3 Ways to Make Your Legal Association the Industry’s Go-To Career Destination

General job boards, including Indeed, LinkedIn, and Monster, have a place in the world. They cast a wide net – for both job seekers and employers.

But as an association centered on the legal 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.

So, what does it take to make the most of this opportunity for your organization?

Here are three ways to make your association’s online career center THE destination for the legal industry:

1. Offer top-notch 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 association can provide employers with access to highly qualified candidates – your members and registered job seekers.

At a minimum, 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.

Illinois State Bar Association uses YM Careers job board software to power their job board. Read their 5-star review on Capterra.

But, to become THE career destination for employers in the legal industry, be sure to offer additional options to maximize exposure of their job postings, improve the return on their investment, and (bonus!) 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 maximize their recruitment efforts by placing banner ads on your job board. Banner ads direct job seekers from your career center to the employers’ job posting(s).
• Social media outreach – Let employers pay an additional fee to put their job postings in front of passive job seekers through your social media networks. This approach helps employers extend their recruitment reach beyond the pages of your career center and helps your association drive non-dues revenue.
• Re-targeting campaign service – Offer a re-targeting service to get employers’ job openings in front of potential candidates after they’ve left your career center. Here’s how it works:
  1. Job seekers visit your career center.
  2. They move on to browse other websites.
  3. Job seekers see an employer ad that appears on the sites they spend time on.
  4. The job seekers click through to a link of the employer’s choice.

2. Provide unmatched career resources.

The Member Engagement and Loyalty Study conducted by Momentive Software shows that job opportunities are tied for the number one reason people join a professional membership organization. It also remains a high-value benefit throughout the member career journey.

This is particularly relevant in the legal industry. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, competition for jobs in the legal industry over the next 10 years is expected to be strong because more students graduate from law school each year than there are jobs available.

That’s why your bar association’s career center should provide the ability for job seekers in the legal profession to easily search and apply for relevant job opportunities. To take it to the next level, also provide them 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 dream 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. Get the word out.

For your career center to become THE destination for the legal industry, employers and job seekers must know about it. But, how do you market your job board and drive sales 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 legal industry.

For example, YM Careers offers traffic and engagement 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. YM Careers also offers job posting sales services that can help you showcase your job board to employers who need it.

The services include:

• Outreach – The job posting sales 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 teamwork with employers to choose the right recruitment product and channels to attract high quality candidates and optimize each employer’s budget.

Learn more

Your industry-specific member base gives your career center a competitive advantage over most job sites. We’d like to bring your association job board into our legal job board network, which includes the American Bar Association and many state and local bar associations.