How to Shortlist Candidates

You’ve written a stellar job ad for a fundraising vacancy you're looking to fill. It’s been live for 30 days and has received an encouraging number of applications.

Your next team member is waiting to greet you like a warm hug on a winter’s night, however, to find that individual you need to trawl through 80 CVs and cover letters. Of the 80 hopefuls, you want to whittle it down to say, five or six people to interview.

It’s an arduous and time-consuming process. But it’s a vital piece of the recruitment puzzle.

For those of you who are new to the process, what’s the best way to shortlist candidates? Here’s a short guide.

1. Decide how many candidates you want on your shortlist

There’s no ideal number to shortlist to find your dream hire, nor is there a minimum or limit on how many people you can interview. So, it all comes down to how much time you have to invest in the shortlisting and interviews.

2. Determine your shortlist criteria

Once you’ve determined the length of your shortlist, you need to decide on the skills and knowledge you feel are needed for the role (incidentally, these details should at least in part, have been captured in the job description and person specification).

The criteria should correlate with job performance, based on the qualities and traits of the top performing employees in your charity who work in a similar role.

In broad terms, your shortlist criteria should include the following:

• Education: Does your new hire need to meet a minimum entry requirement, such as a degree with a minimum classification?

• Work experience: Do they need to have had experience at a particular type of charity, or in a particular field, such as corporate or major donor fundraising?

• Skills and knowledge: Do they need job-related expertise, such as data analysis or project management skills?

• Personality traits: Are interpersonal skills, effective team-working, or the ability to negotiate and influence people important for the role? If not, what is?

• Competencies: Does the candidate need to excel at certain things, such as problem-solving, decision making or leadership?

Once narrowed down, you’ll need to categorise the criteria into ‘essential’ and ‘desirable’.

Essential criteria are the things a candidate must meet to be considered for the role. While desirable criteria are those that would make someone a stronger candidate for the role but are not deal-breakers.

Bear in mind that, by law, the criteria you use must not discriminate against legally protected categories of applicants such as their age, sex, religion, or any disabilities they may have.

3. Create a shortlist scorecard

The next stage is to take your essential and desirable criteria and create a scorecard.

If you’re hiring someone for a community fundraising role, for example, your scorecard might include excellent organisational skills, strong interpersonal skills, and volunteer coordination experience. In each case, you’d provide a score of say 1-3 based on how well they fit each criterion.

Having a shortlist scorecard serves two purposes: it will ensure you’re applying each criterion fairly and consistently across all candidates and enable you to easily identify the strongest candidates.

4. Rank candidates against the scorecard

You’re now ready to start shortlisting. Firstly, reject all the applications that are missing essential criteria. Next, consider your desired criteria. Your approach here will depend on how far away you are from your target shortlist number. If you’ve got a lot of candidates to exclude, start by rejecting the ones with the fewest desirable criteria. Once you’re nearer your target, score each candidate based on how many of the desirable criteria they meet. You can then compare candidates and keep the best ones on your shortlist.

5. Pick up the phone

If, after all of the above steps, you still need to eliminate more candidates, you can always introduce a further screening aspect into your shortlisting process, such as a Skype chat or phone call.

If you go down this route, prepare a set of job-specific questions and be sure to ask each candidate the same questions in the same order. Make notes on their responses and score each answer in a matrix.

6. Let unsuccessful applicants know the score

This final point is an important one that many employers don’t bother with - and that’s to make sure you inform unsuccessful applicants that they’ve been… well, unsuccessful.

An email or short phone call is all it takes. It’s an act of courtesy that will make all the difference to the jobseeker and will do wonders for brand perception and public relations.

Final Word

These are a few of the basic steps you need to take to shortlist candidates. But the best way to ensure you get the best person for the job is to enlist the help of an expert.

This is where Bamboo comes in. Give us a call on 0203 750 3111 to get the process started. 

What to do if you make a bad hire

After a long search, you’ve hired someone to fill a vital position in your charity. Their CV was spot on, their interview flawless, and they had all the skills needed for the role.

And yet, a few weeks in, you can tell something’s not quite right. Maybe your new employee isn’t meshing with co-workers, or their work isn’t up to scratch and other employees are having to pick up the slack.

Instead of solving problems, your new employee is the problem.

Hiring the right person for a role is never easy, but what do you do when you realise that the person you hired isn’t the right fit for the organisation?

Here are 4 tips for dealing with a bad hire.

1. Get your facts straight

The first question to ask is whether the problems you see are just teething problems, or whether they reflect something deeper and more long-term. It’s important to speak to their team members, to get a comprehensive picture of what is going wrong, and why.

Speak to the new recruit’s direct manager and colleagues and get their take on it.

Speak to their line manager, HR, your onboarding team, and those responsible for training and discuss possible solutions.

Take the time to analyse and understand the feedback you’ve had from other team members: what are the higher-level insights, what isn’t working — and why?

2. Do some soul searching

Time for some soul searching: are you giving new recruits the support they really need? Could it be that this ‘bad hire’ is struggling because of you and not them?

Look back over your new hire’s application to help you understand where any mismatch of expectations might have come from.

