Recruiting Career Shifters: How to Spot Potential in Transferable Skills

The word ‘unprecedented’ is used a lot when it comes to the world of recruitment, and it really is justified. The market is constantly evolving, and at times this makes it particularly difficult for charities to find top talent for vacancies.

There’s untapped value in casting the net a little wider to find the perfect person outside your usual pool. At some point in their careers, most people consider changing their line of work and looking for more meaningful options in different sectors. In fact, 1 in 10 workers in the UK changed careers between 2014 and 2024.

However, many people lack confidence in changing careers, worrying that recruiters will consider their experience irrelevant to the role. But career shifters could be exactly what your charity needs to succeed—it’s just a case of knowing how to spot their potential.

When lots of people are looking to change tracks, the charity sector will undoubtedly see an increase in applications for open roles. But should we be open to candidates without third sector experience? Our answer is a resounding yes. In this guide, we cover why you should consider career shifters, how to spot the people you need to succeed, and ways to attract candidates who want to make a difference by changing careers.

Understand the skills and experience your charity lacks

Before advertising any vacancy, it’s worth taking a look inwards to see what skills and experience might be lacking in your organisation. Conducting a skills gap analysis will help you figure out which skills your charity needs to achieve your goals for the coming year, and whether there’s currently any untapped talent within your organisation.

A review will help determine what type of skills you should look out for in potential hires. A key element of this analysis is understanding which skills are nice-to-have and which are essential. Do you really need someone who has already performed a specific role within the charity sector? Or would you be open to a candidate who has the right core skills but comes from a different sector?

In certain roles, such as marketing or web development, corporate sector experience could even be a benefit. The private sector is often lightyears ahead of the charity sector when it comes to digital marketing and tech, which means candidates with experience in these areas are likely to bring a wealth of knowledge to the table.

Which skills should you look out for?

The skills required for each role are determined by the unique demands of the job. However, we find the following to be applicable to most jobs in the charity sector – all of which can be acquired from working in other sectors:

• Digital skills – these can vary but any newcomer needs to have solid digital skills that are relevant to the role. Remote workers will need knowledge of cloud-based applications like Google Drive and SharePoint, as well as video conferencing software like Zoom and Microsoft Teams to effectively collaborate with colleagues. In fundraising roles, the ability to manipulate and draw meaning from data is valuable, so keep a lookout for Excel and SQL skills.
• Communication – strong communication skills are essential, especially as hybrid working patterns have become the norm. New employees, regardless of where they’ve come from, need to be able to communicate complex ideas to team members whom they’ve perhaps never met.
• Emotional intelligence – candidates need to be sensitive to the demands, different personalities and working styles displayed by colleagues and clients. In essence, a high emotional intelligence will be important to build good working relationships.
• Motivation – the reasons why somebody is applying for a role are just as important as their skills. People who work in charities are generally driven by purpose over financial gain. Try to discover what’s driving a candidate towards your organisation and whether they feel a connection to your cause or a desire to make a difference with their knowledge.

Benefits of hiring career shifters

If your charity is hiring for a position, remember that transferable skills and motivation can be far more important than previous experience in a specific niche. Career shifters can offer various benefits to your organisation, from fresh insights to innovative digital knowledge.

Transferable skills

People pick up skills from all areas of life and work – what should matter to recruiters is not where someone developed these skills, but how well they can apply them as part of the team.

This is why recruiters and HR professionals are increasingly prioritising transferable skills over narrow experience in a sector. Screening questions can be a reliable ways to measure a candidate’s suitability, as you can assess work samples and activities related to the actual job, rather than simply what’s written on a CV.

When you look at it this way, a successful salesperson could easily transition to an effective fundraiser, or a marketing executive could seamlessly slide into a charity comms role. If you assess candidates on raw ability rather than what they’ve done to date, you’re more likely to hire the best person for the job.

There are some roles – particularly those in finance, HR and software development – that don’t differ much between sectors. In these types of careers, past charity experience is likely to be seen as a bonus, rather than an essential requirement. For these types of role, you could actively pursue candidates from other sectors by clearly outlining in your job description that a charity background is nice, but not a prerequisite.

Other roles are much more charity-sector specific, particularly fundraising. But even in this case, it’s worth giving applications from passionate candidates who want to move into the charity sector a chance. Broken down into its core components, a junior fundraiser’s job description is all about building relationships, driving engagement and generating revenue. These are all skills that some top corporate candidates who have worked in sales and business development are likely to have in abundance.

Passion and willingness to learn

Passion for the cause is vital in a charity, and it’s what drives many career shifters to consider a move into the sector. If you receive an application where a candidate’s passion really shines through, it might be worth offering them an interview, even if they don’t have the exact experience that you’re looking for.

