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Recruitment strategies help organisations set a clear direction for hiring the best talent, which is then put into action through various tactics and methods. Even in an employer-led market, finding brilliant candidates among the masses can be daunting. For those in the charity sector, there are additional considerations, such as limited budgets and time.
Many challenges can be overcome when approached with a strategic lens. A recruitment strategy can mitigate common hiring challenges by improving applicant quality, addressing candidate shortages for specific skills, and enhancing diversity within your business.
Our guide outlines the main building blocks for developing a strong recruitment strategy that helps your organisation find the talent you need.
1. Define success for your organisation
Before implementing new strategies or changes, it’s important to consider the broader context to set clear recruitment goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). Setting recruitment KPIs will provide a framework for tracking progress, identifying what’s working and uncovering opportunities to improve your hiring processes.
Success for a charity might look different to a corporate business, but these are the main recruitment metrics you could consider:
- Time to interview and/or hire: Keeping candidates waiting could mean missing out on a strong addition to your team if they have other offers with shorter timelines.
- Quality of hire: Do hired candidates demonstrate the expected skills, experience and value alignment?
- Employee retention time: How long do people stay with the charity after being hired? Consistent exit rates within the first year are a sign that something needs to change.
- Offer acceptance rates: What percentage of roles offered to candidates are accepted? Low acceptance rates could indicate issues with the hiring process or a poor cultural fit.
- Application relevance rates: High levels of irrelevant applications, such as underqualified applicants or experience that doesn’t match, suggest job ads could be reaching the wrong pools of candidates.
- Applicant and employee diversity: Attracting and hiring applicants from diverse backgrounds helps build an effective team. If your applicant pool only includes a small number of minorities, and even fewer are hired, there may be unconscious bias that needs to be addressed.
- Candidate experience: Whether an applicant is successful or not, they should leave their interaction with you with a positive perception of the organisation.
Once you’ve defined success, you can begin highlighting your strengths and addressing shortcomings.
2. Develop employer branding
Many organisations place significant emphasis on consumer branding to connect and engage with people, with the ultimate goal of driving customer purchases. Similar to consumer branding, employer branding strategies use tactics to connect with people and attract and hire suitable candidates.
The way your organisation is perceived can directly affect how candidates view you as an employer and whether they feel they’re a good fit for you, and vice versa. For charities, employer branding will be heavily driven by values and the cause you support, while demonstrating the purpose and impact you aim to achieve.
3. Create job descriptions that attract the right talent
A job advert could be the first touch point a prospective applicant has with your organisation. It’s crucial to write compelling job descriptions that stand out and reach the right audience. Prioritise clarity and transparency over ‘fluffy’ and generic information to improve application quality.
When you post a job advert, ensure it includes:
- Salary information
- Key responsibilities
- Essential and desirable skills, qualifications and experience
- Location and working arrangements
- Organisation values
5. Ensure the end-to-end candidate experience is positive
Every candidate who applies for a vacancy should have a positive experience, regardless of whether they progress through the process or are ultimately hired. Recruiters can implement simple, low-effort ways to make a good impression on applicants – and it doesn’t have to cost very much, if anything.
- Avoid lengthy forms or complex processes, as these deter applicants.
- Respond to all applicants with an acknowledgement of the effort they put into applying, even if their application is not progressed.
- Provide feedback to unsuccessful applicants who advance beyond the initial application stage.
- Respect people’s time by responding promptly.
6. Prioritise inclusive bias-free hiring practices
Hiring should be a fair and inclusive process that works to eliminate both conscious and unconscious bias, unlocking the potential of a more diverse group of applicants. Improve diversity in organisations by implementing diversity and inclusion practices into recruitment, such as:
- Anonymous recruitment – this removes applicants’ personal details, such as names and email addresses, so recruitment decisions are based solely on skills, experience and qualifications rather than irrelevant personal traits. CharityJob’s ATS includes an anonymous recruitment tool, which is free to use when you post a job with CharityJob Apply.
- Improved accessibility from streamlining the application process. Keep the number of steps to a minimum, avoid asking candidates to re-enter the same information multiple times, and make reasonable adjustments where needed to enable them to attend interviews.
- Flexibility – show applicants support inside and outside the workplace. Offer interview times and working hours that fit around their current work schedules or family commitments.
- Writing inclusive job adverts that avoid gender-coded or age-biased language, as well as non-literal phrases that could be confusing to neurodivergent applicants.
7. Use free recruitment tools to improve incrementally
Recruitment tools can be used to conduct regular analysis of hiring metrics set out in recruitment KPIs and to monitor candidate feedback. Powered by this information, you can implement data-driven changes to regularly improve recruitment processes.
CharityJob’s ATS is an end-to-end hiring platform designed to streamline your recruitment process, with handy features such as:
- Actionable insights with performance and diversity reports.
- Screening questions to find top talent.
