I recently had the opportunity to participate in an ASAE Marketing Mavens call focused on association career centers.
My question for the group was: Many of my clients are finding that their career centers are not performing as well as they used to. Anyone else experiencing this? Thoughts as to why this is happening? Anyone come up with any solutions?
Participants came up with lots of good ideas and suggestions:
- Lots of folks reported similar experiences – declining use, declining revenue. Sometimes that was a result of competing with yourself, with members posting jobs directly in private online communities for free. Sometimes that was a result of outside competition from platforms like LinkedIn and Glassdoor. There are lots of opportunities for free posting that also reach much larger audiences.
- Another issue people raised was: Is it even appropriate to classify a career center as a “member benefit” if everyone has access? On the other hand, it’s totally counter-productive to restrict access to the job listings, as then the site is no longer useful to employers who pay to list jobs.
- One participant mentioned that the industry their association serves experiences regular pauses in hiring due to change of presidential administrations and resulting uncertainty. (This is kind of a separate issue, as other participants agreed that for their associations, declining participation and revenue are a longer-term trend.)
- We talked about the importance of promoting your association’s career center effectively, with several participants recommending using a third party platform with a revenue share if at all possible. Career center vendors tend to have dedicated marketing teams and proven tools you can use, which an association trying to do this internally may lack.
- Participants that were still experiencing success reported that their associations were more focused on providing a “career community,” of which the job board is only one component. They were adding services like career coaching, career advice content, on-site job fairs at conferences, and resume review.
- Other suggestions included: giving members one free job listing a year (via a promo code), opening up the career center to internships as well as full time paid positions, offering display ads on the site for things other than just jobs, and reserving new postings for member-only access for the first 72 hours.
But (here’s a dated reference for you), the $64,000 question is: Is there still any value in doing this?
And it got me thinking about the concept of opportunity cost. Career centers have historically been good sources of non dues revenue for associations. And if your career center is still bringing in at least some revenue, and the investment of time and attention from your staff to create that revenue stream is minimal, then it’s probably worth continuing, at least for the time being.
But that’s a calculation you need to keep an eye on in ALL your programs, products, and services: What’s the benefit? What’s the cost? Not just direct dollars, but also staff time and attention that, if devoted to this, are not available for something else that might either produce more revenue or be more valuable to members or both?
Photo by rc.xyz NFT gallery on Unsplash