3. Be honest with the new hire

“Bad hires” deserve honesty, too. No one likes surprises, so the employee needs to understand that they are not meeting expectations.

Share your concerns with them honestly but respectfully. You never know, they may be aware of the issues and be feeling the same way.

If it feels right, explore solutions that might satisfy you both.

4. Make sure you have a probation period in place

It might sound obvious, but this is exactly what probation periods are for.

Most employment contracts open with a clear period of time during which you can support your new recruit and find out whether they can succeed. Three months is a recommended trial period.

Spare yourself the cost of a bad hire by outsourcing

One of the most difficult tasks for any company is hiring new employees. Not only can it be a time-consuming process that detracts from your core focus, but it can be hard to know how to find the right candidate for your position and culture. That’s where we come in.

We can help you attract, select, and hire top candidates. We can act as an extension of your charity and handle all or part of the recruiting process.

If outsourcing your recruitment seems like the right move for your charity, give us a call on 0203 750 3111

Improve Your SEO in 5 Easy Steps

We live in a digital age. If you want your charity to succeed, you have to hold your own in virtual spaces. This is where SEO comes in.

SEO, or search engine optimisation, is all about improving your website to get search engines to rank you higher in their results. In the example below, Mind is the first result to be displayed, and so on.

You might think that the only way to get the top spots on Google or other search engines is to pay for them, (which takes money away from your cause). But that’s not the case.

There are some simple things you can do to boost your position. Read on to find out how:

1. Create content people want

This one might seem obvious, but a surprising number of people skip this step.

Ask yourself, why should people visit your site? What are you offering them?

Dogs Trust is a charity that does this well. They have a section on their website called help and advice for current and prospective dog owners. This means that anyone looking up phrases like ‘how to get a dog’ or ‘enrichment for dogs’ will be directed to them.

Another way to add value to your website and boost your SEO is with a blog. Blogs (with keywords/phrases) can boost SEO quality by positioning your website as a relevant answer to your questions. Take our blog for example. We post two blogs a week covering a range of topics on recruitment and fundraising that offer advice on topics that jobseekers and charities may be looking for. We also post topical news and advice that may be useful for charities to know.

Creating added value content will not only help more people discover your charity, it’ll help them form a positive opinion of you. And that’s a recipe for more donations and supporters.

2. Use effective titles

The way you use header tags and title your pages makes a big difference to SEO, especially your H1 tag. This is the largest heading on a web page, which tells Google what your page is about. This is the title that shows up for people to click on through the search engine, making it the first thing people see. There should be just one H1 tag on each page and it should accurately describe the content on that page.

To find out more about tags, check out this article by Social Media Today.

3. Be local

A lot of charities operate in small areas. Not everyone can – or wants to – be international, so why would your SEO strategy be so?

One easy way to increase your local rankings is to set up a Google My Business page. It’s free, helps you show up higher in searches from your local area, and shows people you’re a legitimate organisation.

4. Make it mobile-friendly

Did you know that 4 billion people use the internet on their phones?

Google knows this, and if your site isn’t going to give those visitors a good experience, it’ll rank you lower. Plus potential donors are turned off by sites which don’t work well on mobile, so it’s doubly worth investing time in optimising your mobile site.

If you don’t yet have a website, you can design it to be mobile-friendly, (there’s further advice here), but if you already have a website that isn’t mobile-friendly, this is the one area where you’ll need to invest.

5. Include keywords

Keywords are words and phrases which people search for when trying to find a service, product or advice online. Having keywords on your site means that it stands a chance of showing up in those search results.

For small charities, long-tail keywords (three or more-word phrases) are best to use because they bring back fewer search results. For example, ‘disability charity’ will bring up more results (making it harder for you to appear high up) than ‘children’s diabetes charity’ or ‘support for diabetic kids’.

It can be tempting to put as many keywords in as possible and repeat them as often as you can, but that will actually hurt your rankings.

To figure out which keywords to use, you need to carry out some ‘keyword research’. This is the process of finding and analysing search terms that people enter into search engines.

It’s important as it provides valuable insight into the queries your audience is searching for on Google. The insight you can get from it can help inform content strategy as well as your larger marketing strategy.

If you’re baffled, don’t worry, there are tools out there to help you with your keyword research:

• Ahrefs

• SEMrush

• Ubersuggest

• Google Keyword Planner

• SECockpit

• Keywords Everywhere
  

Are you looking for help with your SEO? We can help. Give us a call to find out how on 0203 750 3111.

8 Tips for Recruiting and Retaining Volunteers

Whether you have a handful or an army of volunteers, they’re the lifeblood of your charity. From helping at fundraising events and manning helplines to collecting cheques on your behalf, without them, many organisations would be unable to cope.

They’re your (unpaid) advocates, champions, ambassadors, and worker bees. So, it pays to treat them well.

With this in mind, here are a few top tips to help you recruit and retain volunteers.

