If your association is like most, you’re always looking for new ways to acquire more members, drive member engagement, and generate more revenue. Did you know that adding a career center to your website – and better yet, integrating your online career center with your association management software (AMS) – can help in a big way?
Let’s look at why now is the time to offer a robust online career center, what your career center should include, and how you can optimize it to drive greater member engagement and revenue for your association.
Why now’s the time for your association to offer an online job board
For the past several years, Community Brands has conducted association industry research. Throughout the studies, one thing remains clear: Members want job and career advancement opportunities.
For example, the 2022 Association Trends Study shows that job opportunities and career advancement are among the top five reasons members join an association. These member priorities are especially important to those in the early and middle stages of their careers. Offering an online job board as part of a robust online career center gives members two of the benefits they value most, helping you to attract new members and improve member retention.
It also helps you to increase non-dues revenue. Your membership represents a valuable pool of highly skilled candidates, and employers will pay to post and promote their job openings through your association’s job board. Plus, your job board can help your association build relationships with companies that might be good prospects for additional sponsorship and advertising packages.
Here are some examples of how your online job board can work to drive member acquisition and retention while producing revenue:
- Allow job seekers to easily search and apply for jobs online.
- Automatically send job opportunities to interested job seekers via email.
- Increase engagement and job views by recommending opportunities to job seekers based on their prior searches.
- Offer employers sophisticated options that maximize exposure of their job postings to improve their return on investment and, in turn, your revenue.
TIP: YM Careers by Community Brands offers job board software designed for associations to help you build an online job board where employers can easily post job openings and members can easily search and apply for relevant opportunities.
Go beyond a job board to offer a true online career destination
Take your job board to the next level by combining it with career development resources to deliver a robust online career center. This approach allows you to not only help your members find job opportunities, but also give them help planning their careers and landing the jobs they want.
TIP: YM Careers offers Career Planning Portal, a professional development hub that gives professionals in your industry a comprehensive set of career resources to advance their careers. It comes with YM Careers job board software to help you deliver a complete online career center.
Here are some key resources to include in your online career center:
- Career advice that offers relevant articles and other content to help job seekers find and land jobs
- Online coaching that gives job seekers guidance on career planning, writing résumés, interviewing, working through career challenges, and more
- Career insights and placement services to give members information to help them make well-informed career choices
- A career path tool that helps members map out the steps needed to achieve their professional goals
Connect your career center and your AMS for a membership and revenue powerhouse
Your online career center can take member and revenue growth even further when you integrate it with your AMS. YM Careers and NetForum are both part of Community Brands’ connected network of solutions for associations. Here are a few specific examples of what they can do together:
- When job seekers visit your YM Careers-powered career center and sign up via job alert or account registration, leads are automatically sent to your NetForum AMS. You can generate a report in NetForum AMS of member prospects, which you can then use for member acquisition efforts.
- You can use your YM Careers job board registration page to promote membership benefits with intelligently placed calls-to-action that encourage job board visitors to join your association. Promoting the benefits of membership on your job board keeps your association top-of-mind and further reinforces your brand as prospective members search for jobs.
- Member activity on the job board is written back to the member record in NetForum AMS, giving you a more complete view of your members’ interactions with your association, all in one place. You can use these insights to create more personalized content and marketing campaigns for your members.
Learn more
With YM Careers, your association’s job board is more than a member benefit; it’s a career growth destination. Integrating your YM Careers job board with NetForum AMS gives you added opportunities to convert non-members to members, improve member engagement, and ultimately increase revenue.
Learn more about the power duo of NetForum AMS and YM Careers.
