Picture this: It’s the beginning of a new calendar year, and your nonprofit has new, ambitious goals in its strategic plan. However, as the year progresses, you discover that you lack the manpower to achieve these goals.
To avoid overloading your employees and prevent burnout, or missing your goals altogether, it may be time to consider acquiring new talent to provide your business the support you need. Hiring a new employee is an investment in your nonprofit’s long-term growth potential and can improve innovation, employee engagement, and teamwork.
In this guide, we’ll explore different strategies for your nonprofit to work smarter (not harder) while hiring, ultimately building the ideal team to achieve your mission. Before we dive in, consider the current state of your hiring practices. Keep those in mind as you decide which of the following strategies makes the most sense for your nonprofit to implement.
1. Conduct strategic hiring analysis
Data-driven hiring is crucial for identifying your strengths and weaknesses and crafting a growth strategy based on those insights. By strategically analyzing hiring data, you gain valuable insight to help find the ideal candidate to meet your business needs.
According to Lever’s guide to talent acquisition metrics, you should analyze data such as:
- Sourcing channel effectiveness, which determines which recruitment channel has the highest volume and quality of leads.
- Use this information to determine which platform is the most efficient, saving your team time and resources without compromising candidate quality.
- Candidate diversity, which is the representation of candidates from various backgrounds, including underrepresented and minority groups.
- More diverse, versatile teams tend to be more innovative and adaptable than homogenous teams, which is important for challenging times and employee engagement.
- Quality of hire, which is the performance and contributions of a new hire within their first performance period.
- This data helps you gauge the efficiency of your sourcing methods. If you find a high level of new hire attrition, you may have to improve your interview and hiring practices.
- Offer acceptance rate, which is the number of candidates who accepted an offer versus the number of candidates who received an offer.
- Offer acceptance rate helps you understand if your benefits are competitive enough to secure the best, most well-rounded applicants. If you have a low offer acceptance rate, you’ll likely have to research competitors and adjust your offerings accordingly.
These are only a few of the metrics you can use to improve hiring practices—don’t be afraid to track key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with your short- and long-term goals.
2. Leverage skills-based hiring
If hiring is low on your nonprofit’s list of priorities, you have less time and resources to find the most qualified candidates. However, you can make hiring more efficient with a skills-based hiring approach.
Skills-based hiring is when nonprofits look for candidates who satisfy certain criteria or have certain aptitudes, such as communicating with donors or coordinating volunteers. While it may seem straightforward—since every hiring process involves evaluating candidates’ backgrounds—skills-based hiring goes a step further. This strategy emphasizes the importance of candidates meeting key criteria from the outset, rather than relying on the hope of providing training later on. This approach allows nonprofits to save resources that would otherwise go towards more extensive training.
Here are some ways you can implement a skills-based hiring model:
- Post on hiring boards specifically for nonprofits, such as Idealist
- Ask skill-specific questions during the interview process
- Require a certain threshold on aptitude tests
After you hire someone with particular skills, touch base with them to bridge any gaps between their experience and your needs. For instance, if you hire an HR professional who has experience in your specific applicant tracking system (ATS), sync with them to make sure they’re using the right filters and integrations.
3. Use multiple communication channels
This means your team needs to use numerous communication channels to cover more ground when hiring. Here are some key communication channels to consider adding to your strategy:
- Events. Both hiring-specific events, like career fairs, and more general events, like conferences, provide ample opportunities for you to spread the word about your mission and network with potential hires from all walks of life.
- Online job sites. Websites like Indeed, ZipRecruiter, and LinkedIn provide comprehensive job-posting functionality. List your opportunities on them and describe the responsibilities of the role, the skills the candidate will need, and any qualifications you require. Candidates can filter through jobs on these sites to find yours and apply if they’re interested.
- Social media. Social media might not be the first hiring channel that comes to mind, but it’s still a very effective way to market upcoming opportunities. Plus, many of your followers are already passionate about your mission, making them more likely to apply.
- Through employees. Not only can employees answer questions about your organization, but they can discuss their experience working at your nonprofit. Incentivize employee referrals by implementing an incentive program, providing a small reward to an employee when someone they referred is hired.
No matter which combination of marketing channels you decide to use, vigilantly collect engagement data so you can calculate the effectiveness of your sourcing channels.
Like with any other nonprofit function, the quality of your hiring efforts relies on hard work and coordinated efforts from your team. As you roll out hiring adjustments, ensure you keep everyone informed by training relevant staff members and making adjustments based on their feedback. By doing so, you can cultivate an effective hiring culture and future-proof your nonprofit with a well-rounded team.
Author: Stephanie Sparks, Director of Content Marketing at Employ, Stephanie leverages 17 years of marketing and communications experience, and her master’s degree in marketing, communication studies, and advertising, to craft compelling content across the JazzHR, Lever, Jobvite, and NXTThing RPO brands. She is a thought leader in the HR technology and talent acquisition space.