Webinar: Use a Job Board to Revolutionize Your EDO's Branding and Marketing Strategy

Ted Dacko

Good afternoon everyone, welcome to our webinar, Using a Job Board to Revolution Your EDO's, Branding, and Market Strategy. My name is Ted Dacko, and I'll serve as your host today, and we have two featured speakers, first, Michael Kling, Co-Founder of TrueJob. Hello Mike.

Michael Kling

Hi Ted.

Ted Dacko

Second, Jenn Cornell, VP of Marketing for Ann Arbor SPARK. Hello Jenn.

Jenn Cornell

Hello.

Ted Dacko

Alright. A few housekeeping issues before we begin. All of you are in listen only mode to make sure that we cut down on the back ... or, cut out the background noise. There is a dialogue box that you'd ask your questions, you can type them into that dialogue box. We're gonna try to get to all the questions at the end of the webinar, and if we don't we'll get back to you individually.

The slides for this presentation will be available to you and a recorded version of the webinar will be available and sent to each of you within the next two days, and if you're interested in anything that you hear today, we'd be happy to follow-up with you.

If you're having any trouble with the webinar try moving your mouse to the top or bottom of the screen, we're using the product ZOOM, and that's where the Zoom menu is. Check your volume in your headphone connection if you're having problems with the audio. Of course, if you're having problem with the audio, you can't hear what I said anyway.

Let's go to our agenda. Our agenda is, I'm going to do an introduction to Mike Kling in just a second who's gonna talk about the importance, generally, of a job board in an economic development organization. Then we're gonna turn it over to Jenn Cornell and I'm gonna have a series of questions for Jenn about, specifically, a role and the benefits to the marketing department of a job board. Then we'll cover benefits in general, we'll go to Q&A and we will cover next steps.

Let's start with the introduction to Mike. Mike is a Co-Founder of TrueJob. He was trained at MIT and he was responsible for two very critical functions at TrueJob, one is product development and the other one is to make sure that customers are totally 100% satisfied. He is committed to and passionate about helping economic development organizations succeed and particularly with respect to their job boards.

Mike, welcome.

Michael Kling

Thanks Ted.

Ted Dacko

So tell us why a job board is so critical to an economic development organization?

Michael Kling

Yeah, so that's what we're talking about today, so that's a good place to start. I know that we have some varied economic development organizations in attendance. Some of you are just one person shops, we've got some larger ones as well, and you're also really varied in how you do your marketing. Some of you might do internal marketing or maybe you use outside agencies or marketing groups. But regardless of all these differences, marketing efforts for economic development organizations have a lot of the same goals.

The first one is to improve the perception of your brand in your community. If you have a better brand it's gonna be easier for you to both attract new businesses to your area and also to serve those existing businesses that you have right now. As you're doing this, you're going to be trying to measure your success in different ways. Measuring different metrics, depending on your organization, that could include things like how much web traffic you're getting right now, or maybe you care more about how many subscribers you have to your marketing newsletters and how those email campaigns go.

You need the ability to track those key metrics around your marketing campaigns so that you can improve them. Ultimately, you have this goal of being able to continue to support your community and to do that you're going to need to maintain or increase your funding. Whether that's public funding, private funding, some combination of both, that's gonna allow you to continue making an impact. As we're gonna see, as you're gonna hear from Jenn, a job board is really a way that you can directly address all of these things.

Here we kind of ... on this slide you can see the three main stakeholders around a job board and we're gonna talk a little bit about what the problem is that a job board's trying to solve. First, economic development organizations, that's you, in attendance today. Limited funding, you may have limited sources and you need to be able to demonstrate that you're making an impact to your stakeholders and ultimately to your funders. Then we have employers in your area. These companies are looking for talent. They're looking for workers to fill their open positions. And then we have the job seekers, and these are individuals looking for positions that they can take on, that they're qualified for.

