If you didn’t read our post on resumes for general jobs, start here! And if you missed the beginning of our series on coronavirus unemployment start here.
Recruiters, like any other profession, work on a budget. In their ideal world any recruiter would have access to every job board under the sun, but job boards are expensive and very few companies have the resources to give recruiters subscriptions to all of them. Recruiters who work for small to midsize companies probably work on every job. They handle sales openings, marketing positions, tech roles, whatever the company needs. Because their open positions cover multiple fields they usually opt for more general tools like Indeed, ZipRecruiter, CareerBuilder, and LinkedIn, where they can find candidates in any field. The bigger the company the more specialized the recruiters, and the more specialized the resources they use. Recruiters who specialize in tech roles most likely work with Dice and StackOverflow. Anyone in the cleared space probably uses ClearanceJobs, and more and more startups are doing their recruiting on AngelList.
What does that mean for you as a candidate? It really means that your resume needs to be everywhere. You can’t rely on one job site to effectively market yourself or reach companies who are hiring. It also means that when you’re posting to those niche sites you should expect the recruiters to be more knowledgeable about specific skill sets and industries. It’s also more difficult to stand out there.
Resumes for niche job boards need to have most of the same things as general job boards - clean formatting, easy key word searchability, and clear contact information. In addition, they should also have a more creative summary, a skills section, and evidence of project successes (that also provides context for your work).
The summary statement is important because it gives a picture of you at a glance. When you’re skimming sometimes hundreds of resumes a day it’s great to have something to quickly ground a candidate’s experience. Making that statement stand out without too narrowly defining yourself is tricky. You still want to appeal to a range of companies, but you want to give some indication of the types of roles you’re really looking for. “Revenue driven senior sales professional” is a great start. “Revenue driven”, because any company would see it as a positive AND it’s easy to provide figures in the experience section to back that up. It’s also less commonly used than the ever popular, but harder to quantify, “Results Focused”. “Senior sales professional” says in a kind and professional way “Don’t call me with an entry level 0-2 years of experience role”.
A skills section can feature a lot of different things, but its real value is in making things easy on a recruiter. We probably have a checklist of qualifications, either years of experience or skill based depending on the role. Structuring this section with clear and simple formatting will make your life so much easier throughout your job search because it’s easy to update and add to. As you start to interview take note of the specific skills you’re asked about, questions like “do you have experience with Linux?” If you DO, and it’s just not listed in your skills section that’s your cue to go back and add it.
Project success also looks different in every field. The key is to figure out how to explain your qualifications and results to someone who doesn’t work at your current company. If you’re in sales for example, reaching your annual quota is great, and definitely something to include on your resume. It’s much stronger though if you explain that you were the only sales rep on a team of 30 that met your quota in 2019, or that you outperformed the rest of the team by 20%. Numbers really matter here, they’re the easiest way to put your performance in context, to show that you don’t just know how to do your job, but you’re really good at it. Even if it doesn’t seem like your job was numbers based, think about processes you improved, volume of work you produced, or the amount of clients you engage with over the course of a quarter.
To see the general job board resume updated for a niche job board click here.