Two years ago, Peter Schmelzer wanted to move up in the world of association management without moving away from the Chicago area.
Knowing just the kind of job that was right for him, he turned to the online job board of the Association Forum of Chicagoland.
He found the perfect job, and the American College of Osteopathic Family Physicians, based in Arlington Heights, found the perfect deputy executive director. Schmelzer now uses the Forum’s online service when he needs to find qualified candidates for the college. “It’s just so more focused than a big job board,” he said. “When we want to hire people who have association experience in marketing or meeting planning, you really want to target the search.”
Associations don’t broadcast splashy ads during the Super Bowl for their online job boards, so it’s easy to underestimate their presence in the fast-growing arena of Internet career services. Collectively, though, the thousands of U.S. associations are a powerful competitor to high-profile online job services, such as HotJobs.com and CareerBuilder.com (which is owned in part by Tribune Co.).
“We are a stealth service,” said Chris Mahaffey, commenting on the dramatic growth of association job boards nationwide. He is CEO of the Association Forum of Chicagoland, which runs a job board for association professionals. “We counter-market the Monster.coms by telling our potential users that if you post your job on Monster, you’ll get all kinds of responses that don’t fit what you’re looking for. And we tell the same story to the candidates . . . go ahead and put your resume out there in the chance that lightning may strike. But if you’re in association management, go to associationjobs.org,” Mahaffey said.
Most job hunters view association boards as just one element–albeit a critical element–of a many-pronged search, explains Susan Bergman, director of online service for the Society for Human Resource Management, based in Alexandria, Va. The society not only operates a sophisticated job board for its 160,000 members but also advises corporate human resource executives on how to leverage online job boards for their own hiring purposes.
A society poll indicated that job hunters and corporations “try lots of channels simultaneously,” said Bergman. Huge sites tend to be most useful for mid-level generalists, while employers prefer to advertise only locally for entry level and part-time positions.
Even executives at nationally branded sites concede that association boards deliver a revved-up version of what associations traditionally have done best: provide members with the latest opportunities in their fields. “People who are a part of their professional organizations show an interest in their industry,” said Christopher Jones, vice president of content and community for HotJobs.com, a division of Yahoo Inc., of Sunnyvale, Calif.
Major league job boards are taking a page from the associations’ playbooks by creating industry-specific channels and news services. Job board executives point out that job seekers who want to change industries need to see how their skills might be applied to various types of positions–a chore easily accomplished by omnibus boards. Still, they concede that the sites of professional groups are well suited to match the most motivated, qualified candidates with specialized slots and management positions.
That’s what Debra Denslaw does when she needs to find curators, archival specialists and music cataloguers for the Chicago Public Library. As the recruitment coordinator for the library, Denslaw doesn’t want to waste time digging through the letters and resumes of hundreds of hopelessly unqualified candidates when she needs to unearth the right person for a very specific position.
She uses the online job postings and other recruitment tools offered through the American Library Association (ALA) and its affiliates, all located in Chicago. “You want to target the people who have the experience and interest in that specific field,” she said. “As you find that you have to fill a more specialized position, you have to direct your search specifically to the associations who have web sites that people (with those skills) are watching.”
Employers whose operations span several professions often belong to an array of associations, the better to drop a hook where the fish are. Tim Seeden is president of an association management firm, Association Solutions Limited, in Lisle, but also is a member of Meeting Planners International. Through the MPI’s Chicago chapter Web site, he cross-posted a meeting planner position and found an experienced employee who wanted to relocate to Chicago from California yet continue working as an event manager.
Though associations were a bit slow to pick up on the usefulness of online job boards to their members, they’re now adding online tools to get their jobs up to par with their well-developed, traditional membership networking functions. Many groups are doing what the MPI does–include local listings in a job bank operated by the national organization or by a network of local chapters. As well, many societies are adding the ability for members to keep their resumes online–the better to catch the eye of recruiters.
The American Marketing Association, based in Chicago, runs its job board through a for-profit subsidiary, MarketingPower.com, explains Bob Wallach, CEO of MarketingPower. By using an online service that specializes in providing the technical underpinnings for association boards, MarketingPower maintains a database of 3,600 resumes and sends out notices of new opportunities to a database of 33,000–all of whom only get notices that fit their indicated interests. “We’re adding elements to market more aggressively,” he said.
While associations do see their boards as a prime benefit of membership, a surprising number make their boards completely open: Job seekers often don’t have to be members to search the listings, and corporations don’t have to be members to post openings. That’s because the nonprofits find that the boards are the best possible proof of the value of membership to potential members.
Meanwhile, because members are the most likely to be trolling the boards for leads, employers still find that they are approached by a self-selected, prequalified group of candidates.
Smaller can be better, said Dawn Benati, president of the Chicago Interactive Marketing Association. The enjoyable surprise of recognizing a familiar name and recalling a familiar face through a society-run board goes a long way towards linking up members the old-fashioned way.
“Knowing your market is the cardinal rule,” she said. “We know our market–Chicago-based integrated and online marketers. It’s not as much about the content as (it is about) the context. The Chicago Interactive Marketing Association is the context . . . and that makes what’s within the context more targeted and qualified, even if it is more simple.”