Now, if you haven't thought about your role in making these connections before, just remember that your organization really has ... you have expertise in your region. You already have connections to employers, whether that's through incentives or programs, whatever it is that you're doing in your area and so, you have this great opportunity to help make these connections between companies and individuals, and a job board can help you do that.

Ted Dacko

Mike, what's wrong with products like ... using products like Indeed, or Monster, or some of the other big job boards that are available in the marketplace today? Why shouldn't people just consider using those?

Michael Kling

That's a really ... that's a common question. It's a very important one. A lot of companies right now in your area probably are using resources like this, whether it's Indeed, whether it's Monster. Something we see somewhat frequently is on economic development websites, maybe you have a section with resources, and you might even link to some of these sites. The first main problem with this, imagine you have, say a business owner coming to your website, or an individual that's maybe considering coming to your region. As soon as they find this resource, they're leaving your website and you're losing whatever engagement you had with them.

Tied into that, as soon as someone goes off to one of these third-party websites, you're also losing your branding, and you're losing any opportunity that you have to really be part of this process of hiring and any ability to get credit for being part of that process.

Another big problem is that these large job sites, they care a lot more about having a large quantity of jobs on there as opposed to the quality of those jobs. You, as an economic development organization, you know what the key industries are in your region, what the growing companies are. You know what you want to highlight about your region to present it in the best light and you can do that using curation. And curation we'll talk about but, you need the ability to choose which companies and which jobs are appearing, and you can't do that if you're just sending people to these other resources.

Ted Dacko

So there's a big different between people looking for janitorial positions and people looking for advanced programming positions then?

Michael Kling

Yeah, exactly.

Ted Dacko

Okay.

Michael Kling

Exactly.

And finally, you're losing critical data when people go off to other resources. You're not going to be able to see what's happening, what companies are succeeding, who's hiring, are my marketing campaigns being effective, what kinds of results am I seeing? By having a job board that's under your control, you can track all of these key metrics and really understand what kind of impact you're making.

How does TrueJob fit into this picture? Well, TrueJob gives you a better option than these other resources. TrueJob is ... TrueJob exists to help economic development organizations do a better job of promoting and marketing their organizations to their communities using job opportunities. The way that we do this is using a Cloud-based job board software, which connects job seekers and employers, it integrates into your existing website and the whole time it's tracking these key talent metrics, these key marketing metrics, for you to use to evaluate how effective you're being.

I think ... instead of me talking about it, I think we're gonna --

Ted Dacko

So Mike, I guess what I'm hearing you say is that, this allows the economic development organization to capture the critical jobs in their region on their website, or in their environment, so that they're not dispersing all this. And as these job seekers and other people are signing up and trying to learn more, it gives them the ability to capture more information to promote other events that the economic development organization might have. Is that correct?

Michael Kling

Yeah, exactly. All of that stuff.

Ted Dacko

Okay, very good, thank you. Alright, so, Jenn welcome.

Jenn Cornell

Thank you. Happy to be here.

Ted Dacko

Thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to be with us today. You are the VP of Marketing at SPARK.

Jenn Cornell

I am.

Ted Dacko

Tell me a little bit about SPARK and, is it the largest economic development organization in Michigan?

Jenn Cornell

Yes. Ann Arbor SPARK is the largest EDO in the state of Michigan. Our mission really is to promote Ann Arbor as a destination for business, both start-up and global brands, and talent.

Ted Dacko

And talent. How does your role as the VP of Marketing fit into all of that? What's ... what goals do you have in all of that?

Jenn Cornell

We have a lot of goals that we track. Everything from website traffic, making sure that we actually able to report out. Increases in our traffic, views on videos that we produce, the number of views our press releases get, the number of medium engines we get. My job is to sort of oversee all of those moving parts and to make sure that we are continuing to hit the high bar that has been set for us and by us.

