With so many job board software providers in the marketplace, it can be challenging to find the ideal career center partner for your healthcare industry association. But, connecting with the right provider to offer a great career center for your field offers many benefits.
What are the benefits of offering a great career center?
There are so many benefits to providing a career center for your industry. Here are just a few:
- Provide career advancement – You can offer a valued member benefit by connecting your members with top jobs and employers within your industry:
- Provide members with access to niche jobs in your industry
- Members will look to you as the reputable place to job hunt
- Offer career resources beyond open job opportunities
- Engage and retain members – Your career center can be a source of engagement and help for your members, allowing you to support members at various career stages:
- Provide a member benefit no other organization or job board is able to offer
- Actively engage members by providing job opportunities via email, social media, and website promotion
- Be the go-to recruitment and career planning resource in your industry
- Generate non-dues revenue – You can create more opportunities to bring in revenue from your career center:
- Employers will pay a premium to get their jobs in front of your members
- Increase their return on investment by getting jobs in front of passive job seekers
- Offer additional sponsorship opportunities like banner ads and career fairs
What should you look for in job board software for your association?
A career center is never really finished. It should always evolve and improve. So, first and foremost, look for a job board software provider that continuously works with you to find ways to increase enrollment, maximize engagement, and generate revenue.
In addition, look for job board software that can help in three key areas:
1. Offer strong 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 healthcare industry association can provide employers with access to highly qualified candidates – your members and prospective members.
As a baseline, 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.
To take your career center further, offer options to maximize exposure of employers’ job postings, improve the return on their investment, and drive more non-dues revenue for your organization.
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 – Give employers the opportunity to place banner ads on your job board. Banner ads direct job seekers from your career center to the employers’ job posting(s).
2. Provide unrivaled career resources for your specific industry
Every industry is different, but according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, healthcare occupations are projected to add more jobs than any other occupational group.
That’s one good reason for your association to provide the ability for job seekers in the healthcare industry to easily search and apply for relevant job opportunities. But the ability to find job opportunities is just the first step. To take it to the next level, also provide job seekers with career planning resources to help them land the job and grow their careers.
For example, using Career Planning Portal from YM Careers, you can provide your members with:
- Career pathing – Give your members a clear roadmap to reach their professional goals with an online tool to visualize the steps from the job they have today to their next great job.
- Career advice – Provide career advice, with professional resources and coaching, including articles, tips, best practices, résumé reviews, and access to career coaches.
- Career insights – Give members detailed data, including salary, education and skills requirements, activities performed, outlooks for job growth, related jobs and more, to help members make informed career decisions.
3. Promote your career center
For your career center to become the ultimate destination for the healthcare industry, employers and job seekers must know about it. But, marketing your job board and driving sales can be tough 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 the healthcare industry.
For example, YM Careers offers services to market jobs to the professionals in your industry, driving them to your career center as the go-to source for their career growth in the healthcare field. YM Careers also offers job posting sales services that can help you showcase your job board to employers who need it.
Services include:
- Outreach – The 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 together with employers to choose the right recruitment product and channels to attract high quality candidates and optimize each employer’s budget
As association centered on the healthcare industry, you can provide job seekers with something those job boards can’t: a focused collection of job opportunities in their chosen profession. You can also provide employers with a stream of highly qualified candidates that they can’t find anywhere else.
