Taking its own advice to “Start Building,” CareerBuilder sets out on a mission to build something bigger: the economy.

What began two years ago as a branding campaign to prove itself as a strategic business partner to clients has morphed today into a much larger initiative. With the launch of Empowering Employment, CareerBuilder hopes to communicate the company’s mission to create a stronger job market and fuel economic growth.

The idea for the new campaign generated from talks between CareerBuilder’s Jamie Womack, Vice President of Corporate Marketing and Branding, and other company executives. “We felt the time had come to move beyond ‘Start Building’ [our employer-focused slogan since 2008],” says Womack. “We started asking ourselves, ‘What do we want to be known for? How did we become who we are today?’ We wanted to tell the whole story about the value we bring to our clients.”

More than a job board
While CareerBuilder enjoys the distinction of being the world’s largest online job board, consistently beating its competitors in both revenue and online traffic, Womack and others felt a need to spread the message that CareerBuilder’s impact goes beyond that. “We take pride in being a great company, but what does that really mean to the community?” Womack recalls thinking. “What’s the deeper meaning for CareerBuilder’s existence, and how can we rally our customers and employees around that?”

Taking all of the above into consideration, CareerBuilder chose the term Empowering Employment as a way to instill in both businesses and individuals the knowledge that they have the power to contribute to a better economy. “In the simplest terms, Empowering Employment means doing your part to increase employment in the United States – whether it’s what you’re doing to bring jobs back as an individual or whether you’re a business who’s hiring,” says Jamie Womack, Vice President of Corporate Marketing and Branding. “It’s about making the effort to really impact the economy.”

Empowering Employment also alludes to CareerBuilder’s own efforts to empower both businesses and individuals with the resources they need for success in a competitive labor market.

For businesses, CareerBuilder has been leveraging its technology to help clients make more strategic decisions about where they allocate their recruitment funds. “We’re using our talent intelligence portals to gather data about job seekers and the job market, which we can use to educate our customers, make them more efficient, and help them hire better people,” Womack says.

For individuals, CareerBuilder continues to offer the most jobs in the U.S., as well as a host of online courses job seekers can take to supplement their skills and make them more attractive to prospective employers. Companies can take advantage of these offerings as well, as they look to train and develop their current workers and bridge the skills gaps in their own organization.

On a larger scale, CareerBuilder is also stepping up its role as a thought leader. Last September, CareerBuilder announced a major commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), an annual meeting that convenes leaders from all over the world to collaborate on innovative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges. More recently, CareerBuilder CEO Matt Ferguson sat down with renowned business leader Warren Buffett to discuss the obstacles to economic growth and what is needed to overcome these obstacles. The company has also been making strides to help bring military veterans back to work, and it recently embarked on an initiative to help aspiring IT workers learn the valuable skills for which companies are hiring but can’t find in the current labor market.

Creating jobs is business as usual for some
CareerBuilder is just one of many companies taking the initiative to foster job growth and fuel the economy right now. Chase, for example, recently made a pledge to employ 100,000 military veterans, while Amazon and Starbucks have stepped up their hiring practices and found ways to create jobs that will serve their businesses in the long term.

Among the businesses taking a proactive approach to create jobs and retrain workers are CareerBuilder’s own clients, several of whom will be featured in the company’s soon-to-be-launched marketing campaign – spanning both print and online media. Not only does CareerBuilder want to recognize those clients who embody the Empowering Employment mission, but the company also hopes that driving awareness of companies doing their part will inspire other businesses – clients or not – to do the same.

Says Womack, “We want to create a message that compels people to wake up and say, ‘I’m serving this bigger purpose.’”  Empowering Employment, therefore, is less of a branding play for CareerBuilder, and more a call to action for all Americans.