Ted Dacko

What I think I'm hearing, correct me if I'm wrong, is, you are measured by the engagement rate with the local community, both in terms of companies and people and you didn't say anything about the success rate at filling positions. I'm guessing that's in there as well, right?

Jenn Cornell

Yeah, so we aren't actually measured by that specific metric, but we are measured by the number of people who open up our talent newsletters, which is tied directly to TrueJob. And the number of people who visit that part of our website. So we are measured by the number of overall website hits that we get each year and the TrueJob portal is actually the most visited part of our website.

Ted Dacko

You think those are common goals for marketing department in an EDO?

Jenn Cornell

I think so, yeah. If talent is one of the most important parts of what an economic development organization does and addresses and ... I think it's also, not only just to be able to show to companies who want to come here, that there is a lot of talent, there is a lot of interest in the jobs that are here in this community, but to be able to just then, offer that as a service to the companies that are hiring to say that we can make you come here and we're gonna make all of your positions as visible as we possibly can.

Ted Dacko

Now, as a larger EDO, you probably, you have a multi-person marketing department. How many people do you have?

Jenn Cornell

There are five of us total.

Ted Dacko

And, what kinds of things do these folks do.

Jenn Cornell

Yeah, so we have a Director of Marketing and Communications whose focused very squarely on generating content for blogs, for our website, for external purposes like byline articles, I also do a lot of that because my background is in PR so a lot of the PR function, creating content for that falls on me. We have an AdWords Graphic Design person, so they kind of ... they're an AdWords Certified and technical person who also is very artistic and does a great job with our graphic design work. Then we have someone who's in charge of events, and someone who's in charge of our social media presence.

Ted Dacko

Now, for theoretical purposes, if you were a one person department, would you still have done ... still focused on a job board?

Jenn Cornell

Yes, because it makes everything ... it feeds content to every other channel, and so, being able to talk to a company that's hiring because we noticed they're posting a lot of jobs, that's something that we can then turn into a blog post and having jobs actually that we know are popular, we can look and say, "Wow, there's a lot of jobs right around software," and so we can do a spotlight on that, dedicated as a social media campaign or as an AdWords campaign. So it would make everything ... it makes everything that we do a lot more informed. Gives us, again, content right from TrueJob that we can pull and use.

Ted Dacko

Do you use an external marketing communications firm? Or, do you do everything internally in terms of your website and market messaging?

Jenn Cornell

No, that's all done internally. We do farm out to a firm when we have large graphic design projects like an annual report that would just be ... it wouldn't make sense for us to try and do internally, but all of that is done internal.

Ted Dacko

So TrueJob is not your website, it is a component of your website then?

Jenn Cornell

Yes, that is correct.

Ted Dacko

Okay. Very good. I guess you probably answered this already but, why did SPARK decide to offer a job board ... do you think we've already covered that topic? Or is there more that you want to say about that?

Jenn Cornell

I think we've ... I think that the reasons that Mike outlined in his set up for this are all very relevant to SPARK's decision to have a job board and to offer one and it's interesting because when you were talking about it, we had previously, before engaging with you, we had a job board that we used, but it was really just a back-end system that didn't offer any of the insight and reporting metrics and things that TrueJob offers to us. Making the switch actually took what we had that was just functional and make it extra useful.

Ted Dacko

Some of these metrics that the new job board provides. What are some of the ... the questions that it answers for you that you weren't able to answer in the past?

Jenn Cornell

Well, so this isn't really a ... it is a question, but who's actually using our job portal and how do we better communicate with them was something that we struggled with and we shared that with you guys and the capability was baked in. And so you guys actually enhanced the platform to allow job seekers, should they choose to give us their email address, and to be added to our talent newsletter. That was something that was ... we never could have done internal and has been, as part of our overall communication strategy, really effective. We thought we were doing really well before with our job seeker newsletter. We had a 15% open rate and about a 4% click through rate and so, once we started implementing the capabilities that you built in to allow job seekers to opt in, we could have clean lists.

