Charities Hurt by Their Distaste for Tough Recruiting Tactics

The tight job market isn’t the only obstacle facing non-profit groups that are looking for top-notch help.

They are sometimes hindered by an unwillingness to embrace aggressive or creative recruiting methods, observers say.

Richard Potter, vice president for development at American

Humanics, a non-profit group in Kansas City, Mo., that trains college students for entry-level jobs at youth and human-service organizations, recalls a meeting last fall at which officials from Enterprise Rent-A-Car talked with human-resource executives from 14 charities that jointly support American Humanics. The subject: methods that Enterprise uses to court prospective management trainees.

Enterprise first builds long-term relationships with college students by teaching them universal résumé-writing and job-interviewing skills, Mr. Potter says the company officials explained. Only later does the car-rental company invite some of those students to be interns at the company, they said.

Mr. Potter says that most of the charity executives at the conference reacted positively to Enterprise’s ideas. But some did not. “They said, Well, we’re non-profits, and you don’t understand non-profits,’” Mr. Potter recalls.

One objection, he says, was the high initial cost and delayed payoff of Enterprise’s recruitment approach.

In addition, “there was kind of a distaste for cultivating, scouting, and schmoozing of college students to come and work” for a non-profit organization, he says. The old-school human-resource executives want altruistic, community-minded individuals banging on the door, as opposed to using corporate techniques to attract them.”

Learning to Communicate

Such resistance, Mr. Potter says, “is part of the attitude out there in the sector that hurts us. There are some progressive organizations that are willing to learn from the corporate sector. And there are young people out there who would get more jazzed about making a significant difference in their communities than about stock options. We need to figure out how to communicate our message to them.”

American Humanics is trying to do just that.

It is in the early stages of working with human-resource and marketing executives from its member charities, including Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, Junior Achievement, and United Way of America, to come up with ways to use the Internet to market the non-profit world as fertile career ground for young people.

“I don’t think 18- to 30-year-olds recognize the extent of the career opportunities that are available,” Mr. Potter says. “We hope to get collaborative proposals together to present to major foundations that would allow us to make some inroads in changing that misperception.”