For Charities With Difficult Clients, Job Interviews Can Be Tough

At the Virginia Home for Boys and Girls, officials work hard to hire the right people for what it calls its “teaching parent” positions—married couples unrelated to the children, who live in two-bedroom apartments attached to the charity’s group homes for abused, neglected, and otherwise troubled children.

The positions are so important, and so demanding, that one of the first things the Richmond organization does in evaluating potential employees is what Robert Steele, vice president for child and family services, describes as the “scare-away call.”

In the phone interview, officials outline the stark challenges of the position: living with difficult children around the clock, the potential for runaways, even the possibility of a physical attack from an agitated child.

Their goal: to frighten off those who are merely casually interested and to find the applicants who really have the passion, dedication, and skill the job requires.

“We stress to folks, if you’re looking for a 40-hour-per-week job, this is not it,” Mr. Steele says. “We put a lot of time and effort into this recruiting. The last thing we want is for people to uproot their lives, move here, and find out, ‘Oops, this is not for me.’”

His organization isn’t the only charity that takes extraordinary steps to find the right candidates. While making smart hires is important for any organization, experts say it’s doubly important for charities that deal with sensitive or challenging clientele like troubled children or the homeless.

No ‘Kumbaya’

The economic downturn and the growing number of career-switching baby boomers are deepening the pool of nontraditional job applicants, says Laura Gassner Otting, an executive recruiter focused on nonprofit searches and author of Transitioning to the Nonprofit Sector.

While that represents a potential boon for charities in search of talent, she says, it also presents the challenge of dealing with newcomers to the nonprofit world who arrive with an overly rosy vision of what working for a charity might be like. While they might pursue such a move in search of the emotional fulfillment that comes with saving needy—and grateful—clients, they might not be as prepared for the gritty reality of helping people with problems, or the administrative or strategic challenges that come with running charities. Often, for instance, nonprofits have tighter budgets and fewer resources than the for-profit companies they left behind, operating with smaller staffs than one finds in the corporate world.

Ms. Gassner Otting says she considered including a passage in the opening pages of her book to advise potential career-switchers that “if what you’re looking to do is go sit around a campfire and sing ‘Kumbaya,’ go find a campfire.”

She added that any charity that finds itself taking extraordinary measures to weed out casual job seekers needs to question whether its search is ill focused.

“It’s frankly a waste of time, because you shouldn’t be dealing with [casual applicants] anyway,” she says.

Volunteerism Preferred

Tori Lyon, head of the Jericho Project, a nonprofit in New York that provides stable housing and counseling for homeless and addicted people, says her organization is among those that have seen higher-than-normal numbers of applications from the for-profit world during the economic downturn.

As happy as she is about the bigger pool, she says her group looks to see if such applicants have experience as volunteers with social-service charities. She fears that without such experience, some might come in ill-prepared for the demands of working in the nonprofit world.

In reality, she says, she wants a lot of the same things a for-profit business wants in its employees. The Jericho Project wants people who can think and plan strategically and who can work within a disciplined budgeting process.

On top of all that, Ms. Lyon says, she needs people with the kind of clinical and interpersonal skills that would help them smoothly handle a homeless client who shows up drunk for a meeting.

The Jericho Project, Ms. Lyon says, usually does three levels of interviewing for frontline jobs such as site-director positions, people who oversee a particular facility for the charity. The first to vet the candidate is the human-resources department, followed by the person who would be the candidate’s direct supervisor, and then Ms. Lyon. Interviewers offer hypothetical scenarios—such as confronting a drunk client—then ask the job candidate how he or she would handle it. Ms. Lyon says the best candidates bring the patience and clinical skills of a social worker or therapist, coupled with the focus and tough-mindedness of a business executive.

“We try to run a really tight ship here, and part of that sometimes is convincing people from the for-profit world that what they’ve heard about the nonprofit world might not always be true,” she says.

Role Playing

A strong job-applicant screening process can prove vital when it comes to finding the best-qualified candidates, says Patty Hampton, a managing partner at Nonprofit HR Solutions, a human-resources consulting firm in Washington.

She cited Department of Labor statistics showing that the cost of replacing an employee can run as high as 33 percent of a new staff member’s annual salary. For nonprofit organizations, the overall cost can run even higher when an employee’s quick exit raises questions among donors and others about the charity’s stability or management.

“Making that right hire the first time is crucial,” Ms. Hampton says. At her consultancy, she says, “we can see first-hand how difficult and challenging it can be for smaller nonprofits, and sometimes even for midsize ones, because of the limited resources they have in identifying top-level candidates.”

At Boys Town, the nationally known charity for troubled children, officials use extensive role-playing exercises to test applicants for positions that require direct work with children. The practice is designed to give a sense of how candidates will react in stressful situations.

April Brown, a recruiter at the organization, says Boys Town wants kid-friendly and approachable people helping its children, but those workers must also be able to enforce rules and provide youngsters with much-needed structure.

She said the simulations start at the beginning of the job-screening process, when she and other recruiters do role-playing in phone interviews with applicants who seem promising. If that goes well, the candidate comes in for a face-to-face interview, and hiring managers will do more to simulate the experience of working with troubled youngsters. For example, the applicant might get a crisp (and obscene) response after directing the child to perform a task.

“We look for what [the candidate] would say and how they would say it, how quickly they can think on their feet, and how well they can incorporate some of the rewards and consequence” strategies Boys Town uses with children, Ms. Brown says. “It’s helped us target the right type of employee.”

Ms. Hampton applauds that kind of in-depth screening. She says it helps force the job applicant to demonstrate specific skills, not just offer rehearsed or vague sound bites.

Recruiters can tell whether an answer is heartfelt, she says. “If they can’t tell you why they are passionate about the work, they probably aren’t the best fit for the organization.”

At the Virginia Home for Boys and Girls, those who survive the “scare-away” call still have a long way to go before securing the job. Once they advance to the in-person interview, they must sit through a daylong interview process filled with situational questions that probe their compatibility with how the organization approaches its work.

They are also introduced to employees who already hold the teaching-parent job and are given the opportunity to observe the work in the group homes.

“It’s so worth it,” Mr. Steele says of the process. “The more we put in upfront, the more likely we are to find the right people.”

Common mistakes interviewers make

Patty Hampton, a managing partner at Nonprofit HR Solutions, says these are the most common errors employers make when speaking with job applicants. The interviewer:

• Talks more than listens.
• Doesn’t allow the candidate to answer the questions.
• Fails to gather relevant samples of the applicant’s previous work.
• Relies too much on gut reaction to the candidate’s personality.
• Fails to define the job’s requirements upfront.
• Treats candidates inconsistently.
• Isn’t “present” for the candidate during the interview.