Platforms
- Export Jobs on Third Party Job Sites
- Online Career Fairs
Extended Reach – While your online career center is primarily focused on gathering job opportunities and drawing members to apply, there are other ways you can expand what your career center offers to job seekers. These chiefly come in the form of using different mediums, such as events or content resources, to help your career center become a versatile platform that serves industry job seekers with a variety of options for career advancement and information.
Here are a few ways you can expand your offerings:
- Career Fairs
- Events Showcase
- Chapter Participation
- Custom Resources
Unique Non-Dues Revenue – Beyond the traditional offerings of an online career center are some unique non-dues revenue streams. While some are new to the job board universe, others have been around for years and can help redefine how your career center engages job seekers and employers.
Here are a few of the outlying revenue generators that can boost your revenue:
- Job Posting Sales
- Artificial Intelligence Newsletters
- Targeted Advertising and Retargeting
When it comes to your career center, nothing drives profitably and engagement like visitor traffic and usability. These best practices will help you to increase your association’s career center presence for greater engagement and non-dues revenue opportunities. If it’s too much to start with, take them on incrementally and continually look for additional ways to expose your career center to the right audiences.
To learn more about each of the areas listed above download our latest eBook, Career Center Best Practices. We go into deeper details on actional steps to improve your existing career center or start your new one off on the right foot.
