5 Ways to Improve Your Nonprofit’s Hiring Process

The role of an HR professional requires wearing many hats and with that comes the challenge of juggling multiple projects, involving various moving parts of a nonprofit organization. One of the biggest and most challenging tasks that lives on the desk of human resource professionals is recruiting/hiring new employees. Most have come to learn that the hiring process has a tendency to be biased, which comes with moments of being unfair to certain applicants. While most of it comes from an unconscious bias, these acts still play an intricate role in making a decision when hiring a new employee.

While bringing awareness to our natural bias and attempting to correct these behaviors can be difficult, there are solutions that can be put into place to offer your human resource’s team a strategic plan to help prevent such biases from occurring.  

1) Reformat your job descriptions: A job description is one of the most crucial parts of the hiring process. It sets the tone for everything that follows and the parameters around the type of person you’re looking to hire—from their skills to their capabilities. The use of different words can have a greater impact than you realize on the candidates that come across your job listing. For example, certain adjectives like “competitive” and “determined” can be more appealing to men where as “collaborative” and “cooperative” tend to resonate more with women.

2) Try “blind hiring”: A technique that “blinds” you from seeing any demographic-related information for a particular candidate. This approach can help improve the chances of not weeding out a great candidate and to retain a more dynamic interview pool without your natural bias interfering with the hiring process.

3) Assessments using work examples: Offering a test to solve work-related problems can be a helpful indicator to both the potential hire and employer— revealing their level of job performance and the opportunity for the candidate to demonstrate his or her skill level. This can help eliminate the bias and unconscious judgement of appearance, gender, age and personality.

4) Create a consistent interview process: While an unstructured interview can allow for a more organic conversation, it tends to be unreliable when predicting job success. Whereas in a structured interview, the candidate is asked a set of defined questions, allowing employers to focus on the key factors that have an impact on performance—this approach offers a consistent interview process and minimizes potential bias.

5) Implement goals of diversity: Creating these goals will offer guidance and define the parameters in which to abide by—this helps keep diversity and equality top of mind when hiring future employees.