The Technology Your Association Needs to be a Successful Career Center

You might be looking to implement an online job board for the first time. Or maybe you’re ready to take your online career center to the next level. Either way, it’s great news. A career center delivers one of the top benefits members are looking for (job opportunities) and can be a great source of non-dues revenue for your association.

But before you choose job board software, it’s important to write down your goals and the functionality you need to accomplish them. This will become your go-to checklist to help you find the right career center solution for your organization.

Here are some common goals and corresponding functionality to get you started:

• Email job matching – We need to be able to work efficiently and effectively by automatically sending jobs to relevant job seekers via email when they are posted.
• Mobile support – Our career center needs to provide the modern experience job seekers expect. Members and prospective members need to be able to quickly apply to jobs from their mobile devices.
• Personalized search and recommendations – Job seekers expect the same kind of personalized online experience they have with for-profit leaders like Amazon and Netflix. To deliver these types of experiences, and thereby increase engagement and job views, we need to be able to recommend opportunities to job seekers based on their prior searches.
• High ROI employer products – Employers use leading job sites like Indeed, Glass Door, and LinkedIn. We need to be able to offer hiring managers a competitive experience with sophisticated options that maximize exposure of their job postings to improve their return on investment.
• Candidate screening and management – We need to provide employers with modern functionality to attract, screen, and manage applicants.
• SEO and job distribution – We need to drive traffic through search engines, social media, and other digital channels. We need to be able to optimize every job for search engines, and reach candidates through social media, email, mobile channels, and sophisticated programmatic advertising.
• Advanced data, reporting, and analytics – To continue to improve and grow our career center, we need insights into our job board, including job board sales, performance, and user behavior to grow membership and revenue. We need easy-to-use yet information-rich reporting and analytics.
• Marketing and sales – We need to expand our reach. Ideally, we would work with a software vendor that offers sales and marketing services to actively search for employers who are hiring and drive them to our website. This will help us increase revenue as our career center becomes the hub of talent and opportunity for our industry.