- Customised templates to make communication faster.
- Multi-user access to allow the hiring panel to score candidates and collaborate seamlessly.
And it’s FREE to use when you post a job using CharityJob Apply.
8. Engage your team in the process
Cultivate shared ownership of recruitment across employees, whether it’s within the crucial interview stages or through employee referrals.
- Interviews: Hiring managers should be regularly trained in inclusive, fair interview processes to reduce the impact of subjectivity and cognitive bias. Inviting colleagues from the team with the vacancy to join interviews will give the candidate the opportunity to meet someone they might work with and assess their cultural fit.
- Employee referrals: Current employees will likely have worked with talented individuals in previous roles, and so can vouch for their skills and experience when recommending them for vacancies.
9. Keep your candidate pipeline open and connected
Nurturing a talent pipeline delivers value in more ways than one, from reducing future effort to keeping pre-qualified candidates engaged for suitable vacancies.
In an employer-led market, you can often become inundated with brilliant candidates and only one role to fill. It can feel like a loss to turn down top talent, but maintaining an open dialogue means you’ll be able to keep them at the top of the list for subsequent suitable roles.
10. Promote charity culture and benefits
Although culture is technically something employees experience after the hiring process, it has a knock-on effect on recruitment. A great workplace culture and desirable benefits that make your employees happy mean they’re more likely to tell their friends and previous colleagues, leave positive reviews online and stay at an organisation for a long time – all of which are things that prospective candidates take notice of. Benefits and cultural practices include:
- Training, learning, and development programmes or budgets.
- Generous holiday allowance, or purchase schemes.
- Access to shopping discounts or offers.
- Healthcare support, such as private medical care and mental health support.
- Flexible working arrangements.
Flexible working is a significant – and very popular – benefit to offer employees. Hybrid, remote and other flexible work options are especially important when you’re unable to offer competitive salaries. Lower salaries are a common challenge in the charity sector, which has long offered flexible working styles, even before the pandemic forced other industries to follow suit.
Nurture a positive workplace culture, creating a work environment people want to join and stay in. Share posts about activities and cultural events on social media, and include this information on company websites so people can get a sense of what it’s like to work for you.
Recruitment strategy FAQs
How do I choose the right recruitment strategy?
Choosing the right recruitment strategy for your organisation will depend on several factors. Consider the following to help with strategic direction:
- Which challenges are you currently facing? Consider insufficient applications, low-quality or underqualified candidates or a low acceptance rate.
- What do you want to change? Maybe you want to offer a better candidate experience, implement fairer interview processes or gain visibility into recruitment data.
- Where do you want to get to? Perhaps your charity wants a more diverse and skilled talent pool, or a quicker application-to-hire timeline to get talent in the door as soon as possible.
What is the difference between recruitment strategy and process?
Think of a recruitment strategy as the top-level goals, while recruitment processes are the steps you take to achieve those aims. Your strategy should have a long-term vision that takes into account your organisation’s needs, and your processes should be tactical, actionable and adaptable to support success.
How can non-profits recruit effectively with limited budgets?
Non-profit organisations face the unavoidable task of hiring on a low budget, as do many other companies, such as start-ups. Where your organisation might not be able to compete with competitive salaries, you have heart – don’t underestimate the value of making emotional connections.
Whether it’s offering flexibility, a supportive working culture or inviting employee referrals, there are plenty of low-budget yet impactful methods that strengthen recruitment. Using a specialised job board like CharityJob also ensures every penny of recruitment budget is spent on finding relevant and passionate candidates for vacancies.
Build your recruitment strategy with CharityJob
Post a job with CharityJob Apply to get free access to our end-to-end Applicant Tracking System (ATS). Showcase your job vacancies in a way that attracts the best talent and provides actionable insights and tactics to support your recruitment strategy.
Our ATS allows you to filter CVs with keyword searches, communicate with candidates, evaluate applications and – perhaps most importantly – help remove unconscious bias from your process.
We offer four job ad packages to suit your needs and budget. Choosing the right package is important because it determines the pool size, type, and quality of candidates your ad will reach.
If you’re not sure which is right for your non-profit organisation, contact us for personalised advice. Give us a call on 020 8939 8430, or email us at info@charityjob.co.uk
Tags: charity recruitment, charity sector recruitment, diversity in recruitment, recruitment process
Social media
Social media and network sites like LinkedIn and sector-specific forums can also identify strong candidates.
LinkedIn is great for networking, headhunting, and advertising roles. CharityJob has a partnership with LinkedIn, which allows recruiters to cross-post on LinkedIn (for a small additional fee) to expand their candidate pool.
Sector-specific forums, such as our own CharityConnect for people currently working in the charity sector, are a great way to connect with potential candidates who have experience in your industry. They’re valuable spaces to raise charity awareness and build connections with potential candidates, boosting your employer brand.