We’ve been hearing from members who are searching the NPAmarketplace for partners in a specific niche (i.e. insurance, fintech, etc) that it’s hard to actually find true partners in the space, because they get so many partners coming up in their search who have marked in their profile that they do ‘everything’.
For example, these are how many recruiters come up in these industry searches:
- Banking /Lending/Financial Services 232
- Accounting 296
- Healthcare 244
- IT 400
Meanwhile, we only have 50 partners in the Banking practice group on NPA Central, 178 in Accounting, 74 in Healthcare, 236 in IT/Technology. If you actively work a space, you should be part of that group on NPA Central – joining the calls, posting candidates/jobs in that space, etc. If you do not actively work that space, I would say take it out of your profile.
You are hurting yourself by putting in every Industry, even if you are a generalist. You may think you're casting a wider net, but you're doing more harm than good. For example, if you are listing all these industries like below, if someone has a niche role in one of these spaces, they likely won’t reach out to you for help because they won't actually think you are in a specialist in that space:
To combat this, if you are trying to find a partner in a certain speciality/niche, we suggest searching keywords/buzzwords/job titles rather than the industry as a whole, as specific keywords will likely only appear on the profiles of real specialists in that space.
To that end, to ensure you are coming up in searches, make sure you put keywords/buzzwords/job titles in your profile. For example, rather just putting ‘IT’ in the Industry field, add buzzwords to the bottom of your bio description:
Keywords include:
MBA BS BA JDEdwards "JD Edwards" jde dynamics d365 ERP Netsuite SQL OBIEE INFORMATICA ETL .NET dotNET MOBILE BI BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE CRM EDI Cisco SaaS PHP Android LINUX WEB "Web application" SAP JAVA Azure SQL RESTful Android Kotlin MVC MVVM JSON six sigma black belt green belt USA
MBA BS BA JDEdwards "JD Edwards" jde dynamics d365 ERP Netsuite SQL OBIEE INFORMATICA ETL .NET dotNET MOBILE BI BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE CRM EDI Cisco SaaS PHP Android LINUX WEB "Web application" SAP JAVA Azure SQL RESTful Android Kotlin MVC MVVM JSON six sigma black belt green belt USA
That way, when a member does a search for members who specifically work “ERP” for example, you will come up.