How does one best communicate to recruiters their experiences gained through volunteer work? I am heavily involved in community activities and serve on two boards. Obviously, this provides me with great networking opportunities, but I am wondering how to leverage this with recruiters as well.
List your volunteer experience both on your resume and LinkedIn profile, paying attention to keywords. Are you a supervisor, managing the other volunteers? Are you doing crisis management, or do you take care of all the scheduling, or operations? Volunteer work is a terrific way to forge connections and work experience gained that way certainly applies!
Approach this much like you would a paid position in terms of your resume when you are listing company, titles duties, responsibilities, the difference you made, etc. But you have already identified the real benefit the volunteering does for you in terms of job search: networking! Your network is much healthier because of your volunteering; leverage that to career opportunities, and if you specifically want to connect with recruiters…start making inquiries with your network as to who knows recruiters who deal with the industries you’re interested in.
