Seven Great Ways to Fill Your Hiring Pipeline and Recruit Nonprofit Talent

In today’s day and age, our organizations are really only as strong as the people that run them. Our work and our impact is ultimately a reflection of the people on our teams that are executing and contributing to our organizations every day.

Our team here at Community Boost has been growing quickly, so we certainly understand the challenges that many other organizations and nonprofits face when recruiting great talent. However, this also means that we’ve come across many different ways to make hiring more effective and drive better applicants. So, let’s dive into the seven tips and tricks we have been using to save time and increase quality applicants.

1. Post on Job Boards

Job boards are definitely a great way to get your organization on people’s radar. The influx you can draw from boards like Indeed, Glassdoor, Idealist, or LinkedIn can be really high. However, due to the ability for job searchers to mass apply to postings through some boards, the quality of applicants may vary.

A useful tactic to implement in order to flush out applications is to use a job board like Indeed, for example, to direct applicants to your organization’s site. Once applicants apply through Indeed, utilize the auto-response templates to point people to your site. This way, applicants can fill out a longer, more detailed application as well as having the chance to poke around your website and understand your organization and its mission a bit more.

Additionally, once your nonprofit reaches the point where you need to constantly hire more talent, utilizing an applicant tracking software (ATS) like Breezy, Workable, Zoho, or many more like the bunch. This way, the software manages the hiring pipeline and streamlines postings on all of the job boards. All your applicants will be in the ATS and your hiring process will feel more organized and time-efficient.

2. Utilize the LinkedIn Recruiting Tool

Paying just five dollars a day ($5/day) to run a job ad through LinkedIn will also give you access to the LinkedIn recruiting tool, which is debatably better than the actual job ad itself. What the LinkedIn recruiting tool does is it works backward and allows you to sort and filter through people that are qualified for your open position(s). You can quickly reach out and message qualified people about the position to see if they might be interested in applying. It’s a great way to “hunt” top talent and go after people that you want to apply.

3. Check Out Your Local Young Nonprofit Professionals Network (YNPN) or Other Professional Groups

Another great tactic for recruiting top talent is to check out what professional networks are available near you. For example, your local Young Nonprofit Professionals Network, or YNPN, is a great place to start. Sharing your open role with a group or a network like that can really help you tailor your job to your niche as well. Think about the groups your best candidates are likely a part of and have someone on your team get involved. Networking for your job postings is something that can help advance your hiring pipeline greatly. 

4. Handshake and College Job Boards

Connecting with your local universities is crucial and advantageous as it allows you to get access to the job boards that they use. Handshake, for example, is a great platform for connecting with tons of universities across the country, because it allows you to send your job to various colleges to post on their platform. You will then get an application package from people who have applied to your organization’s position through the job link and can move them forward in your hiring process if you want to.

5. Join Facebook and LinkedIn Groups

Joining groups like Nonprofit Communications Professionals with 7.5K members and Thriving Nonprofit with 16K members will broaden your audience. They usually have certain posts on their page that are specifically for nonprofit’s to post their open positions. Again, this is a key way to target people who are already in the social sector and the nonprofit space, which might be an important consideration in hiring for your organization.

You can even post in our Digital Marketing for Nonprofits group on Facebook, which consists of about 702 members. While it’s smaller-scale, it can be another space for you to find people scanning for jobs in the nonprofit space.

6. Utilize Recruiting Services Like Happie

While we have not directly tested the use of recruiting services, we highly considered it to fill our Sales Development team. Depending on the roles you’re hiring for, it could really work out for your organization. Services like Happie typically use email marketing as a strategy for getting candidates. Additionally, you would likely pay for their services from a performance standpoint.

Recruiting services are definitely worth a look if you are short on time and tight on bandwidth.

7. Incentivize Your Staff

Finally, incentivize your staff to help track down people they think would be a great addition to the team. Nobody knows what it takes to do the job better than the people currently doing it. If they are proud of their work, then proudly sharing that your organization is growing and looking to hire is something they should be happy to do. However, it still doesn’t hurt to offer your staff an incentive as well. A tactic we implement here at Community Boost is to offer a $500 bonus if someone helps recruit a new team member that is hired and stays on the team for three months.

Think about what would work for your organization and don’t be afraid to do a temporary test. Job boards and broader tactics are great to further diversify a team, but sometimes you need to hire fast. Your organization can find success in running through your team’s network for qualified applicants.

Overall, utilizing some of these tactics can be an effective way for your nonprofit to hire great talent while saving yourself and the rest of your team some time.

Cameron Ripley