by Alison Green
Now that you know what you’re looking for, your next task—and, we’d argue, the most important determinant of whether you hire a superstar—is building your pool of candidates. As we noted in the opening to this chapter, most hiring mistakes occur not because managers select the wrong person but because they don’t have the right person to select to begin with. Given this, the more energy you spend on building your pool of candidates, the more likely you’ll be to find high performers.
Mass Marketing
Perhaps the easiest part of recruitment, and certainly the most commonly practiced, is mass marketing using techniques like Internet postings that reach multiple people rather than specific individuals. In this category, most organizations think to hit the obvious sources, such as posting on their own Web site, circulating announcements to e-mail lists, and posting on sites like www.idealist.org or www.craigslist.org.
In designing your advertising efforts, get creative and go beyond the obvious. For instance, if your ideal profile is someone with strong writing skills and you don’t necessarily need prior experience in your specific field, post your job announcement at the English departments of local universities and on online job banks geared toward writers. If you’re hiring an information technology staffer, send notices to IT consulting firms in your community.
Individual Headhunting
The most successful managers go beyond mass channels and bring their searches down to an individual level, basically becoming headhunters. They consider the ideal profile of the person in the role and try to think of anyone they know who might fit that profile, including current members of their staff. Besides being candidates themselves, your current staff can also help identify people to target. When there are important openings at one organization we know, the executive director gathers a small group of staff members, and in thirty minutes of brainstorming, they usually come up with a list of ten to fifteen good possibilities.
Recruit aggressively from your list of prospects. Rather than simply e-mailing them a job description and asking whether they’re interested, make it harder for them to say no to the first step in the process. For instance, invite them out for a cup of coffee to talk about their future plans. This sort of personal interest is usually far more compelling than a quickly e-mailed job posting.
Finding Connector Sources
You should also think of connector sources—people who aren’t right for the job themselves but might know others who are. Go through your list of contacts to identify people who are connected to your organization or are social acquaintances who might be good sources.
Here too, once you have a good source, you should try to speak with these people directly rather than e-mailing an announcement. You will be surprised how many more names you get when you spend a few minutes on the phone with these people. (This is why professional headhunters almost always want to speak to you on the phone rather than simply e-mail you an announcement.)
Striving for Diversity
For a variety of reasons, including the fact that many nonprofits have missions connected to promoting social, racial, or economic justice, many organizations strive to have a staff that is diverse in different respects. At a minimum, organizations should aim to have a workforce that reflects the relevant population in their community. The best way to reach this aim is to try to ensure through both mass marketing and individual headhunting that your applicant pool is diverse. For instance, at the mass marketing level, if you are looking for strong African American candidates, you might try to post your position on e-mail lists for black professionals in the area. On the personal headhunting level, if you don’t have diverse networks of your own, reach out to others who do by finding sources who might be more likely to know of diverse candidates. The personal headhunting piece is key here; of the many organizations we know that have wrestled with how they can build a more diverse staff, the ones that have made the most progress undertook a serious effort to build and cultivate a strong pool of diverse candidates over time.
THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN
You should always be looking for strong potential staffers, whether or not you have a current opening, noting interesting prospects you come across, and encourage your staff members to do the same. To ensure that good candidates readily come to mind when the time comes to hire, keep a running list of prospects. A simple document listing names, contact information, and one sentence of context about the person to trigger your memory works well. (See Tool 6.2 for a sample talent list.)
And do more than passively track these potential stars: reach out and cultivate them. Send the occasional e-mail with updates on your work, take them out for coffee and talk about their career goals and how your organization might fit in, or drop them a periodic e-mail to see how they’re doing.
Ideas for Building a Strong Pool
Most hiring mistakes occur not because managers select the wrong person but because they don’t have the right person to select to begin with. Here are a few tips to help you build a strong pool and avoid that trap.
Mass Marketing
Post ads on your Web site and those of other friendly organizations.
Send a message out to e-mail lists.
Ask friends, colleagues, and staff members to circulate the announcement.
Submit posts to job sites (including www.idealist.org).
Use industry-specific online job banks.
Post on social networking Web sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook.
Contact the alumni and career services offices of undergraduate or graduate schools.
Reach out to professional societies.
Individual Headhunting
Go through your contact list and note potential candidates or sources.
Hold a meeting of strong members of your staff and brainstorm ideas for candidates or sources. Setting a target is helpful: “We will not leave until we think of six good candidates and twenty good sources to call.”