1. Consider the reasons why people volunteer

Taking the time to consider why people volunteer can inform your recruitment campaign and the way you structure your volunteer roles. Some of the common reasons include:

• Giving back to the community and/or a cause they feel passionate about

• Wanting to be part of an event that excites them

• Looking to meet new people

• Hoping to learn new skills

• Wanting to build up experience for their CV

• Building their professional network

Think about each of these motives and build your volunteering programme around them. And be upfront about asking each of your prospective volunteers about their motives, so you can better match them with an assignment. When meeting with volunteers, ask what their motivation is and find a way to satisfy their needs and deliver on their expectations within the role they take on. This will ensure they stay motivated.

2. Prioritise volunteer inductions

You only have one chance to make a good first impression, so make sure you give volunteers a warm welcome and a great onboarding process.

For the uninitiated, ‘onboarding’ is the mechanism through which new volunteers acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, and behaviours to become effective organisational members.

A few tips to create a good onboarding process:

• Create a volunteer handbook containing all the key information about the organisation, the cause and the people behind it

• Set up 1:1 meetings between volunteers and key managers/senior members of staff

• Offer substantive training

For a more in-depth look at how to onboard volunteers, check out this article by Rosterfy

3. Help them develop new skills

Anyone who is willing to volunteer is likely to have a healthy curiosity and willingness to try new things. Indeed, many volunteers get involved specifically to develop new skills.

Consider your volunteers as extra staff who are capable of performing complex tasks using their experience and skills.

Consider running initial training workshops and doing refreshers every six months to allow volunteers to come together to share their ideas and experiences.

Provide leadership opportunities to those who want to shoulder responsibility and guide others. Help them connect with people they may not otherwise interact with. Understand their skills and background, as they may be able to do more than you’re currently offering them.

You can find out more about training volunteers in this blog post by markel.uk.

4. Support, don’t manage

You’re not paying your volunteers so you can’t manage them as paid staff. It’s a balancing act, negotiating what you need against what a volunteer wants to do and gain from the experience.

Get the balance right and you’ll have volunteers for life, but if the balance shifts in either direction, things can go horribly wrong.

Like any relationship, regular communication is key, but don’t forget it’s your organisation. If things aren’t working out, you’re well within your rights to call time on the relationship.

5. Implement regular catch ups

Regular meetings are vital as they’ll give your volunteers a sense of direction, especially at the beginning of their tenure. Make sure you give volunteers a chance to have their say and provide support and supervision when they need it.

6. Be accommodating

Try to be as flexible as possible with your volunteers. After all, they’re offering up their free time to help your charity, so be as accommodating as you can if they need to take time off or are unable to work their usual hours.

7. Acknowledge their contributions

Gratitude is a powerful thing. It can change a person’s outlook on just about any situation. Maintain morale by showing gratitude and demonstrating it openly. Don’t overlook the power of those small, simple gestures like taking your volunteers out to lunch, giving them a small gift, or sending a thank you card to their home.

8. Shout about their successes

Include volunteer case studies and quotes in your internal/external communications. Ask volunteers if they’d be happy to share their experience on film as a short video or in a case study to use in your recruitment and training collateral.

You could also recognise volunteers’ contributions publicly by highlighting their work in your newsletter/blog, or at an award ceremony.

With our extensive database of contacts, we’re in a strong position to help you find talented volunteers and paid fundraisers. Give us a call on 0203 750 3111 to get the process started.

How to deal with rejection from a candidate

You’ve shortlisted CVs, interviewed candidates, and chosen ‘the one.’

The only thing left to do is tell the lucky candidate they’ve got the job.

But what if the conversation doesn’t go your way, and the candidate rejects your offer?

It’s not uncommon. After all, some people only apply for jobs to try and get more from their current employer. Others may have several interviews and receive a better offer from another charity.

Either way, you need to handle the situation carefully.

Here are some tips.

1. Be polite

Sure, rejection is frustrating, but if your irritation comes through in your response, it’ll reflect badly on you.

The chances are, the candidate will badmouth you on social media for the world to see.

Your reputation is everything, so keep your communication polite and professional.

2. Ask for feedback

Applicants turn jobs down for many reasons. Maybe your offer wasn’t up to scratch, or the candidate was put off by something you said during the interview. Or they may have spotted some negative reviews about your charity that raised red flags.

Either way, feedback will enable you to adjust your recruitment process to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

3. Revisit your offer

If a great candidate rejects your offer because of the package, revisit it. Candidates hold a lot of power in the current market. And they know it. For that reason, they aren’t afraid to push back.

If you’re convinced they’re the right person for the job, ask them what you can do to make the offer more attractive.

Then revisit your offer.

Are you willing/able to pay more, offer more holiday, or tweak the benefits?

It goes without saying, you’ll need to consult your budget and/or company policies before adjusting the package.

A word of warning: Regardless of how keen you are to have a candidate on board, don’t push them into accepting the role, as it could backfire spectacularly. Think about it. If they reluctantly take the job and leave after three months, you’ll be back at square one.

4. Don’t be disheartened

Just because you offer someone a job, it doesn’t mean they’re going to accept it. It’s not ideal, especially when you’ve put a lot of time and effort into your recruitment process, but remember, it works both ways – you reject candidates too!

Need some help recruiting top-tier fundraisers that are in it for the long haul? Give us a call on 0203 750 3111 to get the process started.