Let’s say you’re interviewing a new applicant for a job and you feel something is off. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but you’re a bit uncomfortable with this person. She says all the right things, her resume is great, she’d be a perfect hire for this job – except your gut tells you otherwise.
Should you go with your gut?
When it comes to shaping the future of the not-for-profit sector, young people are in a unique position.
Millennials – which covers everyone aged from about 17 to 37 – are empowered by new and emerging technologies, and are driven by a strong sense of social justice.
And that’s a good thing, since they’re the ones who will eventually be running the NFP sector – alongside the rest of our society’s institutions.
So how does your organisation do at recruiting, training and retaining young people as staff and volunteers?
Every organisation has them. And a bad one can cause serious problems for a team – while a good one can be be a god-send. So what do you look for when you’re recruiting an admin person for your team?
That’s what we asked our NFP People community last month. And we were pleased to receive some fantastic responses from recruitment pros in a range of organisations.
So here are the top five tips on how to hire admin staff for your organisation, thanks to the NFP People community.
If your NFP doesn’t already use remote workers, chances are good that you will in future.
That’s because – and this will be news to no-one – the landscape of Australia’s workforce is changing. Influenced by high-speed broadband and the ubiquity of virtual tools, organisations are increasingly using remote workers to maximise flexibility for both staff and the organisation as a whole.
In fact, many roles across to the not-for-profit sector can be performed remotely, from managers to graphic designers to counsellors – and beyond.
So how does your recruitment process need to change to take remote workers into account?
Keeping staff for the long-term is difficult for any organisation, but high turnover is a pain that many not-for-profit organisations know better than others.
The negative effects of high turnover are numerous and well-documented: lower productivity, declining morale and significantly higher costs to train newcomers. Organisations also miss out on the huge benefit of institutional knowledge when key people leave.
So what can your organisation learn from one company that has a 95% staff retention rate?
Google is renowned for its ability to put together some of the world’s most innovative and effective teams.
But that doesn’t make its recruitment staff immune to unconscious biases – the assumptions and decisions our brains make without us even realising it.
Unconscious biases actually effect all of us, every minute of the day. And they can have a huge affect on an organisation’s recruitment activities.
Fundraising is critical to the survival of almost all not-for-profit organisations. And with more than 50,000 NFPs registered in Australia, the demand for fundraisers far outweighs the supply.
But because almost every organisation is looking for them, attracting fundraising staff is notoriously difficult. So what do you need to know to recruit talented fundraisers to your organisation?
Most people would not consciously decide to hire candidates based on whether they remind them of themselves. But one unconscious bias – affinity bias – may lead people to favour candidates who are like themselves, research shows.
If senior managers and NFP boards are made up of mostly men who unconsciously engage in such bias, it stands to reason that more men than women will continue to be hired and promoted – particularly men who share the same background with current managers. This only serves to perpetuate the cycle of men outnumbering women in leadership positions.
So what can be done?
More than one quarter of Australian not-for-profit organisations aren’t tracking even basic data about their recruitment processes, according to the latest Not-For-Profit People survey. But for the other three-quarters, which metrics are the most – and least – tracked, and which are considered the most valuable?
Hiring the right people for the right job is arguably one of the most important responsibilities in any not-for-profit.
But what if there was something interfering with your ability to do just that – and you didn’t even know it?