For nonprofits, building financial resilience is important for navigating challenges like recession and economic downturn and most importantly, continue its mission. Many nonprofit teams strengthen their finances by establishing recurring giving programs, creating an endowment, or optimizing their budgets—but these options aren’t always the answer.
Investing in employee recruitment is another important way to support your nonprofit’s capacity and financial health. After all, sourcing a candidate who will stay with your organization in the long run saves you from turnover costs (which can be up to twice as much as the employee’s salary!).
In this guide, we’ll review how to enhance your recruitment strategy and, as a result, improve your organization’s overall performance and longevity. Let’s dive in!
1. Create a Role-Specific Recruitment Plan
One-third of employees leave a role in the first three months because it is not what they expected. You can prevent this type of turnover by creating a recruitment plan for each role and laying out specific details about the position, such as:
- Necessary qualifications. What skills do people in this role need to succeed? Mention must-have qualifications and those that would be a bonus but aren’t strictly needed.
- Daily expectations. What will an average day look like for people in this role? Include specific activities and projects they’ll be involved in.
- Nonprofit-wide expectations. How will people in this role contribute to the organization as a whole? Mention which teams the role frequently interacts with and how they push overarching goals forward.
- Workplace culture expectations. How will people in this role support company culture? Include soft skills that will make a candidate a great fit, like great communication and collaborative skills.
- Performance metrics. How will we measure progress and success for people in this role? Discuss target metrics, such as “dollars raised” or “donors retained,” based on the role’s focus.
Then, tailor your outreach strategy based on these details. For instance, let’s say you’re hiring an auction coordinator. You might require that candidates have three years of auction experience, a proven track record of success, and the bandwidth to collaborate with the marketing team daily leading up to auctions. Structure your interview questions and recruiting criteria accordingly.
2. Prioritize the Candidate Experience.
It’s equally important to make a good impression on your candidates as it is to evaluate their fit for the role—in a way, you’re being interviewed as well. Avoid losing candidates by improving the job application experience at your nonprofit. Here are some tips from Lever:
- Communicate consistently. As a candidate, it’s frustrating to put effort into applying for a job only to receive inconsistent communication from the organization. Just like with donor communications, you must establish clear channels and set expectations for when candidates can hear from you from the start.
- Track relevant recruitment metrics. Carefully select key performance metrics (KPIs) to evaluate the candidate experience. For example, you might choose application completion rate, offer acceptance rate, and funnel conversion rate (the measure of how many people move on in your hiring process) to track how engaging and intuitive your recruitment process is.
- Collect feedback. Who better to provide insight on how to improve candidate experience than the candidates themselves? Qualitative data can be just as telling as quantitative data, so be sure to ask candidates during the process what they’d improve about your recruitment process.
Recruitment technology makes it easy to add these best practices to your strategy. Be sure to choose a platform that allows you to collect whatever information you need and automate communications so nothing slips through the cracks.
3. Build a Strong Employer Brand
Cultivating an appealing employer brand (the perception of your nonprofit as an employer) attracts qualified candidates and expands your hiring pool. When gauging your current employer brand, consider these important elements:
- Employee satisfaction
- Mission and values
- Sector-wide reputation
- Benefits
- Workplace culture
Create recruitment marketing materials that leverage your employer brand to spread awareness of your open positions. Use your nonprofit’s existing brand colors and messaging, along with employee testimonials, to show that your organization is an ideal workplace.
When revamping your current employer brand, it helps to check websites such as Glassdoor and Indeed to see your nonprofit’s current reviews. If you notice any trends (especially those that corroborate your recruitment data) that point to areas of improvement, work on these to improve your employer brand.
4. Understand and Use Recruitment Technology
If you’re new to recruitment, spreadsheets are probably your bread and butter. However, to launch a new and improved recruitment strategy, you need tools dedicated to the task.
That’s where technology like applicant tracking systems (ATS) and candidate relationship management (CRM) software come in handy. These tools streamline recruitment workflows, making it easy to schedule interviews, store candidate data, track and report on hiring trends, and more.
Adopting a new software solution might sound overwhelming and budget-straining, but don’t worry—there are tools made specifically for nonprofits. For these groups, JazzHR suggests looking for an ATS that has:
- A pay-as-you-go model for extra features
- Integrations with your other tools
- A nonprofit discount
- Mobile accessibility capabilities
- Seats for multiple team members
Using an ATS built for nonprofits ensures that your recruitment strategy has a strong foundation. Just ensure that you do your due diligence when picking out software, such as booking free demos and reading third-party reviews.
Whether you’re hiring a donor communications coordinator or an office manager, a recruitment strategy can help you find the best candidates in a fraction of the time required for manual outreach. This saves your staff time, which they can put toward other important initiatives that boost your nonprofit’s finances and push your mission forward. Although your recruitment strategy won’t come together overnight, by taking these steps, you can prime your nonprofit for long-term success and stability.
