As we’ve been doing every day this week, let’s show how to use certifications and licenses to find industry-specific professionals, but applied to finance-related fields since it’s Finance Friday in the Arbita Tip of the Day series!

Most financial certifications are pretty stringent, requiring deep industry (and often related legal) knowledge in order to pass the corresponding exam.  In the investment world, brokers typically need that from FINRA, NASAA and/or NFA (here’s a list of their financial securities exams).

People who have earned one (or more) of these will often list it on their resumes (e.g., “Series 7, 63”).  So you can search for, say:

(intitle:resume OR inurl:resume) ("series 7" OR "series 63") -jobs -intitle:sample -intitle:free -intitle:writer

The addition NOT terms at the end are helpful (though not exhaustive) to eliminate jobs and fake resumes.  Of course, you can additional keywords to narrow results further by geography, company, etc.

Many financial licenses and certs have names rather than numbers, so make sure to search by those names (as well as their acronyms).  For example, we covered some financial-related certifications in our Public Sector Wednesday tip, so check out that post, too!