I’m hiring for a Community Manager — here’s what I look for on resumes

After being a team of 1 or 2 for most of my Community Management career I find myself in the slightly weird and very exciting position of hiring several Community Managers over the course of about a year.

As I browse through resume after resume for the 3rd opening I’ve had recently, I started reflecting on how much things have changed in the last few years. Coursera has grown and become a public company, investing much more into community than ever before. And the community industry has seen a rapid expansion as well and, more importantly, a significant increase in legitimacy.

These things combined mean that I’m looking at far more resumes than I’ve ever seen before, I’m seeing better resumes than I’ve seen before, and I’m being a lot more selective about who I choose to talk to than ever before.

I suspect I’m not the only person in that position so I figured someone might find it useful if I shared my thoughts on what I look for in a Community Manager resume and what I immediately pass by.

• Cover letter. If your background is exactly what I’m looking for then you’ll probably get through without a cover letter but I *still* love to see one because it tells me (if you’ve written it well) about your motivation for the role. I don’t want a great Community Manager, I want a great Community Manager who is excited about building community, Coursera, and our community specifically.
  If your background isn’t exactly what I’m looking for but might be close enough to give me pause I will immediately look for a cover letter. If there isn’t one (or if it’s just a wordier version of your resume) I’ll pass. But if you’ve written a great cover letter that tells me why you’re excited about this role, or why that skill that doesn’t look so relevant is actually super relevant, or how you’ve been the driving force behind those initiatives you put on your resume, that could be enough to get you through.
• Your title doesn’t have the word ‘community’ in it. The most common example of this is Social Media Manager. The community and social media industries have matured enough to the point where they are clearly distinct so if I see Social Media Manager I assume that person’s background is not a fit for my team. If you are a community builder who uses social media as your platform you need to make it very clear that the work you’ve done is truly community, not social media marketing.
  Community is a tool that can solve a lot of different problems. Job titles can reflect the problem rather than the method. If your title is something completely unrelated but community management is the tool you ended up relying on to achieve your goals, again, make sure that’s clear on your resume.
• You’ve never been a professional Community Manager. Not a problem. Truly. If you have built a large scale, successful community for fun but your day job has been something completely different I will absolutely consider you. In fact I’ll consider you more highly than people who have been Community Managers but who simply showed up and carried out their daily responsibilities without taking any ownership or involvement in growing the community’s size or success. Please make sure you put that experience on your resume, even though it wasn’t paid, and take off all the irrelevant stuff (or make it super brief).
• Strategy and ownership. This is a little dependent on the level of role I’m hiring for but I’ll always take someone who has ideas, takes initiative, and drives the community forward over someone who has many years of experience as a Community Manager. I see a lot of resumes that go something like “responsible for talking to members, overseeing xyz program, sending out surveys, advocating for members within the company, tracking and reporting metrics monthly” etc. That’s nice and all but it tells me nothing about how much you contributed to the community strategy or whose idea those tactics were.
  On the other hand a sentence like “I identified xyz tactic and implemented it to successfully grow the community from x to y members” comes across completely differently. This tells me you don’t just take instructions and get on with it — you think about the community for yourself, come up with your own ideas to improve it, and do what it takes to bring those ideas to reality. Even if your idea was a huge flop and it didn’t have any impact on the community I’d still rather have you on my team than someone who doesn’t think for themself at all.

Hopefully my thoughts are helpful to you if you’re looking for a community role. If you’re a hiring manager for community roles I’d love to know if you agree with me or if you look for something completely different!