Chamber: Hay Bay City platform posts jobs, expands outreach; city-held account at $118,693.95

Sarah Parker, a representative of the Bay Area Chamber of Commerce, told the Bay City Commission on July 7 that the Chamber’s Hay Bay City workforce platform posted 226 jobs and had 214 employers signed up through the first two quarters of 2025. "We have a total currently of 214 employers that are signed up to post on Hay Bay City," Parker said.

Parker said employers and job seekers used the platform in multiple ways: 1,343 "apply" clicks, 41 formal applications submitted via the platform’s Typeform workflow, and 41 resumes submitted directly to Chamber staff. She said the Chamber’s workforce staff held 53 face-to-face meetings with employers, educators and partners in the period and that staff are providing one-on-one resume support to several job seekers.

Annabelle Schweiger, marketing communications manager for the Bay Area Chamber of Commerce, summarized website and social metrics for the same period. "For the first half of the year, our website received approximately 123,000 views and 40,000 users," Schweiger said, and she identified the job pages as a high-traffic area with about 87,000 job-page views during the two quarters. She said much of the traffic came from Bay City, Ashburn, Virginia, and Detroit.

Schweiger reported cross-platform social reach and audience counts the Chamber compiles: about 1,280,000 views across Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, more than 17,000 followers, roughly 3,730 email subscribers and about 1,300 SMS subscribers. She said average session duration on the Hay Bay City site is about two minutes and 11 seconds.

Parker described a mix of activities the Chamber calls workforce development: employer outreach (53 meetings in the period), targeted messages to job seekers (17 opportunities sent directly), and collaborations with Bay City Public Schools, Saginaw Valley State University (SVSU), Great Lakes Bay Michigan Works and Bay Future. She said the Chamber presented at the Connecting Entrepreneurial Communities conference on bridging the skills gap.

On the program’s finances, Parker said marketing spending in quarters 1 and 2 included roughly $13,000 for advertising and about $3,000 for community outreach; she gave an end-of-quarter-two balance that the Chamber holds with the city as $118,693.95.

Commissioners asked about local procurement for Chamber-branded merchandise and the drop in site traffic the Chamber attributed to a deliberate reduction in Google ad spend. "At the beginning of the year we made the intentional decision to reevaluate our Google Ad spend and have decreased that since, which will therefore cause a decrease in traffic," Schweiger said.

The Chamber asked commissioners, residents and employers to share posts, refer job seekers and employers to the platform and otherwise support the program’s outreach. "If you have an employer that needs job seekers, reach out to me," Parker said.