Revolutionary attraction strategies in the charitable sector
Panelists at the Recruitment Masterclass event during the latest UK Fundraising Week explored a variety of innovative talent attraction strategies for organisations in the charitable sector.
Engaging new talent attraction strategies can mean the difference between selecting from an average or top talent pool. Jennifer Jackson reporting for Third Sector explores the key takeaways from the Recruitment Masterclass event as part of Fundraising Week.
Panelists expressed the current challenges in talent attraction facing the charitable sector:
The sector doesn’t struggle with attracting people, it just struggles to attract the right people.
If you’re recruiting for a fundraising manager, it could be someone’s first job in fundraising, so you have to be creative about how you write the job advert, to focus on transferable skills rather than prior fundraising experience, so as not to put people off who might well be suitable even though they have not worked in fundraising before.
The group cited that online recruitment and employer branding were two of their most important engagement methods.
Online recruitment and advertising are constantly changing due to niche job market platforms cropping up frequently. Niche job boards work hard to engage their audience, build their trust, and maintain industry expertise. Therefore using a niche job board has the advantage of getting your roles in front of a targeted audience.
Employer branding can also be used to personalise this online experience. Working with job boards is a simple place to start. Communicating the great benefits of the roles in your organisation through content such as video, website copy, and creative job listings can be highly effective in attracting top professionals.
Some organisations use technology to drip feed information about their employer brand at different stages of the application process, rather than bombarding candidates with everything all at once at the start.
This way even those who don’t get the job are likely to still feel inspired and engaged with that employer’s brand and may apply again in future. Consider what you really need to know from a candidate in order to invite them to interview, and keep the initial application process as short and simple as possible.
Lastly, in a Q&A session, speakers explored non-traditional recruitment approaches, such as removing resumes from the process and replacing them with video interviews or video resumes. They expressed the importance of increasing diversity by assigning someone in the organisation for this responsibility, utilising technology, and benchmarking recruitment success through sharing resources and information with peers.
Talent leaders often express that employer branding is a key area where they wished to invest more. So why not start small and build to determine the most effective avenues for your organisation?
Sources
Recruitment masterclass: How to create a game-changing hiring process
Jennifer Jackson
Third Sector
