We’ve all heard it time and time again: “9 out of 10 nonprofits lack a formal retention strategy.”* Nonprofits need to revise their view on employee retention. Training a new employee is expensive. Keep your employees happy to keep costs down.

But the constant stream of demands is easy to tune out. There are thousands more pressing concerns that need to be addressed first, right?

The cost of losing a talented employee who is familiar with your organization, cause, and market far outweighs the time it takes to develop and implement an effective formal employee retention plan. Worse, the loss continues to grow as you factor in the time it takes to find and train a replacement, and the time it takes them to build relationships equivalent to those lost when your former employee left.

So what’s a busy nonprofit to do?

Start small. Next time you’re looking to fill an empty position, take a close look at your recruitment strategy. Are you doing everything you can to attract recruits that will be a good fit in your organization not only when they start, but a few years down the line? The more engaged an employee is with your organization, the longer they are likely to stay (and grow) with your organization. But if you aren’t doing the small things up front, like being honest and open about your organization’s culture, chances are your organization will be waging an uphill battle to keep them onboard.

Give them a ring. Not a literal ring. But imagine employee engagement as a dating relationship; to keep your employees onboard and on track, it’s important that you both are continuously assessing the relationship, strengthening your commitment, and ensuring satisfaction. If you think employee engagement might be missing a beat, find new ways to make work more enjoyable, both emotionally and professionally for your employees. And then thank them for their hard work.

People aren’t computers, and they aren’t easily replaceable, but we all fall behind sometimes. So, how does your organization foster employee engagement?

*2013 Nonprofit HR Employment Trends Survey, Nonprofit HR, (2013), retrieved from http://bit.ly/1apm9Ph.

Do your employees wake up every Monday morning dreading the day? Or do they come to work full of energy and ideas that they’re ready to implement? If it’s the latter, your employees may well love what they do, which gives your organization a leg up over unhappy competitors. Read on for a list of 7 things that show your employees love their jobs.

1. Employees actively help one another out. When your employees regularly work together it suggests a couple of things that create a successful workplace. One, it suggests that they feel collaborative efforts are worth their time and energy, and two it suggests that they feel confident in the skills and opinions of their peers.
2. Employees regularly suggest—and implement—new ways to help your organization and your mission succeed. When your employees come in first thing Monday morning with fresh ideas they’re ready to put into action it shows that they’re not only thinking about work outside of their M-F workday, it shows that they’re committed to improving the foundation that your organization has already laid.
3. Employees like one another. Have you ever heard of the airplane test? Basically it says that when meeting—or interviewing—someone new you should ask yourself how you would feel being stuck on an airplane with them. If you’re happy to be sitting next to your companion the flight will go well. If you aren’t, it probably won’t.
4. Employees feel confident in approaching upper management with concerns and new ideas. Having a strong connection with upper management suggests that your employees not only feel valued within your organization, but also that they know that your organization will take their ideas into consideration when planning next steps—a big plus!
5. Employees happily share credit with one another. Former President Harry Truman famously said that “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”
6. Employees regularly exceed expectations. If your employees are going to work because they have to, your organization may be stifled by their lack of enthusiasm and contribution, but if your employees are coming to work because they love what they do, chances are they will regularly exceed expectations because enthusiasm and hard work are a very reactionary combination.
7. Employees know what they do matters and that it makes a difference within the organization. For most employees a secure knowledge of who they are within the organization, how their work matters, and how it makes a difference to those outside of the organization equals happier work life self-esteem.

How do you measure employee happiness? Would you add anything to our list? Tell us about it on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn!

Even before you finish posting your most recent job opening, resumes start pouring in. Eager candidates are ready to do whatever it is your organization needs done.

Unfortunately eagerness alone doesn’t fit the bill—candidates need the right combination of skills and experience too.

Keeping a few things in mind when screening that burgeoning stack can keep it from becoming a people-eating monolithic pile of epic proportions. These four tips will help.

