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Focus
on recruitment:
Into the mix |
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| Is
it possible to bring in high quality candidates without exorbitant
recruitment fees? Yes, finds David Adams, though it is a process
of mixing and matching between different mediums to bring
in the best people |
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Recruitment
has always meant taking risks. Look around your workplace
and you’ll be able to see some that paid off, and some
that certainly didn’t. But in an ever more competitive
sector, charities need the best staff they can find. They
need to reduce the risks they take with each new appointment,
and the best way of doing that is to have a pool of strong
candidates to choose from.
The first step is to question existing practice. Christian
Aid reviewed its recruitment process in 2005. Previously,
most vacancies were advertised in the Guardian and Evening
Standard newspapers, but the charity is now more likely to
use specialist charity recruitment websites like the UN’s
ReliefWeb, and not simply because they are much cheaper.
“If someone is reading the paper and sees a job for
an administrator in the Africa team, then they might think
that sounded interesting and apply. But with the websites
you get access to a pool of candidates who might be better
qualified,” explains Sarah Wilson, a spokesperson at
Christian Aid. “They may also have more sympathy with
the aims of the organisation. So by using the online service
we’re narrowing our search and making savings on the
recruitment budget.”
There are now a huge number of recruitment websites, many
of which can play a useful role for charities. Charity JOB
(www.charityJOB.co.uk), has been running since 2000. It has
89,000 registered job seekers, each of whom receive weekly
updates on new jobs, with about 1,000 new jobseekers joining
the service each month. “People on our website are not
just there to look for information, but to look for a job,”
says the site’s director, Raya Wexler. “The market
is buoyant.”
The site conducts a survey of 200 clients each October, the
most recent of which suggested that 40 per cent of postings
resulted in an appointment, and 60 per cent produced candidates
suitable for interview. Whatever weight one might attach to
those findings it is hard to dismiss the cost-effectiveness
and speed of online recruitment. Listing a vacancy with CharityJOB
costs between £70 and £200, depending on the format
used – a fraction of the cost of an ad in the national
press – and new vacancies can be up on the site within
minutes.
Another option that can extend the potential pool of candidates
is to work with a recruitment agency. “Charities using
our service want to attract candidates from a wider range
of backgrounds,” says Joanne Davies, senior manager
at FSS HR Recruitment. “They want to get more creativity
into the organisation, to look at people prepared to offer
different ways of working.
“It’s always going to be difficult when you’re
competing against organisations where salaries are higher,
but we’re finding that we’re getting really positive
results with networking,” she continues. “The
refreshing thing for us is that charities can be so flexible.
In the public sector recruitment may be a bit more rigid.
Charities don’t have to be so formulaic. Each role is
different, so there may be a different route to success with
each one.”
Another agency, Charity Action Recruitment, is itself owned
by a charity, Red Kite Learning, for which it acts as a fundraising
stream. It works with charities of all types and sizes, recruiting
for roles from junior admin staff up to board level. Fees
at CAR are often lower than at other recruitment agencies,
particularly for senior positions, where charges are currently
capped at 14 per cent of salary, much lower than the 20 per
cent or more that may be charged elsewhere.
“We have an empathy with charities, because we are part
of one, and we have very high ethical standards,” says
manager Michael Laws. “We won’t be deploying some
of the sales tactics that can be used in the recruitment industry.
That’s part of our appeal, and if we’re cheaper
as well then that’s also going to be help.”
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It is often worth tailoring the recruitment method depending
on the position in question. Maurice Wren is director of Asylum
Aid, a small charity based in east London that supports refugees
and asylum seekers. He describes how Asylum Aid has used completely
different methods to fill three quite different vacancies
in recent months in legal casework, fundraising and management.
The charity knew the caseworker role could only be performed
by one of about 1,600 people in the country with the correct
accreditation, so is using formal and informal networking
within the refugee NGO sector to find candidates. “With
that very tightly defined job there’s no point going
outside the sector,” says Wren. “With the managerial
post it’s quite the opposite – I’ll grit
my teeth and use the Guardian, pay the crippling costs they
charge in the paper and on the web. We need to get as big
an audience as we possibly can, and even with the growth of
the online recruitment websites, that’s still the big
one.” Meanwhile, the charityJOB.co.uk and jobsincharities.co.uk
websites, along with the recruitment pages in the charity
trade press were used to find the fundraiser.
Asylum Aid is too small to hire recruitment agencies very
often, and has had mixed results when it has done so. “The
plus side of working with an agency is that they do a lot
of the work for you,” he says. “But as an organisation
that works for what is widely perceived as an unpopular cause,
we need our people to have a good idea about what we do. In
the past when we’ve worked with agencies we were finding
that people were appearing for interview and it was clear
they hadn’t given that a lot of thought.”
Roughly the same principles govern recruitment strategies
at Macmillan Cancer Support, a much larger organisation, with
an HR department split into three different sections, each
of which uses a mix of press, agency and website recruitment.
“Agencies often work well for us, but some of our jobs
are quite specialist positions, care roles, or legacy specialists
on the fundraising side,” explains Kate Pyle, HR coordinator
at the charity with responsibility for communications, fundraising
and marketing. “We also struggle to get agency fees
within our price range. But we have used them for positions
like events administration, when we’ve had a huge response.”
Pyle and some of her colleagues are trying to convince others
within the organisation of the benefits of using online channels
rather than print media (although the charity has been using
the national press for many job adverts recently to help raise
awareness of its recent re-branding from Macmillan Cancer
Relief). “We’ve been trying to promote the use
of websites to some of our line managers, but it’s very
difficult out in the regions, where perhaps not so many people
are used to using the internet to search for jobs,”
she says. “Some of our managers are against the web.
I’m hoping that will change.”
But perhaps the biggest challenge for any charity, large or
small, remains the size of the salaries it can pay. “When
we advertised for our fundraiser we got a very poor response
– although among that was a very strong candidate,”
says Asylum Aid’s Wren. “Had I been able to add
two or three thousand to the salary I’m sure the pool
of candidates would have been broader. Wanting to work for
the cause will only take you so far, because the cause won’t
pay your mortgage. I think where we really struggle is where
we’re not reflecting what’s on offer in the market.”
Despite greater resources, Macmillan struggles with the same
problem. “We’re luckier than some other charities
because we’re quite well-known, and some people are
willing to take a drop in salary to work for us, sometimes
because they have been directly affected by cancer,”
says Pyle. “But I think we’re also quite competitive
within the sector, so we don’t struggle too much. I
can see why smaller charities do.”
But charities could also do more to help themselves, suggests
Charity Action Recruitment’s Laws. “Many of the
CVs we get are from people with no voluntary sector experience,
and sometimes it’s hard to help them, because most charities
want people who have done that job elsewhere,” he says.
“They won’t want to look at a business development
person from a corporate. I’m telling clients to look
at transferable skills in candidates. Otherwise you have a
greater shortage of skilled people, salaries go up, and everything
becomes more difficult for everyone. Those who are more flexible
are finding some great people with some great skills who want
to move into this sector.”
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