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Since the early 2000’s, there has been a steady growth of not-for-profit organisations popping up all over the UK, with research from the UK civil society suggesting an average of 2,500 new charities are registered every year.
Both paid and voluntary charity work can be very rewarding and great for professional development, since it focuses on helping individuals and communities. People working in this ‘third’ sector often praise charities for truly caring about their staff, offering life-enhancing benefits such as flexible working, generous holiday entitlements and rewarding pension schemes.
Despite the advantages of working for a charity, when it comes to online recruiting, charities often face difficulties in recruiting the right people at the right time for the right role. Below are three of the most common recruitment challenges, with ways for charities to overcome them in order to succeed with 2020 recruitment goals.
Attracting the right candidates
Whilst you may have your 2020 recruitment goals in place, stating that you need X amount of charity workers in place by X date, it’s important not to rush when publishing your job advertisement until a thorough job analysis has been conducted. By clarifying the appropriate skills, responsibilities and duties needed to perform a job role successfully, you’ll be able to publish a truly accurate job advert to attract the right type of candidate applications.
To help job seekers decide if the job role is of good fit for them, it’s in your best interest to include as much detail as possible within the job description, adding a job title and location, and making it clear if it’s a paid charity job or none-paid voluntary job.
Remember to ‘sell’ the benefits of working for a charity and why it’s different to mainstream jobs, and state what will be expected of the job applicant, described with relevant skills required through keywords. However, be cautious not to be too demanding with skill levels required in charity job adverts, as it can backfire by putting too much doubt in a job seekers mind as to whether they are suitable enough, and dampen their initial excitement for wanting to work for a charity.
Keeping recruitment costs under control
Given the very nature of charitable organisations, they’re often funded by public donations and depend on volunteers to help run them, meaning costs will be tight when recruiting new staff. Whilst there are traditional recruitment methods, publishing your job advertisement in job centres, printing in various forms of media, or working directly with recruitment agencies/head-hunters, these are not necessarily the most cost-effective, nor time-effective, ways of hiring candidates.
Try actioning online recruiting by posting your job adverts on job boards, such as Zoek, who offer free job advertising all year round for registered UK charities. Gain instant access to thousands of active job seekers through Zoek, the fastest growing UK job site with intelligent job matching technology that strives to deliver ultimate value to hirers and a superlative experience to job seekers.
No matter what size UK charity, Zoek allow you to advertise jobs for free via their job search platform, helping charities receive relevant, quality job applicants at ease whilst keeping recruitment costs under control, enabling funding to be prioritised elsewhere.
Retaining quality workers
Once charities have successfully recruited the right talent for their job vacancies, a common misconception can occur if hiring managers believe that is the end of the recruitment process, when often it is not. Retaining newly recruited workers is just as important as attracting them in the first place, otherwise it becomes a waste of time and effort in training them, equating to lost cost and negative impacts upon team morale.
Once a suitable workforce is put in place for a charity, the actual management of it is crucial for long term success, meaning measures must be taken to keep employees happy and feeling valued in their job, in order to minimise staff turnover. Since none-profit companies often cannot afford commercial-level salaries, there are many ways to retain staff using the power of their brand values, employee benefits, and personal development opportunities.