People, when they find a job will opt out of that email address and so we weren't really ... we didn't have a good mechanism for capturing new addresses to keep our list very targeted and very focused on job seekers. After you started giving us the ability to pull lists, contact lists, for those who'd opted in from TrueJob, our open rate went up to over 25% and the click through rate more than doubled to 11%, and it continues to improve.

Ted Dacko

Wow.

Jenn Cornell

Yeah, it's amazing. It's our highest performing newsletter as well.

Ted Dacko

Great. What do you use these lists for? What kinds of things do you use them for?

Jenn Cornell

Primarily ... we have a talent newsletter that we produce in house and, I mean, we are a team of five, which I know some people are probably sitting there thinking, "I'm an office of one, don't complain."

Ted Dacko

Or maybe part-time.

Jenn Cornell

Right, part-time. We like to have ... make sure we're putting out ... we're doing something, it needs to be valuable, and so, we use the ... obviously the email component that we talked about, but we are also able to go through and say, "Wow, Thomson Reuters," for instance, a major employer in our region, "you've got eight jobs, let's make sure we do a spotlight on Thomson Reuters in this job seeker newsletter." "Let's make sure that, wow, there are 10 graphic design jobs, we should absolutely pull a couple of those." So it makes our content more informed.

Ted Dacko

And, so, I'm gonna take a step back for a second. SPARK is organized, from an operations perspective, into two pieces. There are, is a group that focuses on the larger established employers and there's a group that's focused on the start-up community. Is this functionality used by both of those groups?

Jenn Cornell

Yes. Absolutely. It's used by both and I think part of it is, they see that we actually engage the ... TrueJob as a tool, as a marketing tool. They know that if they post to the job board there's a good chance it's going to end up on social media. So it just amplifies and helps a start-up who may not ... might get lost in the shuffle next to a Duo Security, or a Barracuda, or a Nokia. You know, they might get lost in the shuffle, but they know if they're actually posting to the job board, we're gonna give equal love.

Ted Dacko

Okay, very good. Now, do you ... your marketing department, or actually SPARK in general does a lot of different kinds of events. You will have something called TechTrek, you will have Entrepreneurs who come back at ... during Thanksgiving, etc. How does the job board help you with your other external events?

Jenn Cornell

That's a great question because it came up ... you guys got a shout out yesterday at the TechTrek luncheon where we ... TechTrek is this walking tour of downtown Ann Arbor's innovation businesses, about 70 participants and we very strongly, repeatedly, encourage our employers to put their jobs on their portal. It gives us a different way when we're always beating that drum, sign up for TechTrek, here's what you're gonna get out of TechTrek. This is ... TechTrek's cool. It allows us to engage the job seeker audience as well, so not just the general public, not just the participating companies, but it gives us a new way to talk about the event to a very specific audience.

Ted Dacko

And we sit in the shadow of a tiny little liberal arts college here called The University of Michigan. So I'm guessing this gives you an opportunity to take students who may not necessarily be aware of the job opportunities in the place that they went to school and to have them continue to live and work in this community.

Jenn Cornell

Yeah, absolutely. That was ... we engage them through TechTrek, but we also engage them through Tech Homecoming, which is an event we host the night before Thanksgiving where companies that are hiring gather together at a local ... usually we rent out a restaurant and have the opportunity to talk about available positions and when we follow up with the people ... either they registered or attended, it doesn't matter, we promote the job board, and say, "Here's a way for you to find out what's going on in this region," and, if you're coming from a city like Chicago, or we're attracting you back from New York or California, wherever you happen to have decided to go, but now you're looking to come back home. There can be a perception by some that there aren't a lot of good tech jobs in the mid-West, in Michigan. We're not considered a tech hub, although I hope that's changing if we're doing our job correctly, it should be changing.

