“When you can’t afford the talent you need, you have to be creative. We don’t have the luxury of finance and we need our staff to push hard, so we have to recognize that.”

Free the Children’s Rann Sharma is talking about the challenge of finding and keeping staff. While you might think that an organization with tons of media coverage, youthful employees and a global profile would be a stranger to the hiring and retention dilemmas that face your nonprofit, you’d be mistaken. It’s not just you: nonprofit hiring is a tough gig.

A highly informal qualitative survey recently asked professionals in the nonprofit sector which nonprofit staff positions are the most difficult to fill.

Their responses, in no particular order, were:

1) Managerial positions, particularly managers in small- to medium-size nonprofits, who tend to have numerous responsibilities, from HR to fundraising to grant-writing to volunteer coordination, plus the others that get added to their job description as other employee contracts end and/or funding runs out.

2) Development and fundraising positions, which are intense both in terms of workload and in importance to the existence of the nonprofit. However, as one respondent put it, “Hiring a fundraiser might take the job of fundraising off the ED’s plate but it requires additional fundraising to cover the fundraiser’s salary, so you’re back to square one.”

3) Senior positions, such as executive director and the CEO, CFO and COO “C-suite” positions, which often require specialized candidate search that many nonprofits can’t afford.

4) Most contract and project positions, which, by definition, don’t offer a prospective employee job security.

In other words, whether you’re hiring or looking to be hired in the nonprofit sector: good luck with that.

Adding to this is the specific challenge of attracting and retaining Gen-Y and the millennials, the next generation of workers, who are leaving school with ambition and unprecedented levels of student debt. The Chronicle of Philanthropy recently published an article that showed that, while most young nonprofit employees surveyed recognized the societal importance of nonprofits, their commitment to staying in the sector weakened as they got older, largely influenced by the shortfall between their salary, the cost of living and their loan repayments.

“There’s a lot of talent out there, but how do you attract them to the nonprofit world? Most nonprofits start from the position that it will be difficult because the pay envelope won’t be as big,” observes Daphne FitzGerald, chair of the Human Resources Professionals Association.

“But my experience indicates that three things pull people to a job: the work itself; the boss; and the workplace environment. Having two out of three isn’t bad, and if you have all three, you’re cooking with gas,” says FitzGerald. “Money enters into it and becomes the deciding factor when everything else starts to go south.”

So, armed with the reasonable supposition that any hire, from file clerk to executive director, is going to be fraught, it makes sense to ensure that you are keenly aware of your strengths and weaknesses as both a recruiter and an employer before you begin.

1. Take a cultural snapshot of your nonprofit

In the same way that a fish doesn’t know it swims in water, you might not know how your organization’s culture looks from the outside. KnowHow NonProfit, a UK-based online hub, has a short, useful article that can help you start to figure out what activities and relationships define your organizational culture, in addition to the work you do in the community.

“Culture fit is number one for us when we hire, as is passion. We go beyond a transactional, you-give-me-a-task-and-I-do-it approach, and that’s not for everybody,” says Rann Sharma, a director of human resources for Free The Children, a Canadian-founded, international education and charity partner with a staff of 250 in offices around the world.

“We work alongside people who become friends. On desks here, you see pictures of family but also of co-workers. Our challenge is to find the people who fit that profile.”

People work at nonprofits because they want to make a difference and be part of a larger story. Can you make a strong connection between every job and the mission of the nonprofit – even if it’s “just” an admin position?

2. Get the job description right before you post the job

You can’t post the job – or function well as an organization – without a detailed job description. If you don’t have an HR department to handle the task of developing the job description, enlist the help of your board. The HR Council for the Nonprofit Sector’s excellent – and free – HR Toolkit includes job description templates, standard nonprofit job profiles, and the how-to’s of job analysis.

3. Avoid jargon, buzzwords and guessing games in job postings

It may not guarantee a better quality of applicant but could we declare a moratorium anyway on meaningless job posting phrases like “customer service orientation,”,“ability to tolerate ambiguity” and their ilk?

“Some postings do tend to be recycled,” says FitzGerald. “It also makes me crazy when the same competencies are applied to every job, like innovative or team-focused. An ED’s team or innovation skills are different from a file clerk’s or a staff lawyer’s; what does it mean for that particular job? What does trust or empathy mean in your organization?”

