When you think about marketing ideas for your association, you might not think about your job board and online career center. But maybe you should.
Your association’s online job board, or career center, presents a powerful opportunity to grow member engagement and revenue for your organization. It connects your members with their next great new hire or career opportunity. It can also be a source of revenue for your organization through paid job ads, sponsorships, and other fee-based products. But people have to know about it first!
Here are 18 effective ways to promote your job board or career center through various channels:
1. Get the word out. If you’re just launching your job board, send an email from your association’s Executive Director or President highlighting the benefits of the career center for employers and job seekers.
2. Distribute a monthly marketing email. Email your registered employers and job seekers each month with tips and best practices.
3. Introduce a job alert email to your members. Not only will a job alert email drive more traffic to your career center, but you can drive non-dues revenue from employers for job exposure to additional candidates.
4. Email coupons and special offers to employers. This is a great way to encourage more job postings, particularly during slower posting periods.
5. Promote your career center in member and prospect emails. Focus on the career center as a member benefit.
6. Include articles about the benefits of the career center in your email newsletters. If possible, feature a job seeker who found a great opportunity through the career center.
Website
7. Place a jobs feed or widget on the home page of your website. This will pull in more traffic to the career center than a link alone. It will also give employers access to passive job seekers.
8. Include job widgets on inner pages of your website that cater to different types of professionals. Make sure that the jobs in the widgets are relevant to the content of these pages.
9. Make your career center more than just a place to post jobs with career resources. Promote your career-building resources, including job search and interview tips articles, career and industry statistics, and more to drive traffic to your website and career center. Then, once you capture email addresses, you can use that list of prospective members for targeted recruitment campaigns.
Social media
10. Use a Facebook integration. This can promote recently posted jobs through a Careers tab on your Facebook page.
11. Set up a feed that automates the distribution of some of your jobs into your Twitter streams. Twitter is one of the top search engines on the web.
Events
12. Advertise. Include an ad or page highlighting the job board and its benefits on the microsites for your events. Also, display banner ads during your events that promote your career center.
13. Exhibit. Include a booth in your events’ exhibit halls to promote your career center.
14. Host career skills sessions at your events. Brand them as “sponsored” by your career center.
15. Host career fairs at your events. These also can be “sponsored” by your career center.
16. Offer coupons. Give sponsors and exhibitors of your virtual events a coupon code for a career center discount (for sponsorships, job postings, or other fee-based items).
Direct mail
17. Targeted direct mail with compelling messaging and offers can generate real results. Consider that your job board and career center offer a valuable member benefit – they help your members throughout their entire career journey. So, why not use them as an attention-grabbing offer in your next direct mail recruitment campaign to capture readers’ interest?
18. Send new member welcome kits to start demonstrating member value on day one. Your members will be more likely to stick around when their membership renewal rolls around. Include information about your job board and online career center resources in the welcome kit.
Learn more
Using YM Careers as your career center solution, you can implement these techniques (and more!) to grow your job board, generate revenue, and provide valuable member benefits.
Your association’s job board and online career center can be powerful tools for marketing your association. Using YM Careers job board software and career center solutions, you can offer the career advancement benefits your members and prospective members seek.