During an interview, you could question candidates about:

• why they chose your charity, or want to work for a not-for-profit,
• what steps they might take to upskill themselves in a given field,
• any volunteering work that they’ve done, and how this has shaped their understanding of the charity sector.

Keep an open mind and consider how a candidate could develop and flourish. Do they show determination? Are they naturally proactive? Have they displayed ownership of their own professional development? All of these are key indicators of whether or not they have the potential to contribute to your mission.

New perspectives and adaptability

It’s a common trope that the charitable sector is slow-moving, overly bureaucratic and generally lacking the spark and innovation of its private counterpart. This might be harsh, but it can be true to an extent.

Whilst many charities make efforts to innovate – particularly in regard to AI and new technology – only 44% of charities have a digital strategy. Ultimately, this lack of digital know-how could translate to missed opportunities for raising funds and achieving your organisation’s mission. By hiring people from the private and public sectors, you could benefit from more diverse skills and fresh perspectives to help modernise the third sector.

The changing job market has led many people to question their motivation for the jobs they do. You only have to open LinkedIn to see countless stories and posts about people who switched careers to better align with their values, passions, and skills – and what unites all of them is adaptability. Each career switcher has demonstrated not only a willingness to take a risk, but the ability to adapt to an entirely new situation. As charities are faced with increased uncertainties, the flexibility and determination of career shifters can only be seen as positive traits.

How to attract career changers

It’s important to adapt your recruitment process and goals in response to market trends, and that includes making career shifters feel encouraged to apply. Here are four ways to switch up how you market yourself as an employer and start bringing in talent from different sectors.

Review your advertising process

When writing your job ads, let potential applicants know from their very first touch-point with your charity that you’re open to candidates who don’t have experience in your sector. You can state this outright, or list ‘charity sector experience’ as a ‘desirable’ criteria instead of ‘essential’ to encourage people with experience in other sectors to apply.

By posting your vacancy on CharityJob, you can be confident that applicants are specifically seeking out roles in the charity sector. These applicants are more likely to have genuine passion and drive about moving to a career at a not-for-profit organisation.

Be open minded when shortlisting

It can be tempting to quickly reject candidates that don’t tick all of your boxes when you’re inundated with too many applications– but don’t! Uncover top talent by changing how you approach candidate shortlisting, and adopting a more flexible and objective perspective.

If charity sector experience is the only thing an applicant lacks, taking them out of the running means that you could be overlooking an opportunity to hire a truly talented candidate with invaluable experience. Additionally, if their experience is in a different (but very transferable) role, consider their skillset separately from the job title they held, to see if this aligns with what you’re looking for.

Help candidates showcase skills during interviews

If you’re considering taking on career shifters, you’ll need to determine how their experience could apply in a new role and test their skills effectively. This is most efficiently done during the interview phase.

Ask your candidate questions about how success was measured in their past roles, the results they achieved, and how they think that could be applied in your open role. Give them the opportunity to outline the specific impact they think they could have at your charity.

Assess skills with a task-based activity, or a second interview with another member of the management team so you can compare notes about suitability. The goal isn’t to catch anybody out, but rather to test their fit with the role and to determine the level of potential training that might be required.

A word of caution though – don’t take too long between interview stages. Though it can feel more challenging to decide whether a career shifter is an ideal fit, the candidate experience is still important. The market often moves very fast and you don’t want to risk losing talented people.

Plan in-house training

Investing in personal development and training helps employees feel supported and valued – leading to better retention.

As part of your development programme, you could offer dedicated training for new hires who have never worked in the charity sector before. This would give them a strong start in their new role, with a top-level overview of not just your charity’s mission and vision, but also the state of the sector as a whole. Are there any nuances that they need to be aware of in their work?

Onboarding is the best time to make sure career shifters are brought up-to-speed on relevant policies and legislation, feel like they can ask open-ended questions, and go into their new role with confidence.

Find career shifters for your charity vacancy

In an era where equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) should be a staple element of every recruitment process, it’s worth being open-minded when it comes to career shifters. These highly-skilled people are likely to have a lot to offer your charity, and can become a real asset in the long term with just a little bit of training.

Choose the right package for your vacancy

Ready to get started? Post a job with CharityJob Apply and get free access to our Applicant Tracking System to support your candidate attraction strategy. Our end-to-end recruitment platform will do the hard work for you to simplify and streamline your entire recruitment process. We make it quicker and easier to find the perfect candidate.

We offer four job ad packages to suit your needs and budget. Choosing the right package is important, as it dictates the pool size, type, and quality of the candidates your ad will reach.

If you’re not sure which is right for your organisation, contact us for personalised advice. Give us a call on 020 8939 8430, or email us on [email protected].

This post was originally published in 2022 and has been updated in 2025 to ensure relevance and to reflect the current job seeker and recruitment experience.