Maygan Chapman has spent the last six months looking for a nonprofit job in fundraising, event coordination or volunteer management. She has relevant experience and is careful to tailor each resume and cover letter to the job in question. Still, not one organization has contacted her, even to let her know that the position she applied to has been filled. Calling organizations to follow up sometimes yields snappy responses.
“People are kind of brisk or rude…I’ll get something like, ‘the job ad says do not call’…but I just want to know if I need to keep looking [for a job],” Chapman recounts.
While most would agree that, no matter the sector, job-hunting is rife with discomfort and uncertainty, searching for a job in the nonprofit world can, at times, bring a unique set of stresses.
The sector is sometimes faulted for a lack of transparency when it comes to the hiring process.
While it’s tough to draw accurate comparisons between different job sectors on this issue, and no hiring system is perfect, nonprofit job seekers have been known to complain about the following organizational faux-pas: a failure to include salary information on job ads and employers’ tendency not to notify applicants when a position has been filled.
Many nonprofits — especially those with fewer resources — certainly have legitimate reasons for not maintaining a fully transparent hiring process. But with an increased emphasis on transparency within the sector as a whole, it seems more important than ever for organizations to commit to a transparent hiring process.
Barriers to transparency
Sharon* works at a small but profitable social enterprise in Toronto. Their six-person staff recently underwent a hiring process she describes as “stressful.” The position — a customer service job — paid $36,000 and, after being posted for a week, brought in 489 applications.
“As only six people, having to read almost 500 resumes and cover letters, assess and collate the data in a Google docs spreadsheet, then discuss it all with each other, took about a week and a half.”
And this was before interviews, held in several rounds — both group and individual — to accommodate the many applicants. All told, it took about a month and a half to fill the role, and Sharon says the lost time caused the organization to run a “serious deficit that impacted our revenues.”
They followed-up with candidates who had made it to the interview stage, but beyond that felt it was too time-consuming to tell everyone the job had been taken.
“Even to send a mass email notifying people they didn’t get the position, we’d have to go through each individual email application, extract the address and add it to a [mass mailing list],” Sharon says.
“Basically, if we’d replied to every applicant that applied to the job we’d still be doing it now.”
A failure to follow up can often be attributed to the nonprofit in question having insufficient staff or resources to devote to the hiring process in a way they themselves might consider ideal. Many organizations, though they’d like to be able to reply to all candidates, don’t have a designated HR staff person at their disposal, let alone an HR department.
Editor’s Note: Check out this article for tips on how to write a job ad that will reduce the number of unqualified candidates.
Salary disclosure and cultures of transparency
Veronica Utton is managing director at consulting firm V. Utton & Associates. Her clients are primarily nonprofit organizations. She says the issue of transparency — both regarding hiring and generally — is not specific to the nonprofit sector, and that whether a for-profit company or a nonprofit organization chooses to be open about certain information is more a question of whether they’ve cultivated a ”culture of transparency.”
“If an organization doesn’t have articulated policies describing how job postings are to be handled, it’s not likely [they would include something like salary information in a job ad].”
Essentially, she says, if, amongst their staff, a nonprofit promotes trust and is communicative about matters like budget, funding or compensation practices, it’s more likely to convey salary or role expectations in a job posting.
If an organization is more tight-tipped about such issues amongst their own staff, they’re far less likely to be transparent with job applicants.
This said, Utton says she hasn’t seen a failure to post salary information deter strong candidates from applying to nonprofit jobs. She attributes this to the fact that many in the sector (and those drawn to it) are often motivated by factors other than money.
“A lot…are motivated by other intrinsic values…and if they’ve done their homework, they’ll have a fairly good sense of what their skills and the job is worth.”
Hiring and seeking: An imperfect system
It’s clear that a shortage of information can be extremely frustrating for the job-seeker.
Chapman used to work in medical administration, and says salaries were always posted for these types of jobs. In the nonprofit sector she’s often left guessing.
“I’ll spend weeks on an application and then find out the job pays [much less than I feel I can live on]…I understand there aren’t a lot of resources to pay staff in the nonprofit sector, but people shouldn’t have to go in blind,” she says.
