Careers

Online Career Centers: Content gold you didn’t know you had

By • May 29, 2015

Content gold you didn’t know you had—and a powerful membership benefit

Carrie McIntyre
Carrie McIntyre, Boxwood Career Solutions

In the never-ending quest to provide relevant information to members and prospects, one source of great content is often overlooked. Even better, you don’t have to create this content, and you get paid for it. Sounds too good to be true? It’s not. We’re talking about industry job postings on your website, in you newsletters and in your online career center. Consider the following, based on research and experience with our clients’ career centers:

 

  • More than 50 percent of workers are either actively looking for a job or would make a change if the right opportunity came along.
  • Typically, an association’s job board is one of the three most heavily-visited areas of its website, usually racking up more page views than any destination other than the home page.
  • Jobs published in association eNewsletters get at least four times as many views as jobs published only on the job board receive.

There’s no doubt about it: Most of your website visitors have at least a passing interest in career opportunities. Even if they aren’t actively looking for new opportunities, most are still curious about which companies are hiring. And, in niche communities of professionals, it’s not uncommon to see a job listing and know the person who used to have that job.

Tweetables

 

 

The majority of your audience will check out job listings even if they’re not actively looking for a new position. LilTweetablesSmall

Don’t make your career center visitors work too hard to access job listings that pique their interest. LilTweetablesSmall

Job listings are a valuable source of content that
can profit your career center. LilTweetablesSmall

Integrate job postings into all of your communication channels and social media. LilTweetablesSmall

So, even if you’ve been paid to list a job opportunity, it’s a form of useful relevant content—not an intrusive advertisement.

The right way to post jobs

The easiest way to leverage career content is to set up feeds that automatically promote your jobs to various places on your website, your social media outlets, your eNewsletters and other online outlets your association may host.

There are several dos and don’ts for effectively leveraging your career center content:

  1. Always display job title, employer, and location. Readers should be able to scan job content quickly, and these are the three most interesting pieces of information to potential job seekers.
The American Academy of Neurology includes the top 3 pieces of information job seekers want when scanning job openings: job title, employer, and location.
The American Academy of Neurology includes the top three pieces of information job seekers want when scanning job openings: job title, employer and location.
  1. Leave enough space to display two to three jobs. Because you’re only listing the title, employer and location, you don’t have to take up a lot of space for this to be successful.
The National Society of Professional Engineers makes space for 5 job listings in a prominent place on their home page.
The National Society of Professional Engineers makes space for five job listings in a prominent place on its home page.
  1. Look for high-traffic areas to include job content, such as your home page, publications hub, certifications page, event calendar page, member dashboards, and so on.
The Medical Group Management Association places career resources front and center in its Careers section, and makes navigating to other career-related resources obvious and easy.
The Medical Group Management Association places career resources front and center in its Careers section, and it makes navigating to other career-related resources obvious and easy.
  1. Get your social media properties involved. Jobs can be posted to Facebook and Twitter in an automated fashion that doesn’t interfere with the rest of your social media activities.
The National Association for College Admission Counseling takes job listings from its career center and uses them as tweets. The employer gets additional exposure, and NACAC has ready-made content that is of interest to its Twitter followers.
The National Association for College Admission Counseling takes job listings from its career center and uses them as tweets. The employer gets additional exposure, and NACAC has ready-made content that is of interest to its Twitter followers.
  1. Up-sell job listings in your eNewsletter. Not only will you add dynamic content to your eNewsletter, you’ll get extra revenue from employers.
NAFA Fleet Management Association’s inclusion of job listings in its biweekly newsletter lets members know what career options are available, gives employers an additional channel of exposure, and earns the association more non-dues revenue for this service.
NAFA Fleet Management Association’s inclusion of job listings in its biweekly newsletter lets members know what career options are available, gives employers an additional channel of exposure, and earns the association more non-dues revenue for this service.
  1. Make sure your job posting packages let employers know about all the extra pushes you provide. That way they’ll understand the full value of what they’re purchasing from your association.
The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association outlines the value of paying to post a job on their career center at the start of the job posting process on their website.
The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association outlines the value of paying to post a job on its career center at the start of the job posting process on their website.

Don’ts:

  1. Don’t make job posts look like ads. Formatting should be minimal. Don’t make them look like a banner ad. Remember, this is content, not advertising.
  1. Don’t require the user to click to see the jobs. You want the jobs to catch someone’s eye if they weren’t already planning to visit the job board. If they have to click to change from a news feed to a jobs feed, you’ll reduce the visibility of your employers’ job listings, as well as the results you’ve promised those employers.
  1. Don’t include portions of the job description in the feed. Doing so makes it harder to scan the key items (title, employer, location), and you’ll need more real estate in all the places you re-post the listings to display that info.
  1. Don’t give in to naysayers at your organization. Propose a pilot for one or two job feeds, assess the results, and then use the data to make the case for job listings as a permanent part of your content strategy.

Conclusion

Association career centers can be a plentiful, useful source of content for your website, your publications, and your social media channels. By leveraging your jobs as content, you no longer have to run house ads to market your job board—the jobs you’ve leveraged as content are already doing that for you. Next month, we’ll discuss how you can get more interaction with your career-related content.

Carrie McIntyre is the senior director for new business development at Boxwood Career Solutions. Carrie joined Boxwood in 1999 after working in membership and marketing for several D.C.-area associations. She has helped associations of all sizes implement best practices that turn their job boards into full-featured career centers that create even stronger strategic value for associations.