Association industry research shows that job opportunities rank as one of the top benefits an association can offer its members. This makes your job board a great area for increased member engagement and revenue growth.
There are some practical ways to increase member engagement with your career center. For example: Include a jobs widget and/or articles about the benefits of the career center in your newsletter. Or put social media to work through something as simple as automatic tweets of job postings.
But a little ingenuity can take you even further. Your job board represents an opportunity for all kinds of creativity when it comes to driving membership and increasing non-dues revenue.
Understanding your job board’s audiences
The first step to getting innovative with your job board’s potential is to understand that it serves two primary audiences — industry employers and members.
Employers often look to member associations to help them identify new, highly qualified talent. For your association, that means plenty of possibilities to engage employers with your industry-specific job board — and charge a reasonable fee for doing so.
Members, on the other hand, are the purpose of your association. Attracting and retaining them means your job board must meet their needs for career opportunities, support, and information. Before embarking on specific strategies, consider what your members value most.
Common elements that people seek from their membership include:
- Value – What represents value to one member may not to another. Be sure to understand which segments of your membership base value job boards most so that you can target them with specific offers and tailor their experiences better.
- Support – Your members expect more than great customer service — they also expect your association to support them in their careers. Give them what they want by delivering relevant employment opportunities.
- Information – Staying current with industry requirements and trends is essential to your members. Use your job board as another way to communicate information and best practices by aligning content with employment openings. For example, link a requested skill in a job posting with a course offering.
How to drive membership and increase revenue with your job board
Keeping your two key audiences in mind, here are four ideas for driving membership and revenue from your association’s job board:
Connect employers to qualified members.
Wading through résumés takes time. Make things easier on employers by using your job board technology to alert them to members who are actively searching for new opportunities. Providing more qualified candidates saves employers’ time and money while giving them applicants who have the matching skills and experience they’re seeking.
You can also use your job board software to allow recruiters to showcase their corporate brand. Statistics show that most workers will consider a job change if the prospective employer has a positive reputation. The fees that you charge for these services will likely more than offset the long-term potential for employers.
1. Connect members to personalized job recommendations.
Your members can also benefit from job-matching technology. Make sure that your job board software supports filtering to align job seekers’ skills and expectations with job openings. Also, make sure your technology allows you to offer automatic member alerts triggered by users’ settings and searches.
And consider that eighty percent of Millennials are interested in relevant job opportunities based on their current certifications. So, make sure that your job board software will integrate with your learning management system (LMS) – allowing you to give your members personalized job recommendations based on their certifications and credentials. Conversely, make sure you can showcase your members’ learning credentials on their job seeker profile to help them stand out to recruiters.
2. Capture new learners and non-members.
Integrating your career center with your LMS also gives you an opportunity to capture new learners. You can use information about members and non-members who visit your career center for targeted campaigns that increase enrollment for your organization’s courses and boost certification revenue.
Your job board should also be optimized to ensure that your association has access to non-members who are using the job board so that you can drive membership and increase dues revenue. One way this can be achieved is through an integration with your association management system (AMS).
In this scenario, the contact information of non-members who visit your career center and sign up as job seekers can be captured, with leads automatically sent to your AMS, enabling you to market your association to these job seekers and convert them to new members.
3. Promote your membership to drive ongoing revenue.
Dues-paying members are the primary revenue stream for trade associations. That means member acquisition and retention is essential. And since job opportunities are a primary reason people join an association, be sure to promote your job board in each newsletter, post, and landing page so your members don’t miss out on this valuable benefit.
Go even further by using prime real estate on our job board’s registration page to promote membership in your association through intelligently placed calls-to-action that encourage site visitors to join the association and that link directly back to your association member benefits page.
Learn more
YM Careers offers job board software and career advancement solutions for the association industry. Learn more: Explore YM Careers.
