Planning The Hiring Process

After much debate, your organization has identified the area that needs help and has posted the corresponding advertisement to an online job board.  Now what?

There's a lot of work ahead of you while you wait for qualified applicants to apply.  One of the things you can do to make this work a little less painful is to lay out a hiring process.  In his book "Nonprofit Management 101," Darian Rodriguez Heyman says having such a plan is essential to evaluate candidates.  He stresses that any hiring process should allow applicants multiple opportunities to provide evidence of their past success.

Heyman recommends the following process to successfully narrow down your nonprofit's pool of applicants:

• Job application review
• Phone screen
• Initial in-person job interview
• Follow-up interview (as many as you deem necessary)
• Reference and background checks
• Negotiation and hiring

Each of these stages should involve what Heyman calls the "four tenets" of an effective hiring process:

• Clarity: Everyone involved knows exactly what you want.
• Consistency: Every candidate participates in the same process.
• Equity: Every candidate is treated equally.
• Legality: The process is nondiscriminatory.