Do Your New Nonprofit Hires Align with Values and Organization"s Culture?

Finding a new hire that matches your not-for-profits vision and values is not always easy. It"s essential that when you are looking for a new employee or even a volunteer, you make an effort to find someone who will fit in with the rest of the organization. Even one faulty employee can ruin the culture of your organization and make otherwise motivated workers enjoy their job less.  Having a nonprofit recruiter on your team to help with the search can save time and frustration.

Finding The Right Nonprofit Employee

There is no such thing as a perfect candidate. People are their own entities, and they have their dreams, visions, and desires. While those dreams and aspirations might align with your company right now, there is no guarantee that they will continue to do so forever. You should make sure that you communicate openly with your employees and that you have plans in place for succession, progression, and supporting each person as they develop in their own way. It is not enough to just hire someone and hope for the best.

Live Your Mission, Vision, and Values

Andy Peers, an expert in Mission, Vision and Values, has worked with the Red Cross and Big Issue. He often speaks of visiting companies that have their core principles painted all over their walls - but when asking employees about those principles, they cannot list them, let alone explain them or how they live them in their day to day work.

This kind of failure at a cultural level is something that can be prevented by finding the right candidate during the hiring process. It is easy to tell someone what a company"s values are, and what their vision is, but parroting it is not the same thing as living it or believing it. Finding someone who displays an intuitive understanding of those values in the interview process is a much more valuable thing.

Paper vs People

One common pitfall that companies fall prey to is hiring the wrong person because they hired based on the resume, and did not take in the entire picture of the interviewee. Anyone can write a resume that looks good. Indeed, a lot of people pay companies to write resumes for them, tailoring them to the job at hand. Rather than looking at the resume and taking that in isolation, it is a good idea to have the candidates come in for an interview and then get to know them a little in person. It is much harder to fake a real-time conversation.

Consider this: If a person is honest, earnest, likable, and seems to have most of the skills that you need for the position they could be the perfect fit. Assuming they have aligned goals and your non-profit organization has the resources to train someone who has most of the required skills, then why not hire the right personality and teach them to do the job? That will most likely be more successful than hiring someone with the right skills who might pull the remainder of the team down by being troublesome.

Although interviews are good, not everyone is great in an interview. There is always the chance that the right candidate might get tripped up by suffering from nerves or by struggling with a simple question to which they should know the answer (and may know the answer but blank out due to nerves). And, some organizations just don"t have the HR resources or the time and staff to do a lot of interviews, especially multiple interviews with several candidates.

When looking for the right talent to add to your organization, hiring an expert nonprofit recruiter can be helpful. They can do the heavy lifting of the search and get to know each candidate very well before sending them to interview with you. This way you only see those people that you already know have similar goals, are sympathetic to your organization"s culture, and have the skill set for the job opening.

Ask The Rest of the Team

Hiring by committee is not always good. However, giving your existing team a voice and input into the hiring process can be good for morale. If your team recognizes the importance of diversity and collaboration, there is a good chance that they will have some valuable input into who would make an addition.

Your existing staff will appreciate having a voice, and feeling safe in the knowledge that they can speak up. Communicate the expectations, and make sure that they know that while all input is heard, it may not be acted on if operational requirements dictate that a certain staff member is needed.

Training Policies

When it comes to individual applicants, one important consideration is how training is handled. This is a particular issue with entry-level staff. Many not for profits bring in young, unskilled people and train them to do jobs such as bookkeeping; then those employees move on once they have some experience and certification - leaving the nonprofit organization to do it all again. While this can be a nice symbiotic policy for the employee and the non-profit if it is done knowingly and willingly on both sides, it can leave some companies wasting money they cannot afford on training. Consider a minimum stay contract for trainees, or asking your trainees to teach their replacements before leaving, to ensure that you are not wasting money in the hiring process.

If you are non-profit organization looking to hire, a nonprofit recruiter can help find candidates with the right resume and the right alignment with your mission and goals. https://www.recruiterie.com