1. Know exactly what criteria you’re reading through resumes for. Even if you have more than one opening at your agency, it’s important that you become familiar with the position description and what your hiring managers are looking for in each position.
2. Create a consistent evaluation process, and always stick to it. Whether you decide to create an Excel spreadsheet that lists every resume alphabetically, or organize resumes into folders of “yes,” “no,” and “maybe,” based on how they meet criteria, it’s important that you follow the same process every time. And although it may sound trivial, keeping your resume screening process consistent can help you breeze through the process, gracefully decline those who applied and aren’t qualified, and get to the next step.
3. Do a quick sort. Your first run through a resume pile shouldn’t have you hiring private investigators or even Googling a candidate’s name. As you read through resumes the first time, keep in mind what’s most important to the hiring manager and in the posted job description. If a candidate makes it past this stage then conduct a more in-depth review of their resume, check out their online presence, and schedule a phone screening.
4. Don’t forget that somewhere in one of these piles is your next great employee. As time-consuming as resume screening can be, somewhere in one of those piles is your organization’s next hire. All of your hard work will pay off when they bring in new donors, strengthen community relations, or streamline your most antiquated process.

How do you make sure that reading resumes doesn’t put a damper on your day? Tell us on Facebook!

Hiring the perfect candidate sometimes seems like it has 1,001 steps. Between sorting through all of the resumes, doing phone interviews, conducting in-person interviews, and letting those passed over down in a way that makes them more likely to apply again later, it’s easy to forget that hidden in there is one of the most important steps to making sure you do get the right person for the job.

In this day and age, the reference check has become much more than a mere formality. Shedding light on what a candidate is really like, calling references and verifying former positions and educational history helps enlighten the hiring team as to what the best, and sometimes worst, parts of working with a particular candidate are.

Underestimating the amount of information you can glean from conducting reference checks is done all too often though. Because it takes significant time and energy to call every reference, it might be easier for some agencies to look at having a third party professional recruiter talk to the references.

If this isn’t a strong option, the key to conducting the most successful reference checks lies in asking, and listening, to carefully developed questions that speak to what you most want, and need, to learn about a candidate. Making the process feel like a conversation- one where you’re up front and open about what the opportunity is and what information you’re looking to learn about the candidate- can lead to valuable revelations that help cement your decision and show you where you can best support and develop a new hire.

When developing your reference check questions, you should look for both hard data, such as questions about the candidates skill set, and qualitative data which will help you better understand the candidate’s communication and management style as well as their strengths and areas for improvement.

Some sample questions might include:

1. Please tell me a little bit about yourself and your relationship with XX.
2. What are the personal qualities that most stand out to you about XX?
3. How has XX impacted your organization/department/campaigns?
4. Can you tell me about XX’s leadership skills?
5. How does XX deal with conflict? Does XX tend to be successful in dealing with conflict?
6. If you did an appraisal of XX, where would you highlight areas for professional development?
7. Have any particular experiences with XX stood out to you?

Speaking with a broad list of references- personal, professional, and developmental- will help you put together the best possible picture of what a candidate would look like in your organization. Since few candidates will put down anyone that would give a less-than-stellar review of them and their abilities, drill down deep into how the reference talks about the candidate and their level of enthusiasm about your candidate for the most telling information.

Thankfully, after all of the reference checks are done, if the candidate still matches your expectations, you can finally make your offer.

Read more about checking candidates’ references.

Do they all have updated interview training?

As we learned yesterday, interviews are one of the most effective ways to determine if a potential candidate will fit well within your organization.

In fact, according to research published by DDI International, new hires who reported their hiring manager and staff interviews to be effective were 85% confident in their decision to accept the job, 42% more likely to be planning on staying with the organization, and 39% more likely to be highly engaged!

Luckily, interviewing is a trainable skill.

By providing proper education and coaching at your agency, hiring managers are able to better, more accurately present the job, your company, and how an applicant would interact with their team. And an accurate representation of the position and your organization can lower first year attrition rates, improve employee morale, and boost outlook.

To review your interview training requirements, consider the following:

• Does your organization provide a question template before the interview to help the interviewer get answers to specific, relevant questions?
• Does your organization provide a template for after the interview that helps interviewers assess the candidate with as little bias as possible?
• Do your hiring managers and interviewing staff know which questions could be deemed illegal by federal nondiscrimination standards?
• How often are interviewing staff at your organization required to refresh their interview skills?
• Do hiring managers within each department have a consistent means of scoring and evaluating applicants?
• Are hiring managers at your organization skilled at coaxing useful answers from applicants, or do they often accept vague, generic answers?
• Does the hiring process at your organization turn applicants off? Is it too long, complicated or demanding?
• How well do interviewers at your organization listen to responses?

