Your Online Career Center Glossary

You’ve just inherited the responsibilities associated with maintaining your association’s online career center. Now what?

What do all these new terms mean? What’s a job alert? An API platform? Who’s responsible for managing the revenue share?

Not every association professional is a techie or a trained career counselor. So we’ve created this Online Career Center Glossary, a list of terms commonly associated with the creation and management of online career centers. We hope this helps anyone who finds themselves in charge of maintaining their association’s job boards or career portal, but isn’t familiar with this new world of career-oriented words.

Bookmark this page for future reference because we’ll be adding terms often in the coming weeks.

General Career Center Terms:

• AMS (Association Management Software) – A software platform that serves as a database for all of your membership information. It often includes capabilities such as event registration configurations and third-party integrations, a website content management system, email marketing, report builder, payment acceptance, a blogging/social media platform, and synchronization with professional development platforms. Your career center is often connected to or housed within your AMS if your AMS runs your website.
• Career Center – Career centers empower an association’s members to advance their careers while fee-based features like job listings and display ads allow the sponsoring association to earn non-dues revenue. Online career centers, or portals, can link up with other online career centers in similar or related industries to form a career center network that expands the number of job postings and professional development resources accessible to all affiliated members. Career centers often offer career related content, recommended jobs through RSS feeds, and they act as a major driver for website visitors in the form of members, employers, and job seekers.
• Career Center Network – A career center network is created when an association joins other associations to aggregate their collective marketplace influence to significantly increase the number of jobs they are able to present to their members. This increases both their member relevance as well as their revenue, while increasing the number of candidates they present to employers and increasing employer ROI.
• Career Events – Career events, such as virtual and onsite career fairs, are used to connect association members with employers.
• Career Mentoring – An association career mentoring program strengthens the industry by preparing a new generation of industry leaders with the appropriate knowledge and skills needed to strengthen their experience and their leadership skills. Seasoned professionals meet regularly with newer professionals to talk through industry issues and discuss career needs important to them. Career mentoring programs are often highly valued by those who participate and can help the sponsoring associations attract and retain members.
• Content Management System (CMS) – A software application or set of related programs that are used to create and manage digital content, allowing multiple users to create, edit and publish content within a career center or website.
• Digital Ecosystem – A distributed, adaptive, open socio-technical system with properties of self-organization, scalability and sustainability inspired from a set of technical ecosystems. A career center traditionally lives in a digital ecosystem with an association’s association management software, learning management system, and content management system, among others.
• Employer – In the context of an online career center, an employer is a user type that logs into the back end of the career center to purchase job postings that they then post on behalf of their company.
• Internship Module – Many career centers offer internship modules which allow student members and student job seekers to find relevant industry internships. The module will often host mentor opportunities, tailored content, interview tips, and more.
• Job Alerts – Career center job alerts allows job seekers to receive notifications for jobs when new roles are added to a career center based on identified key words or specific job titles. These alerts can be served in the form of an email, a text message, or a browser notification.
• Job Board – A platform where job seekers and employers interact by posting and viewing jobs. It is one component of an association’s career center.
• Job Distribution Networks – In these networks, jobs are distributed to thousands of sites including some association job boards. Examples include RealMatch, Jobg8, and Top USA Jobs.
• Job Seeker – A member or non-member of an association who is registered to seek for new jobs within your career center and job board.
• Onsite Career Fair/Event – An in-person career fair to help members and employers make career connections.
• Programmatic Advertising – The use of automation in buying and selling of online media, which allows advertisers to purchase impressions of users specific to their target audience. Interested advertisers engage in real-time bidding on available impressions on your website through live, online auctions. These auctions are conducted through programmatic ad networks and exchanges.
• Retargeting – A form of digital advertising that allows marketers to create highly targeted ad campaigns that reach recent site visitors as well as similar audiences as these groups surf the Web.
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – A form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages primarily through paid advertising.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – The practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website by making site adjustments that ensure it appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine. This is especially important for a career center since SEO helps to drive job seekers (members and non-members) and employers to your association’s webpages to look for and post jobs which earns your association non-dues revenue.
• Splash Page (or Landing Page) – The page of a website that the user sees first before being given the option to continue to the main content of the site.
• Third-Party Integrations – Allow associations to diversify their online career center offerings to stand out from companies and deliver enhanced educational content to help members advance their careers; make it easy for your software applications to work together and afford associations the freedom of choice and flexibility for future technical growth.

Business Model and General Business Terms:

• Non-Dues Revenue – Revenue generated for associations in ways other than membership dues. Examples of non-dues revenue from your career center include employer job posting sales, advertising sales, or revenue from programmatic advertising and retargeting.
• Revenue Share – Career centers can be launched by an association using a fee-based model or a revenue share model. With the revenue share model, associations earn non-dues revenue through the sale of ads and/or job posting sales and a portion of the revenue goes to the career center vendor to pay for their services and the remainder goes to the association in the form of non-dues revenue.

Career Center Website General Analytics:

• Average Daily Jobs –The average number of jobs on your career center on any given day in a given time frame.
• Average Daily Resumes – The average number of job seeker resumes uploaded in your career center on any given day within a given time frame.
• Average Views per Job – The average number of views each job receives over a specific amount of time.
• Backfilling – The industry practice of taking jobs from other sites and career centers and placing them on your career center and job board.
• Bulk Posting – The ability for employers to add multiple job postings to a career center in systemically in bulk.
• Daily Jobs – The number of jobs available on your association’s career center on a given day.
• Daily Resumes – The number of job seeker resumes posted to your association’s career center on a given day.
• Job Aggregator Networks – The companies in this type of network (e.g. INDEED, Glass Door) aggregate jobs from thousands of sites and present them in a consolidated manner on their website.
• Job Syndication – The practice of feeding jobs to other parts of your website via a widget or carousel display, to increase your site’s revenue, traffic and value.
• Job Posting Sales – The practice of using a professional, trained sales team to sell your association’s job posting opportunities to relevant employers within your industry.
• Job-to-Job Applications – The number of open jobs compared to the number of job applications received.
• Retargeting Enhancement – A type of add-on to a job posting where employers can chose a retargeting enhancement for their job posting, so when potential candidates leave the career center they will see advertising about that employer’s job and/or company to entice them to come back to the career center and apply to the job. This type of job posting enhancement puts the power of additional exposure in the hands of the employers, while at the same time driving traffic back to your career center and website.

Technology Terminology:

• API Platform – An platform that brings together two or more distinct, but independent, software applications, through a programmatically consumable service or an application programming interface, creating a foundation for automated interactions between them.
• GDPR Compliant – The General Data Protection Regulation is a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy for all individual citizens of the European Union and all the European Economic Area. It also addresses the export of personal data outside the EU and EEZ areas.
• Really Simple Syndication Feeds (RSS feeds) – RSS feeds enable fast and efficient career center content distribution to frequently updated areas and can be used to feature jobs on home pages, splash pages, blogs, and in email newsletters.
• Single Sign On (SSO) – SSO allows for registered users to auto-login and be redirected to an association’s website or career center automatically, allowing job seekers to securely update and add their resumes and look for jobs, while employers can engage in resume search.
• Widget – An application, or a component of an interface, that enables a user to perform a function or access a service.