“I’m sure it would make the employer’s life easier if they posted all the information…they may be more likely to get the right applicant applying for the right job this way, and it would be less frustrating for everyone.”
It seems reasonable that greater detail — and transparency — on a job ad would help filter out inappropriate candidates – and help find the right match for the position.
Still, the hiring process is imperfect, and job applicants have been known to send out a barrage of resumes despite failing to meet criteria specified on job ads.
Sharon says the job her organization recently posted specified that applicants must be bilingual in French and English. They used the term non-negotiable. And yet, she groans, “We got applicants who didn’t speak English or French, applicants who only spoke English, or who only spoke French.”
Circumstances of this sort can cause an organization — especially a small one — a considerable amount of frustration and a sense of wasted time, all of which could make them more reticent to follow-up with applicants.
Benefits of transparency
Stephanie McAllister is research and workshop coordinator at a charity called Framework-Timeraiser. They’ve launched a program called Timeraiser Plus, which offers workshops, consultations and web audits to nonprofits across Canada. They encourage organizations to use their Sharesies methodology, an approach that values the sharing of information both within and across organizations in the sector.
The methodology, which McAllister says, “comes from what we’ve learned about how beneficial it can be to share information about our own operations,” encourages nonprofits to disclose on their websites details like operating budget, budgets for specific events and a breakdown of where their funding comes from.
It’s touted as a way to build confidence among a nonprofit’s stakeholders, donors and funders, and to strengthen an organization’s team.
Naturally, this philosophy extends to hiring procedures: Last year, her organization hired an event planner using cloud-based technology; they aggregated all the non-personal information from applicants— things like educational and work experience — and, without linking the data to applicants’ names, shared this information on their website.
The idea was to encourage other nonprofits to share more about what they’re really looking for in candidates.
“If more organizations and individuals start doing that,” says McAllister, “there will be a better overall sense of how to better prepare people for the job market and what skills employers are actually expecting.”
Further, she says that by streamlining and opening up the hiring process in this way, nonprofits can learn more about what they’re actually looking for, fine-tune the way they write job postings and generally attract better candidates.
“The sector has a disadvantage of not having a lot of money to pay employees. The more resourceful we are about finding passionate people…the more we talk to each other about where to find these people, the better.”
Tips for increasing transparency
Because hiring transparency can demand resourcefulness, it’s important for organizations to have certain strategies on hand.
Utton suggests “working from the inside out,” meaning managers must first get comfortable discussing things like financial information with staff, and then figure out what they’re comfortable sharing externally.
She suggests creating a written policy that articulates how the hiring process should go, and then striving to follow through. So, for example, if an organization posts a job but already has a candidate in mind, this might be information worth including that in the posting, even if it’s uncomfortable.
With regard to following up, Utton acknowledges the difficulty of contacting every candidate, especially when resources are tight. She suggests, however, setting up an auto-reply message that notifies candidates their application was received and that if they don’t hear back by X day (give or take), they can assume they didn’t get the job.
“This simple acknowledgement can help to open up transparency.”
McAllister says for organizations to get comfortable with transparency, it’s good to start small. She recommends that reticent nonprofits begin by posting their fundraising goals and expenses for specific events, or including a pie chart of their funding breakdown on their website. Further, she encourages directors to have frank conversations about their concerns around transparency.
Ultimately, where hiring and other operations are concerned, a culture of transparency, while it cannot happen overnight, can add substantial value to an organization, its’ stakeholders and those looking to enter it — and can arguably benefit the sector as a whole.
As McAllister puts it: “In the nonprofit sector, one of our main stakeholders is the public at large — it’s important to demonstrate to them what it takes to run a nonprofit. The more information we share…the more they’ll feel empowered to make good decisions about who they give money (and time) to, and how they give money.”
*Name has been changed to protect her privacy.
Jodie Shupac is a Toronto-based freelance writer. She contributes to a range of publications, covering culture, urban issues, health and the environment.
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