But the idea is, you don't have to worry about your trailing spouse not having a job. You don't have to worry if this position with whatever company you get hired in to do software development doesn't work out, there are 20 other software jobs available. Just look at the job board and it'll speak for itself.

Ted Dacko

Good. Now, Mike talked a little bit about the curation process. What kinds of companies/positions are you most interested in, whether they're large or small?

Jenn Cornell

Yeah, our mission is focused around innovation based businesses and so, for us, driving industries like mobilities, IT, healthcare, health science, bioinformatics. We're very ... our focus is very narrow and I think you touched on it earlier when you said, you know, you're not gonna go to a Indeed or a Monster because you're gonna have to sift through jobs that might not be relevant or recruiters who have posted and might not actually be the best job fit. For us, it gives us some quality assurance that the right jobs that align with our mission are being promoted out.

Ted Dacko

You have a ... your annual meeting coming up next week I believe, right?

Jenn Cornell

Yep.

Ted Dacko

So there are statistics that you will ... will you be able to grab statistics about the job board that can used to help you with your overall branding and messaging to the Ann Arbor community?

Jenn Cornell

Yeah. What we measure ... so key metrics for the marketing team are web traffic, page views, the number of jobs posted, number of jobs viewed, the number of jobs filled, our newsletter sign ups and then just basic demographic data. All of that is very interesting to various stakeholders for various reasons. And TrueJob gives us, not only the capabilities to accomplish those goals very successfully, but have meaningful data that we can verify and push out.

For instance, we've been able to confirm that more than 50 jobs, a little over 50 jobs have been filled by companies that we actively engage with since the beginning of the year. So we can actually use that statistic and tell people, "This is why the job board is a very important resource and this is a way that we are serving the community in a meaningful way."

Ted Dacko

So justify your existence.

Jenn Cornell

Yes.

Ted Dacko

Absolutely.

Jenn Cornell

Always a good thing.

Ted Dacko

Talk a little bit if you could about how you use the job board in your social media campaigns. I notice that I see you on Facebook, and Twitter, and LinkedIn, and things like that. Talk to me a little bit about that.

Jenn Cornell

Yeah. When we go into the job ... well, when we go into TrueJob, again, if we see that there's a trend around a specific type of company, or a specific type of industry, or a specific type of job, then that to us is kind of an alarm bell to say, "Wow, there's a lot of interest around here," and if we can promote these, then we can get the right type of talent connected with our message and with the job board and hopefully get them to engage over and over and come back, therefore improving our web metrics and everything else, signing up for our newsletter. I think for us that's just a way to be smarter about what we're doing and how we're doing it.

Ted Dacko

And I think you touched upon this already but I'm curious about how you might ... I think you said already, but, I'll ask it anyway. You use the job board to recruit companies to the Ann Arbor region. Anything else you wanted to add on around that?

Jenn Cornell

No, I mean I think it's something that is ... it differentiates us because we're able to say we do have a lot of qualified candidates, we do have a lot of good ways that we promote the job board. It's just another way to prove value to businesses that are considering us over a place in Ohio or a place in California, wherever they might happen to be. It's just a service that SPARK offers that sets us apart and is more of a concierge type service, right? It's a very specialized service that we're able to offer.

Ted Dacko

And, your CEO is on board with this whole process?

Jenn Cornell

Absolutely. It's ... all of the things ... for instance, one of the things that we report out to ... we enjoy some public funding and one of the metrics that we are required to report out to them is website traffic and to be able to show that we're investing in a website, it's a good investment and more than half of our monthly visits to the website, which is a hard metric and a hard goal we have to accomplish, are directly to the job portal.

Ted Dacko

I'm gonna go backwards for a second. You have these other events, TechTrek, you have training programs. I forget the name of the one where the ... Homecoming, etc. Is the job board a way for you to have a call to action so it's just not an event and everybody goes home but they have a follow up. Is that how you would use this portal?