Keep a running list of staff prospects, and review it when you have openings.
Review your own staff list for candidates.
Call peers at allied organizations and ask them to brainstorm with you.
Identify pipeline organizations for your staff (such as service organizations, government agencies, or private companies) and call contacts there.
Call former staffers and interns who were strong (either as candidates or sources).
Hire an actual headhunter.
Use Tool 6.3 for building an applicant pool.
SELECTING THE RIGHT PERSON
Once you’ve started building a strong pool of candidates, you’ll begin the selection process, which typically consists of successive stages with cuts at each step along the way. The details will vary depending on the position, your organization, and the quality of applications you receive, but typically you’ll begin by making a first cut after reading through candidates’ résumés and cover letters, rejecting the ones who clearly aren’t a strong match. You’ll then do interviews on the phone or in person, often of greater length as the process goes on. Interspersed along the way, sometimes even before the first personal interview, ask candidates to complete exercises that assess the qualities you’ll need them to demonstrate on the job. Finally, as you get more serious about a candidate, check with people who know her to find out their opinion about her fit with your role.
Let’s take a look at the main steps: initial screening, interviews and exercises, and speaking with references.
Initial Screening of Candidates
To make your job easier at the initial screening stage, think carefully about what materials you ask applicants to submit. A résumé and cover letter are fairly typical, of course, but you can also ask for more. If a position involves writing, save yourself the trouble of interviewing poor writers by asking for a three-page writing sample along with the résumé. If you’re looking for a Web designer, ask applicants to submit links to several sites they created.
REJECTING CANDIDATES
Make sure
to inform candidates when they are no longer under consideration, even if all they have done is to submit an application online. These candidates could be your future donors or supporters (or could be perfect for a job opening you have in the future), and how you handle rejections will give them an impression, good or bad, of your organization.
The fastest way to send a rejection is by having a standard e-mail template that you can adapt, depending on how much interaction you have had with a candidate (see Tool 6.4).
Managers (including the two of us) differ on whether a phone call is appropriate for candidates who have gone through an extensive process. If you do make a call, you can be direct without being insulting, telling candidates the ways in which you thought they were strong and the ways in which they might not have been the right fit for your position. For instance, you might say, “You clearly have a tremendous amount of knowledge about the industry. For this position, we were putting even more emphasis on the ability to network and bring in new supporters, and while I’m sure you could do that, it didn’t strike me as your primary strength. I have no doubt, though, that you’ll be a real asset to someone in the right position.”
As applications begin coming in, you’ll know immediately that some aren’t right and you can reject these immediately (see the “Rejecting Candidates” box). For others, you’ll need to scrutinize the materials more closely, looking for evidence of the must-have qualities you want in a role. For instance, if you need a go-getter who will take initiative without close supervision, look at how the candidate describes her accomplishments in prior jobs to see if there’s evidence of going above and beyond the basics of the job. If you need a good writer, scrutinize the cover letter or writing sample.
Interviews and Exercises
Once you’ve chosen the candidates who seem promising enough to pursue further, you’ll proceed to the get-to-know-you stage. In the typical process, a candidate who makes it to this point might have undergone two or more rounds of interviews, with a shorter first interview and a longer second (and often third or more) round. During the later rounds, the candidate might meet others in the organization, such as the hiring manager’s boss, prospective subordinates if the person would be managing others, or a peer in the organization who would be working closely with the person. By getting others’ perspectives, the hiring manager often surfaces underlying issues that she might be missing, and she also gives candidates a better sense of the work they might be responsible for and the culture of the organization.
However many rounds of interviews you do, your primary goal in an interview is to find out how well the candidate matches up with the list of must-have traits you developed earlier. If there’s one thing to keep in mind as you try to glean this information, it’s this: Focus on the actual rather than the hypothetical. In other words, the best way to gauge how people will act in the future is to find out how they have actually acted in the past or to observe how they actually act in the present. Too often, though, managers ask about the hypothetical, say, how a candidate might handle a difficult situation. For instance, if you want to figure out whether an assistant will be able to handle multiple tasks efficiently and without losing track of things, asking, “How do you think you would stay on top of everything?” or, worse yet, “Do you think you could handle the volume?” gets you little useful information (the first question tests more for critical thinking than efficiency, and the second tests whether the candidate is awake). Instead, ask, “How much volume did you have to handle in your last job? How did you stay on top of it all? Tell me about a time when the volume was at its peak. What did you do?” These questions probe the actual by looking at what the candidate did in her past. Alternatively, you can say, “Here’s a pile of tasks to complete. I’d like you to figure out which order to do them in and then do them. I’ll come back in twenty minutes,” which probes the candidate’s actual ability to do tasks quickly.