And another moratorium, please, on making applicants state their salary expectations, then using their accuracy or lack thereof as meaningful selection criteria. It’s a job posting, not an episode of The Price is Right, and you are not Bob Barker. If the salary is far from competitive, be up front about it and highlight what else your organization can offer.

If you need more insight and data about salary ranges from almost 1,400 Canadian nonprofits, CharityVillage’s 2012 Salary Survey Report is available now.

4. Get the posting out there

The obvious place to start is with online nonprofit job sites like, ahem, CharityVillage. Sharma also reports good results from LinkedIn and Indeed.ca, as well as university job fairs.

Consider Service Canada’s Job Bank or narrow your focus to region-specific job websites: for example, Ontario-based arts groups can use WorkInCulture.ca’s job board.

“We also host open houses in our office every month,” Sharma adds. “Candidates who have applied to the current job opening will get an invite, and we also have some drop-ins to keep the process open.” Started in 2011, the open houses have proven to be a useful way for Free the Children staff to get to meet applicants outside of the formal interviewing process and for applicants to get a feel for the organization.

5. Learn how to read a resume

“A lot of people will apply for anything – and the job might only remotely match their skills. You have to sift through the resumes carefully,” says Dr. Agnes Meinhard, director of the Centre for Voluntary Sector Studies at Ryerson University in Toronto. “It’s very time consuming and difficult, and if you’re doing everything else for your organization, you can become overwhelmed.”

The HR Council’s HR Toolkit includes a section on hiring an executive director with a downloadable PDF entitled Hiring a Director for a Non-Profit Agency, which includes a checklist to rate resumes that could be adapted to your needs. And though the process of hiring a director might be more involved than hiring a communications assistant, the PDF’s step-by-step process is a good place to start.

6. Don’t punish education or experience

“You might meet a lot of people who, on paper, are overqualified – especially retirees,” says FitzGerald. “The fear is that they’ll get bored and won’t stay with the job, which isn’t necessarily accurate.”

But the flip side is also true: some recruiters will automatically choose an applicant with impressive credentials, even when not required for the job.

The bottom line, according to FitzGerald: “Don’t discount impressive credentials but don’t default to them. It has to be a bona fide requirement, not a way of excluding someone.”

7. When interviewing, don’t violate their human rights. No, really.

While researching human resources management in small nonprofit organizations, Dr. Meinhard made some surprising discoveries. She did qualitative analysis of 18 nonprofits and found that not only were basic HR and recruitment skills lacking, but some even tread into potentially litigious territory.

“I asked organizations to give me samples of questions they asked in interviews and three out of 18 nonprofits had questions that from a legal perspective should not be asked,” says Dr. Meinhard.

You might think you’re subtly checking whether a candidate can really work overtime by asking if they have a spouse or kids, but that question can have serious legal ramifications for your organization: both marital and family status are protected grounds under the Ontario Human Rights Code. Nor can you discriminate on the basis of age or because the applicant is pregnant.

For more information, you can find links to the human rights commission in your province here.

8. Study your hiring failures

You could get the employee’s perspective with an exit interview but take responses with a grain – or three – of salt: “People have reasons for not being completely forthright,” observes FitzGerald, who notes that voluntarily departing employees might avoid discussing a dysfunctional workplace by simply saying, “The new job pays more.” They also might not want to jeopardize a good reference in the future and so withhold information they fear might reflect negatively on their performance.

Whether you let them go or they walked away, don’t cop out and say, “Good help is hard to find.” If you have regular turnover or a position that remains unfilled, something’s wrong on your end, either with the selection process, the job itself, the supervisor or some other variable of which you are currently unaware.

Don’t choose ignorance; be bold about uncovering and fixing recruitment mistakes, even if they’re the tip of the iceberg for big changes that are needed in your nonprofit.

“You need to define what makes your organization what it is,” notes Sharma. “If you don’t know who you are and why you do what you do, you won’t find who you need.”

Benita Aalto is a writer and communications consultant with extensive experience in corporate communications as well as in print and broadcast journalism. She has been a featured guest on TVO, CTV, CBC Newsworld, and CBC Radio, among others.

Photos (from top) via iStock.com. All photos used with permission.

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