Jenn Cornell

Yeah, absolutely. It's not only ... it's interesting that you raised the question that way because it's not only follow up, a call to action to the event attendees, so job seekers or general public. You know, we send a thank you note out, a thank you email and embed a link so that they know to go to the job portal to continue to look for those jobs to sign up for our newsletter via the portal. But it's also a way for us to follow back up with the companies and say, "You just had this opportunity to meet all this exciting talent, make sure you're putting your jobs there so we can continue to promote and support your needs in that way."

Ted Dacko

And you don't have a person dedicated to talent on your team?

Jenn Cornell

No, that is correct.

Ted Dacko

So this service has that function for you with an automated way to focus on talent without you having to spend resources to do that, is that correct?

Jenn Cornell

It's very simple. We have a person on our staff who goes in ... we do ... obviously, because we are mission based and have a very narrow, fairly narrow focus within the innovation space, the types of businesses and companies that we want to serve and can serve. We have someone that goes in, once a day, for about 10 minutes and just makes sure that ... approves the jobs so ... you're University of Michigan, you are absolutely hiring for a tech job, get on the portal. It's not a very time consuming process at all for our staff, which is a bonus.

Ted Dacko

Have any success stories that you have about individuals or companies with opportunities in the job board? Like you said, you already had 50 placements through your job board this year but, has any, in the last year or so that stand out in terms of particular success stories.

Jenn Cornell

Yeah. I was actually ... we interviewed ... so we feature a talent story on our blog and in our newsletter once a month and so, we had just talked to a gentlemen who was using ... and he mentioned it just off the cuff, but he was looking to come back, he and his wife had started a family, they didn't like the cost of living or the hustle bustle of trying to raise their kid in Silicon Valley and so they were looking for a job back here and he happened to be going through the job portal, knew that he wanted to find a very ... he had a very small industry that he was looking in and found the job there. We were talking to him because he was a relocation, come back to Michigan story, which is something that we always want to tell and he just happened to say, "By the way, I found this job on the job portal," so it was just a really nice coincidence that he brought it up and told us. But it was a great success story. He actually got hired with a global company here.

Ted Dacko

You know, there's a ... pardon me offering some commentary on this but, back in the day I had sold a company to a company in Ann Arbor, I ended up in the ... I ended up coming to Ann Arbor from the east coast, from New York area, and at the end of that deal, because there were ... there was no such thing as a job board back then, and I did not ... I was unaware of the ... what was going on in the Ann Arbor region, even though my family stayed here, I ended up taking a job back in the New York area and I commuted every Monday to New York and every Thursday or Friday back from New York.

Jenn Cornell

Ouch.

Ted Dacko

With a plane full of people who were doing the same thing.

Jenn Cornell

Oh my gosh.

Ted Dacko

As I was doing. So it probably would ... this would have been very, very useful to understand more about what was going on here so I didn't have to have that painful commute. So, interesting. So Jenn, let me ask you this. What about ... what questions should I have asked you that I didn't ask you in terms of the marketing department? Is there anything that I missed that you could think of?

Jenn Cornell

I think, for us, the big ... the big pain point that we experienced before, and I touched on it briefly is that, we didn't have before a steady flow of new and active contacts for our newsletters and so, that made that activity not as effective as it could have been. You know, our list basically withered and died and became stagnant, and so, in an ideal world, if you're doing your job correctly, as an EDO, you're going to see a huge turnover rate on that job seeker newsletter, or on your job seeker email target lists. And so, if ... without this ability to capture who we know is actively looking for a job today, there's no ... I don't know how else we would have been able to do that. Or be able to do it in a way that wasn't just extremely challenging to us without TrueJob, and it's a huge benefit to us.

Ted Dacko

Would you say that is, say, one of your top three critical initiatives that you have as an EDO?

Jenn Cornell

Oh, absolutely. Talent is huge, right?

