Finding the Ideal Nonprofit Employees: How to Identify the People You Want to Hire

If you’re like a lot of nonprofit organizations, you might have a hard time finding and retaining high-quality nonprofit employees. There are certain things you can do to retain staff once they’ve been hired, but most of the time I find the problem starts with the hiring process. When a hiring manager is desperate to fill a position, they often don’t take the time to make sure the person is right for the job - or that they even want the job.

​To avoid that problem, let’s take a look at some strategies you can use to find your ideal nonprofit employees so you won’t have to work as hard to retain them later on down the line.

​Identify Your Ideal Nonprofit Employees

​For-profit organizations often create marketing personas to represent their ideal clients, and I recommend doing the same when looking for nonprofit employees to fill positions in your organization. What kind of person do you need in the role? What values do they need to share with your organization? What kind of temperament do they need to have? What kind of work style would be best suited to that position?

​Skills and qualifications are important, but remember those can be learned, so don’t focus on them too heavily during the hiring process. Instead, focus on the kind of person who will fit into the culture of your organization, because that’s the kind of thing that can’t be taught.

​Communicate What You’ll Need from Your Ideal Nonprofit Employees

​Setting expectations is key to success in just about any area of life. Consider the last time you looked up a restaurant online before visiting. If the reviews you read painted a picture of candlelit dinners with fine wine and attentive staff, you’d be disappointed to find a noisy restaurant with overworked staff and mediocre table wine, even if the food is good. On the other hand, if you were told the food was good, but the environment left something to be desired, you’d be more likely to be satisfied with the experience because your expectations would have been met.

​The same goes for hiring your nonprofit employees. If you paint a rosy picture of how wonderful it is to work for you, while neglecting to mention how many hours they’ll be expected to work or some of the challenges they’re likely to face on the job, they’ll be unpleasantly surprised when they start work. As a result they’ll be more likely to look for a job that does meet their expectations.

​Obviously you don’t want to paint such a bleak picture of your workplace that you deter candidates from applying at all, but you need to strike a balance between showcasing the best parts of working for your nonprofit and being honest about the not-so-great parts of working for your nonprofit.

​Be Consistent

​Just like marketers need to keep their marketing personas in mind through every step of the marketing process, you need to keep your ideal nonprofit employees in mind through every step of the hiring process - from the job description to the interview to the employee contract.

​When you’re clear on what you want from the beginning, you can craft a job description that resonates with your ideal nonprofit employees, come up with interview questions that help you determine whether a candidate fits the definition of your ideal nonprofit employees, and create an employee contract that sets the boundaries for the type of relationship you want to have with your new staff member.

​Whether you’re struggling to hire new talent or keep your existing staff members, it can help to talk with a coach who has decades of experience helping nonprofits with challenges just like this one. Schedule your FREE clarity call now to see how a coach can help your nonprofit organization.