For organizations that need to update their interview training, a quick internet search can reveal hundreds of specialized services catering to many different job requirements, complimentary tricks and tips, and many other resources.

Tell us: How often does your organization evaluate your interview and hiring procedures?

Federally mandated changes to the state-run unemployment system will be rolling into effect over the next 6 months as the October 2013 deadline looms, forcing employers to comply with stricter administration standards or face high penalties. UST helps member nonprofits comply to avoid costly errors.

– Interview Available-

Santa Barbara, CA (April 18, 2013) – In an effort to reduce potential penalties for its nonprofit employer members, the Unemployment Services Trust (UST) has launched several new efforts and technological tools to help address what is being called the federal “UI Integrity mandate.”

Passed as a part of the Trade Adjustment Assistance Extension Act of 2011, the Unemployment Insurance (UI) Integrity mandate requires all employers to provide a complete and timely response to the state’s first request for information about an unemployment claim. Designed to address one of the biggest weaknesses of Unemployment Insurance (UI) funds nationwide—the persistence of unemployment benefits paid in error, which are have cost $10.3 billion in the last year—the UI Integrity Act requires full compliance from all states no later than October 21, 2013. As of today, 5 states (NE, OK, MS, IL, and WV) have enacted legislation with 6 additional states (CA, UT, NM, SD, MN, and NC) passing legislation to be enacted in the coming months. 12 states (WA, OR, ID, MT, WY, CO, AZ, ND, IA, LA, KY, and VA) have pending legislation. The remaining states have yet to take any action to meet the federal deadline.

To ensure that the reform yields the necessary savings, there will be penalties on employers for non-compliance. Any employer that fails to provide a complete and timely response to a claim loses any hope of relief from charges attributable to that claim—even if the employer ultimately wins the claim.

Further, if the state identifies a pattern of failure to provide complete and timely responses, negligent organizations and their claims administrator are at risk of permanently losing valuable protest rights and/or facing monetary penalties.

To address these new liabilities, the Unemployment Services Trust (UST), which helps more than 2,000 nonprofit employers nationwide to reduce the cost of unemployment claims, is conducting regional seminars and state-specific webinars for its members. Through its partnership with Equifax Workforce Solutions (WS), UST’s educational opportunities will allow its nonprofit members to examine how changes to the national UI integrity laws will affect them and to gather helpful tips to improve overall win ratios when protesting improper claims. On average, this type of diligence reduces an employer’s claims costs by 15% each year.

In addition to the seminars and webinars, UST’s nonprofit members now have access to a unique unemployment claim dashboard called CaseBuilder, which was launched by WS earlier this year. “This online dashboard will allow organizations to gather and submit documents and details in a fast, secure environment for all stages of the unemployment process,” reports Workforce Solutions. Current members who utilize CaseBuilder have significantly increased their ability to comply with state requests in a timely manner—which will be extremely pertinent as states begin to integrate UI Integrity legislation into their practices.

Finally, members of UST are already reaping the benefits of “SIDES,” the State Information Data Exchange System that 24 states have implemented, with more scheduled throughout 2013. SIDES is a secure, paperless system which allows UST members and their claims administrator WS to better provide necessary details and documentation at the time of an initial claim filing. Here is how it is helping UST member organizations:

• It’s electronic, so it’s more secure than paper documents.
• Electronic delivery of claims from the state will increase the amount of time employers have to respond to requests for separation information.
• SIDES was specifically designed to require details as a part of the response. Providing the details up front will save time by reducing additional requests for information.

“All employers will be on the hook to respond to every unemployment claim, every time,” says Donna Groh, Executive Director of UST. “We’re trying to establish best practices that ensure our member nonprofits are ahead of the curve—so they can avoid penalties down the road.”

About UST: Founded by nonprofits, for nonprofits, UST is the largest unemployment trust in the nation, providing 501(c)(3) organizations with a safe, cost-effective alternative to paying state unemployment taxes. Equifax Workforce Solutions (WS) is UST’s partner to provide members with claim administration, audits of state charges, and hearing representation if a member’s claims protest goes to court. They also provide educational seminars and training materials to UST member agencies throughout the year. Visit www.ChooseUST.org to learn more.