Ted Dacko

Mm-hmm (affirmative)-

Jenn Cornell

And so, whether ... and there's a big, there's a big perception, both on the ... especially on the job seeker part, like I said earlier, that there aren't those types of jobs here and so, we can't tell employers, "Come here, we can guarantee the talent will come," without being able to show that critical mass. And this is just a really easy way to do it and it's credible because it's a job board. It's not just us saying we have the talent and the jobs, we're showing it.

Ted Dacko

So Mike, back to you, talk to me a little bit about the benefits, summarize the benefits if you possibly could.

Michael Kling

Sure. Thank you so much Jenn.

Ted Dacko

Yeah.

Michael Kling

On this slide here we just have a summary of a few metrics, and Jenn even mentioned some others as well, but first, as she mentioned, right now, over 50% of all the website traffic that SPARK gets goes to their job board and so, if you don't have this kind of resource right now, think about that, think about the potential in doubling your web traffic and what kind of impact that would make. They've engaged with over 300 local employers and the job seeker engagement has increased over 60% and so that means more job seekers finding jobs, viewing jobs, ultimately getting hired. I know there are even more metrics that Jenn mentioned, the increase in click through rate and the email campaigns. More than 50 jobs filled this year.

Jenn Cornell

Can I jump in with a real quick metric that I didn't mention.

Michael Kling

Yes please. Sure.

Jenn Cornell

Since switching to TrueJob, we ... our traffic to our job board, which previously we had the clunky system I talked about earlier, it's gone up, the traffic has gone up 125%. That's over 188,000 individual page views and so, that's significant. This is not an insignificant number we're talking about.

Ted Dacko

And that's from a ... I wouldn't say a poor job board but a ... something that was ineffective to effective. I wonder what would have happened if you've gone from zero to this.

Jenn Cornell

Yeah.

Ted Dacko

Because you already had one and you converted. Most of the people on the phones don't even have a job board, so, they're gonna see some enormous improvement.

Jenn Cornell

Absolutely.

Ted Dacko

Thank you.

Jenn Cornell

Yeah.

Michael Kling

Great. I'll wrap up by just summarizing some of the benefits that we've heard about through this conversation. First, again, that increase in web traffic, potentially being able to double your web traffic if this isn't something that you have right now. Highlighting, the ability to highlight key metrics. Whether that's page views to your website or being able to say you have filled this many jobs in your community, or increased your email campaign, the number of contacts you have. These are all metrics that you'll be able to track and improve.

As Jenn mentioned, constant ... a constant stream of fresh content for you. As you get new jobs, new companies coming in, you can use those and whatever marketing materials, whether it's blog posts or social media, that can be really valuable. Giving event visitors a clear call to action. Talked about this as well. Whatever event it is, making sure that those attendees have some way of following up. If they want to ... if they met people, met companies and they are interested, send them back to your website and start getting them making those connections.

Growing your contact database, again, TrueJob enables you to collect information from job seekers, contact information, that then you can use to reach out to them, reengage them, bring them back to your website, start helping them get hired. Improving ... all these things are gonna help you improve the perception of your brand and as you do that, you're gonna have an easier time attracting new companies to your region, you're gonna be able to do more to serve the existing companies in your region, and as you're doing all of this, you're gonna be ... TrueJob enables you to track what's happening and keep track of all these metrics and that powerful reporting and analytics capability is gonna enable you to share how successful you're being and justify all your efforts with your stakeholders and ultimately your funders.

Ted Dacko

Okay, so let's move to the Q&A section, and of course Mike, as you would expect, the first question is about pricing and Michelle writes in, "Funding is always a challenge for us, please tell me that this is not a $50,000 a year product?"

Michael Kling

No. So the way funding works ... sorry, the way that the costs of TrueJob works is, we break it into two components. We have an implementation fee and then we have an annual subscription fee. The implementation fee is ... pays for branding the job board to match your website, it is for training for people on your team. We actually do some other things like prepopulating the job board ahead of time with high quality job postings from your area so that we can make sure that it's successful at launch. And that fee starts at $850. Then we have the annual subscription fee, and that covers all of the ... all the hosting of the job board, all of the ongoing support that we provide, both to you and to any companies or users coming on your job board. That fee starts at $5,000 a year, just over $5,000 a year and increases for larger communities.

