Having passionate, talented, and engaged employees on your nonprofit organization’s team is essential for long-term success.
However, finding candidates that fit this bill is often left up to senior leaders, human resources (HR), or the talent acquisition leaders at your organization.
What if the best way to find your next star employee is to involve other team members in the hiring process?
Hint, hint, it absolutely is.
Unfortunately, most talent acquisition leaders know all too well how difficult it can be to engage team members in the hiring process. But, this is often because they don’t recognize the value and benefit of their involvement, or how to get involved.
For nonprofit organizations especially, finding productive ways to include team members in hiring decisions can boost company morale giving your employees an increased sense of ownership over your organization’s work, and ensure you’re finding candidates who fit well within your existing teams and align with your organization’s goals and values.
Let’s dive into four ways you can more effectively involve your nonprofit team members in the hiring process!
Building a collaborative hiring is no easier task. But Spark Hire is making it a tad easier with tips & tricks for talent acquisition leaders to build a hiring process that leads organizations to the right hire, faster. Check it out in their complete guide to candidate screening and selection.
Encourage Team Members to Help Promote Open Positions
A successful recruitment process starts with advertising your organization’s open positions.
To do this, you might publish job postings on your organization’s website or share information about open jobs on nonprofit job boards or websites such as LinkedIn or Glassdoor.
Your employees can also be an excellent resource for getting the word out about hiring efforts.
Here are a few things you can do to encourage employees to promote current openings:
- Request a testimonial. Ask your employees if they’re comfortable providing a short statement about why they enjoy working at your organization. Then, include these testimonials in your job postings or across your website to encourage applications from job seekers who relate to the details shared by current employees.
- Ask employees to share job openings with their personal and professional networks. Sharing your organization’s post about an open position on social media platforms or even via email is a low-lift way employees can help increase the strength and size of your candidate pipeline.
- Implement a referral program. An employee referral program is a great way to encourage employees to recommend qualified individuals. Offering incentives for successful referrals (i.e., if the person they referred gets hired at your nonprofit organization) allows your organization to connect with candidates that your existing employees feel will be a good fit for your nonprofit’s needs, and incentivizes them to engage in the hiring process.
Engage Team Members for Job Application Review or Pre-Screening
As any hiring professional is well aware of, sifting through piles of job applications, reading cover letters, and reviewing resumes can take up a lot of time and impact your nonprofit’s speed to hire.
If appropriate, consider streamlining this process by involving leaders at your organization earlier in the process, which can include some aspects of reviewing job applications.
Here’s an example of how you might do this: Ask your grant writing team to review a candidate’s writing samples rather than their entire application packet. This allows them to provide feedback before you’ve even reached the interview stage about whether the candidate has the specific skills needed to succeed in the role, something your hiring team might not be as familiar with as the grant writers themselves.
Of course, before doing so, ensure you have systems in place to protect your organization and your candidates, avoiding any potential legal issues by jeopardizing sensitive information or being inconsistent or biased in the recruitment process.
For this reason, developing an Ideal Candidate Profile before you open hiring for a new role is often recommended, eliminating the potential for hiring bias and creating structure and pre-defined requirements that allow every team member to assess against the same criteria.
Invite Team Participation in Interviews
An obvious yet sometimes overlooked option to engage team members in your hiring process is to have them participate in interviews for roles related to their own – this goes beyond only the hiring manager.
For most nonprofit organizations, cultural fit and mission alignment are critical, so involving employees at various stages of interviewing can help you better evaluate fit and assess a candidate’s potential to effectively collaborate with the entire team, not just their potential manager.
However, make sure to provide training and structure beforehand, and debrief with participating employees after each interview.
Request detailed feedback on the candidate, asking specific questions about things like potential fit, communication style, and relevant experience. Your talent acquisition team or recruiters can then use this input to make more informed decisions about who to move forward in the recruitment process.
Alternatively, ask employees to help you create industry, role, or department-specific interview questions.
This can help your hiring team ask more targeted interview questions about a candidate’s competencies and help you gather more relevant information to pass along to the hiring manager, without having to ask as many team members to conduct the interview – something that doesn’t come easy to everyone.
Connect Candidates With Current Employees
The recruitment process isn’t just an opportunity for your organization to assess candidates. It’s also a chance for applicants to determine if they feel your nonprofit organization would be a good fit from their perspective.
To allow candidates to ask candid questions about your organization, consider setting up “day-in-the-life” meetings with current employees in roles similar to the one they’ve applied to.
During these meetings, your current employees can walk candidates through things like:
- Company culture and team working style
- A typical working day for them or their department
- What they wish they had known before starting their position
- The communication and leadership style of the team
- What it’s like working at that nonprofit company
Reminder: these meetings shouldn’t be treated like an additional interview — they should be seen mostly as a benefit for candidates who have moved successfully through your interview process.
However, ask the participating employees to report back to you with any insights they might have obtained.
Final Takeaways for Nonprofit Talent Acquisition Teams
After all, if a candidate performed well in a formal interview but seemed completely uninterested or unengaged in your organization in the day-in-the-life meeting, that could be a red flag that causes your hiring team to look elsewhere.
It’s important to get your current employees involved in the hiring process in a variety of ways, empowering your nonprofit organization to find and hire top talent and embrace new opportunities to engage its team members.
Additionally, employee engagement shouldn’t stop after a new hire signs an employment contract — make sure to continue engaging current employees in new employees’ onboarding and beyond to ensure the employment experience is the same as what was promised throughout the screening and selection process.
This will allow them to welcome new team members into your organization and serve as mentors to help them seamlessly integrate with the organization and into their new role.
Ready to elevate your hiring process? Book a custom demo with Spark Hire to explore the flexibility and power of Spark Hire’s hiring software.
