New job board offers hiring managers greater reach Email

Finding employees continues to be the greatest challenge facing landscape companies in Colorado. Hiring managers face a daunting task in trying to fill positions so that businesses can operate at full capacity. A valuable tool is industry-specific job boards, and ALCC has taken steps to revamp their classified ads, with the help of NALP’s Industry Growth Initiative (IGI).

“After listening to member feedback, we understood that our old job board was not successfully reaching the right candidates for the jobs that our members need to fill,” said ALCC Executive Director John McMahon.  

In a timely move, NALP approached ALCC to adopt jobs.landscapeindustrycareers.org, a new job board launched in late 2017 through the IGI. Landscape Industry Careers features a dynamic, searchable job board—a feature previously unavailable on the static bulletin board format of ALCC’s previous tool. Job listings appeared in reverse chronological order in the old ALCC board and could not be sorted by any other aspect like location, job title, or keyword. While this helped job posters immediately see their post on the site, it did not guarantee that the right job seeker would find the listing. The new job board allows a job seeker to immediately enter their job function area (irrigation, sales, foreman, etc.) and/or location and search for related jobs near them.

“We want to make sure our job ads have value,” explained Tammy DiFalco, Member Relations Manager. “Our old job board was not satisfactorily connecting candidates and that few posts, if any, directly resulted in new hires. Jobs.landscapeindustrycareers.org addresses our concerns and offers greater reach for hiring managers.”

Job seekers can, from the moment they reach the site, enter the job category or title they want (accounting, foreman, etc.) and find exactly the kind of job they seek. Previously, candidates would have to scroll through irrelevant postings to get to the jobs they wanted. Though it is likely that they would simply leave the site if they didn’t see what they were looking for.  

With customized job board technology and NALP’s technology department behind it, ALCC is confident that the new job board is reaching more job candidates than simply those who found ALCC’s site. And since they can focus on relevant jobs instead of scrolling all recent posts, job seekers will hopefully be more quickly connected to the right jobs. It also means that keywords are more important than ever when crafting a successful job post.

Ads continue to be free to both employers and job seekers. Two new paid features are available as well:

  • An immediate need recognition icon ($5) adds a red ribbon to a post. It does not, however, affect placement in search results.
  • A featured job post ($10) highlights an ad with shading and pushes it toward the top of search results in its categories.

Read more in this issue of Colorado Green NOW:
Camera phone and some creativity can boost your social media
Timberline and DBC Irrigation host high school interns

Heat safety preparedness is critical this year

Efficient landscape irrigation can help ease the pain of drought