Ted Dacko

So this a ... Jenn, this is a fraction of an FTE?

Jenn Cornell

Yes.

Ted Dacko

And, generating the value of potentially multiple FTE's?

Jenn Cornell

Yes, absolutely. And it's a valuable part of our marketing metric ... marketing metrics, it's a valuable part of the content we're able to push out.

Ted Dacko

Okay, Luke writes in, "How long's it take to implement this?"

Michael Kling

Yeah, that's an important question. This is ... this is not a ... it's not a long process. Adding it to your website takes almost no time, we just give you a little snippet to drop in to wherever you want it to appear. Then we work with you to develop, if you want to develop a promotional campaign, we can work with you on that. Again, I mentioned, if you want to pull in some high quality postings from your area to get started, we can help you with that as well. All of that process can take less than a week so we can really get you started quickly on this. This is not a months long implementation.

Ted Dacko

Okay. Charlene asks the question, "Obviously this would apply as easily to an EDO focused on a manufacturing or other kind of region rather than a technology region?" There are no constraints around the kinds of jobs and companies it can be curated, correct?

Michael Kling

That's exactly right. Yeah, we heard about the kinds of jobs that are important to Ann Arbor, but obviously, whatever your community is, whatever's important to you, you can reflect that, you can use the ability to curate the jobs that are appearing and the companies that are appearing, to really match what you want to be focusing on in your community.

Ted Dacko

Okay. Michael writes in, "How can I get more information?" We're gonna cover that in just a second so I will ignore that question for a moment. Do you see any other questions up there?

Michael Kling

I'll take a look.

Ted Dacko

I sort of lost my screen so.

Michael Kling

That's okay. I don't see any more questions right now.

Ted Dacko

Okay. Very good. Let's move to Michael's question, what are the next steps and how can you learn more information? You can visit the website www.truejob.com, which will give you a good explanation of what the product and the company is about. There is a white paper focused specifically on the needs of economic development organizations. There is a case study on the Ann Arbor SPARK implementation, and incidentally, we have implementations throughout the country in Arizona and Wisconsin. Is that right?

Michael Kling

That's right.

Ted Dacko

Okay. There's a recorded version of this and prior webinars that are available. The prior webinars are already there, today's webinar will be up within a couple of days. There is also an interview with Phil Santer, who's the Chief of Staff and runs the larger portion of SPARKs economic development organization, in other words, he focuses on the larger companies. You can download a report book on the kinds of metrics that you could expect to get as an economic development organization. Should you implement a job board, there is a free consultation on implementing a job board and contact information is contact@truejob.com and we would be very happy, the company would be very happy to follow up with you and answer any questions and walk you through a mutually agreeable evaluation process about how you could learn as to whether this would work for you.

With that, Jenn, thank you again so much.

Jenn Cornell

Happy to be here and I'm happy ... anyone who's sort of on the fence, I just want to say, you guys have been incredibly responsive when we mentioned wanting to capture emails or wanting to have different metrics, you guys have been just amazing with customer service. I'm happy to support you guys however I can.

Ted Dacko

Very good. Jenn, you can expect 200 emails when you get back to your office.

Jenn Cornell

I thought you were gonna say 200 bucks right now.

Ted Dacko

No, no, no, no. We don't pay for references.

Jenn Cornell

No.

Ted Dacko

And Mike, thank you again for work, your work for doing the webinar, it was very useful and I'm sure people who listened in got a great deal out of it.

Michael Kling

Thanks Ted.

Ted Dacko

And with that folks, we will wish you a pleasant afternoon and we look forward to hearing from you. Thank you. Good bye.