Hiring for Niche Roles: 5 Helpful Tips

Hiring managers often sift through a large pool of qualified applications and narrow them down to the right fit for the right job. Sometimes that task is easier than others, particularly when trying to fill a niche job that requires a very specific set of skills. Hiring for niche roles can present challenges like a smaller applicant pool, a mismatch of skills and job responsibilities, or missing out on potential employees who opt to work elsewhere.

When your company is faced with filling a niche job, consider some of the following ideas to aid in the search.

Post on Niche Job Boards

Niche job boards may be industry-focused or affiliated with a professional organization. Though posting jobs in these forums comes with a cost, the job will be seen mainly by those who have some of the basic requirements and qualifications already. Here are some examples:

• ​The ASHA (American Speech-Language-Hearing Association) provides certification for audiology and speech language-adjacent professions and hosts a job board with 2,000 resumes uploaded.
• ​Nurse Recruiter provides access to over 400,000 active nurses, and allows the employer to specify profession, license required, even specific shift times, details that generic job boards make difficult for nurses to search easily.
• ​The SHRM (Society For Human Resource Management) is a trusted source of information for HR professionals and has an active job board with over 180,000 job seekers.
• ​Some organizations have job boards that are even more focused, such as the North Carolina Center for Nonprofits, where a nonprofit looking to hire can advertise to a candidate pool who may not need to relocate and might be available within a shorter time frame.

Find the Right Recruiter

If you feel like hiring for niche roles will take more employee effort than your company has to give, you may consider hiring a recruiter to do the majority of the searching for you. Though the temptation may be to just use a familiar recruiter, it might be worth searching out recruiters who specialize in the role you need to fill. Someone who recruits exclusively in healthcare will have knowledge and vocabulary to discard resumes that don’t fit a healthcare organization’s needs. A sales-focused recruiter, no matter how talented, is unlikely to be as helpful filling the needs of a software development company as one immersed in the industry.

Niche recruiters will know the right places to look. If your industry relies heavily on recent college graduates, the right recruiters will have relationships with college counselors and career placement offices. Niche recruiters will have their finger on the pulse of the industry they represent, with an eye on competitive salaries, trends in remote or in-person working, and desirable benefits. This kind of insight can help you identify tweaks in your job descriptions and job details that will bring you the right candidates.

Improve Your Job Descriptions

If a focused recruiter or extra job boards are not in the small business budget, then a hard look at your job descriptions on more general boards may be the next move. If the person writing the description doesn’t understand the job, that will likely be obvious to someone in the industry.

Rather than write generic jargon, consult someone in the field who can help state the job objectives and responsibilities in the right language. Use formatting and keywords that put your job at the top of search results. Candidates searching for those industry-specific keywords can find your job with ease.

Similarly, avoid job description clichés like “team player” or “great communicator” in favor of concrete expectations and outcomes that define the niche job. Use free tools such as Grammarly to check and improve the readability and clarity of your job descriptions, and double-check for spelling and grammar errors that may discourage serious candidates.

Provide Competitive Salary and Benefits

Just as perfecting your job descriptions can attract the right candidates, be sure the salary and benefits you’re offering are commensurate with others in the field. Scrutiny of your employment package is particularly important if you find your company is losing out on candidates you’ve invested company time with.

If appropriate, gather data from job candidates who chose another position to find out if compensation was the issue. Reach out to others in the field – always being respectful of their time – and find out if your company is actually competitive with niche positions. This may be particularly true if the person you’re replacing has been in the position for some time, or if a historical idea of an appropriate salary prevails. If no one has been forced to consider what the market is offering, your salary offering may be low enough to keep you from your ideal hires.

Use Your Network

According to a 2022 study, approximately 82 percent of companies use referrals to source new talent. Current and past employees, job candidates with whom you maintain a good relationship, industry colleagues, customers, and mentors are all useful sources of talent recruiting. In the case of filling niche jobs, they may be even more valuable for narrowing the talent pool.

A tool like ApplicantStack can be tremendously helpful in sorting through past applicants for matching skills for current job openings. Even if they’re no longer on the market, they may be a source for referrals. Additionally, identifying those skills is useful for revising job descriptions. Making a thoughtful list of job qualifications and talents may also lead you to current employees who may be suitable for training or mentorship for filling niche jobs.

Hiring for niche roles can present challenges that expert recruiting and specialized job boards may solve. Where those options aren’t in the budget, thinking creatively about how your company is marketing itself to potential employees along with effectively using your network can help you find the right talent for the job.