Blueprint for a Profitable Career Center: Part 1
An Association’s Checklist of Top Features and Factors to Consider Before Purchasing an Online Career Center
When it comes to your career center, visitor traffic and usability drive profitability, but there are 14 essential components of a profitable and secure online career center that every association should consider before investing in one. This is the first in a two-part series that will unpack everything you need to know to get started on making the right choices for your association.
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Don’t Compete With Your Career Center Provider
Your solution provider becomes your competitor when they maintain their own commercial job board. Commercial job board providers who deliver private-labeled solutions are in the business of selling job postings to employers for their own site. This means the association becomes an extension of its job board business. Your provider’s number one objective should be making your association the go-to resource for talent, which isn’t possible if they compete with you for employer postings.
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Don’t Pay For Another Site’s SEO
Your solution provider’s career center platform should operate on a subdomain of your association’s primary website, therefore giving your association’s site all of the credit for its career center visitors—a significant point, given that it is often the most visited portion of an association’s website. Must-have SEO strategies should include the use of proper page titles via appropriate headers, meta tags, alternative text for all images, consistent and keyword-rich content, use of canonical link tags, redirects, responsive web pages and more.
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Connect To Social Media
Increase your career center’s visibility and create more posting opportunities by funneling jobs to social networks. By incorporating the power of multiple social media platforms into your technology solution, you keep your association relevant and top-of-mind.
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Make Your Site Mobile-friendly
Today’s association members are constantly on the move and accessing your career center from a variety of mobile devices. It’s essential that your career center uses a responsive design to provide a consistent and seamless experience wherever your members are.
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Drive Candidate Traffic
Having a career center full of good jobs is half the battle — the other half is making sure you get the job seekers to your site. You can do this by offering relevant content, resume critiquing services, mentoring programs or hosting a virtual career fair; and including an RSS feed feature on your home page, splash pages, blogs and your email correspondences to showcase jobs to your members. Leveraging artificial intelligence in your e-newsletter to showcase relevant jobs to the reader is an additional option that requires more of a commitment; however, it is a great way to drive traffic.
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Embrace Programmatic Advertising
Programmatic advertising uses specialized technology to collect data about your site’s user characteristics. This group data is used to facilitate the automated buying and selling of display ads through a dedicated ad network. The more you know about your website visitors, the more relevant advertising you can host on your online career center and the more value your advertisers will receive in return for their investment in your site audience. Eighty-eight percent of B2B marketers are currently buying or selling advertising programmatically, according to a report conducted by Dun & Bradstreet and Adweek BrandShare.
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Maintain Software Flexibility
We know associations want flexibility in running and operating their career center — and with good reason. Make sure you’re working with a vendor who will recommend best practices based on what you’re trying to achieve and who can help you get up and running in no time.
For the next seven vital steps, check back here soon to discover even more insight when it comes to making the right career center choice!
In the meantime…We invite you to learn more about Naylor’s Career Center and the Job Board — the leading and only career center solution endorsed by ASAE. Here’s how: Schedule A Consultation
