Opinions wanted: We are a B2B Saas Company - Should we implement a career Category in our Community?

We don’t have one, but I’ve also considered it. 

When I’ve considered it previously in my current role and past companies, the leading decision point is potential risk to your customer and partner relationships. As a B2B company, your revenue comes from the Business. Job boards are about individuals. Job boards could lead to employee exits from your customers/partners. What kind of risk does that create for your business? 

I think your thoughts in your second bullet point are great. Mentorship and career development are great topics to try to cultivate via the community. Plus, they’re things that happen in discussion threads; whereas job postings are imperfect in threads IMO (+ there are so many sites and tools for listing them). 

My POV on your business objectives is to lean into career development over career change. A solid mentorship program could really increase the value individuals get from the community and increase engagement overall. And job changes could still be a biproduct via that mentorship, connections, etc…. just with much less risk of a post that an upset stakeholder might blame for lost talent / rising talent costs. 

*I acknowledge that mentorship programs, etc are MUCH more difficult to launch and run than a forum that allows job posting. 

Absolutely, that is my only concern to be honest. :) 
Before bringing it up internally, I wanted to gather some opinions or if I miss something. 
 

A mentorship program might be something for the further future. Though, starting and seeing how a development category is going might be a first step into that direction. 
I particularly like your point with:

And job changes could still be a biproduct via that mentorship, connections, etc…. just with much less risk of a post that an upset stakeholder might blame for lost talent / rising talent costs. 

I’m thinking about similar improvements (job board excluded). 

I want to encourage sharing of professional development skills related to using our product. 

• How do they build their teams? 
  • Size
  • Personas
• How do they run their projects? 
  • Style (ex. agile, waterfall)
  • Timelines
• Advice for learning and developing

There’s so much learning, PD, and PM content out there from an agnostic POV. I’m trying to figure out if/how I can get our community to discuss it through the lens of using our product. 

It’s tough to beat sources like Linkedin and specific influencers/organizations/sites for those topics, yet in my career in Tech communities, those are the questions people ask each other in person. Discussing it through the lens of the tech you’re implementing/upgrading/maintaining is helpful when they gather in person. 

How do we cultivate those conversations on the community? Please share if you come up with anything that works. I will if I do! 

Hello @Lena H.!

I love this discussion . So much continuous learning opportunity here.🙌🏽

For pt 1 - We do run a job board of sorts on this community & I oversee that. However, it’s not really a separate category per se. It’s blended in easily into our ‘Community news’ category. I run these almost weekly batches of CS Ops & Admin opportunities that I find through my research on other platforms or members/customers sharing them with me. We also have members sometimes post job opportunities at their company themselves, especially if it is pertaining to other areas outside CS Ops and admin roles. Like Danny said, there is definitely a risk that could possibly be involved in these shares, but that’s a risk we did take. Our primary focus was to ensure members get benefitted from these opportunities with the increasing demand for these roles and we wanted to be a touch point where they could possibly find roles beyond what’s on say a hiring platform like LinkedIn. What helped with the risk was the fact that this was tied into our company completely within even our CEO sharing it across on his social. So i’d really suggest that conversation if not already done, with the company to understand the risks and maybe consider bringing them into the game with you.

The initial few batches were also my testing period to see how the community responds and then planned to scale it from there. I mean, at the max what would happen is we would pull the plug on it if it didn’t work & that’s fine too cause it’s an attempt to build the community further in front of your members. I would also suggest the same to test the waters and once it has scaled to cover all roles in your industry, you can move them into a new category. Category can be a huge commitment, unless you’re sure that the amount of content that can go in there regularly to keep it active is high enough.

And sometimes I feel it’s best if the company themselves kickstarts these so that there is a level of filter you can hold with these listings & make certain calls that wouldn’t negatively impact your company while posting these out.

I am open to chat with you more about this if you’d like to!

Pt 2 - I’m very keen to see if anyone else has done this. It’s on my radar to implement here since I feel like this community has tons of wonderful members who would enjoy these conversations. Looking forward to hearing more from someone on this! 🔥

Excellent discussion all around. I just wanted to respond to point 2

Does someone have experience, that power users are responsible to moderate a category within their community? Since the users asked for it, and seem to develop themselves regularly, I thought it might be a good idea. I’d be interested to exchange on that as well. 

It just makes so much sense for Power users to be able to Moderate forums, but we don’t have ‘Moderation’ capabilities available to the end user from the front end (apart from maybe Reporting posts) which arrests the possibility to make non-Employees, Moderators with some very specific handles available.

Ideally the solution could look something like we should be able to make A, B, C moderators of a specific category or group without opening up the whole wide Community backend to them but that is an Idea candidate at this point.