With this principle in mind, we urge you to use the following three methods of gathering useful information during the interview process.
Probe Prior Experiences Deeply
Focus on depth over breadth in your questions, because you will learn more by getting into the details of a few experiences than by covering every job listed on a résumé. In discussing a particular experience, start with general questions, but then probe for the specific traits you are interested in. Along the way, your main challenge will be to get beneath the surface of general descriptions and into the nitty-gritty of how a candidate actually operated. For example, if one of the key traits you are seeking is an ability to stay on top of a large volume of work, your line of questioning might go like this:
Tell me about X. What did you do there?
What was the project on which you spent the most time?
That sounds interesting. How did you approach that?
Was it successful?
What was the biggest challenge?
How did you deal with that challenge?
I would think one challenge must have been staying on top of everything at once. Did you ever get overwhelmed?
How did you stay organized?
I know this is pretty nitpicky, but walk me through the organizational system you used. When you arrived at work in the morning, how did you decide what to start working on? As items came up during the day, where would you capture those so you didn’t forget?
If your probing of specific experiences does not yield information about the traits you are looking for, you can also ask directly:
Tell me about a time when you had to stay on top of a lot of work.
How did you do it?
What was hardest about that?
Be sure that you don’t allow your desire to be nice to the candidate to prevent you from probing until you have a clear sense of her strengths and weaknesses. Pushing as much as it takes to get into the details is key to making an accurate assessment, and good candidates actually appreciate challenging questions.
Simulate Actual Job Activities
If you’ve hired even a few people before, you may know the terrible feeling of realizing after just a few days with a new employee that she is not going to work out. Having candidates complete activities similar to what they’d be doing on the job before they get hired can give you that insight before it’s too late. Think of yourself as a football coach holding tryouts: you wouldn’t ask a player whether he could make a tackle; you’d ask to see him do it.
For instance, if you are hiring a marketing director and want a candidate who can internalize your desired branding and help choose collateral that fits your image, you could have a candidate read your brand positioning statement and look at your Web site, and then ask for her opinions on whether the site fits your brand and how it might be improved. If you want someone who can write quickly under pressure, you might provide a candidate a set of talking points and give her thirty minutes to draft a press release. Or if you want a chief financial officer who can explain financial matters to other executives in clear terms, you might send candidates your financial statements ahead of time and ask them to explain them to you in plain English during the interview.
You can ask candidates to engage in these sorts of exercises at a variety of stages in the process. Even before granting first interviews for an assistant position, for instance, you could cull your pool by having applicants read a scenario about an upcoming meeting and draft a mock e-mail to a hypothetical executive at another organization. Once you’re at the interview stage, you can weave activities into the course of the interview (by asking for a role play of a funder meeting, say), or you can have candidates complete them while they are on-site, or have them complete the tasks off-site and then send them back to you. You can also send background materials to candidates in advance of interviews so they can come prepared.
Close to the end of your process, you might even hire your top candidate in a consulting capacity to do a project for you, giving you much more substantive interaction to base your d
ecision on. Or you might have her spend a half-day going to some of the meetings she’d attend on the job and then debrief with her afterward to hear her impressions and suggestions.
However you do it, finding ways to see the candidates demonstrate the qualities you must have in some kind of real-life situation can be invaluable in informing your decision.
Tool 6.5 lists some job simulation exercises, and Tool 6.6 provides a sample e-mail to candidates asking them to prepare for job-related activities.
Get to Know the Candidate
Many organizations focus almost their entire interview process on general “get to know you” questions, but you will find out more from exploring prior experiences and having candidates perform actual tasks for you, Nevertheless, don’t entirely neglect this category of getting to know the candidate because it sometimes elicits useful information.
In this category, you might ask general questions about motivation and commitment, such as, “What are you looking for at this point in your career?” and “How does this role fit into your path?” You might also explore more specific questions about work preferences to help you understand a candidate’s fit with your organization’s culture, which is often one of your “must-have” criteria. Try questions like, “What drives you crazy at work?” and, “What was your favorite work environment and why? ”
Keeping in mind the actual-versus-hypothetical rule, ask candidates to tie their answers back to specific experiences—for example, “You mentioned that you like having autonomy. Can you give me an example of a time you had that and how it worked? ”
