Help Wanted

Many recruiting ads for key nonprofit jobs turn off more candidates than they attract, experts say

The Koch Family Children’s Museum of Evansville thought it was offering a dream fund-raising job, so when no qualified candidates answered its want ads for four months, officials were puzzled.

After all, the Indiana museum was scheduled to reopen in a beautifully restored Art Deco building in a revitalized downtown area after its recent capital campaign raised $6.3-million, $2.3-million more than its goal.

But the museum failed to promote those virtues in its print and online ads. Instead, its want ad listed more than two dozen “essential functions” of the position, a detailed list of qualifications, and even physical requirements that applicants be able to use power tools and feel “comfortable on ladders.”

“You look at [the ad] and think, If they list that many essential functions you have to do, what’s not on the list? Cleaning the gutters?” says Teri Champion, director of the SSM Rehab Foundation, which supports a rehabilitation hospital in St. Louis.

Ms. Champion read the ad in an online discussion about a challenge for a growing number of nonprofit groups: how best to attract talented workers at a time when more jobs are available than qualified applicants. Job ads are the front line in that struggle, but in many cases charity ads don’t do enough to draw in job seekers, experts say. In some cases, they may even be a turn off.

The museum’s executive director, December Warren, says the ad was written by a local business executive who may have thought he had to include the job’s physical requirements to comply with laws protecting disabled applicants from discrimination — a misunderstanding of the law, experts say.

After the museum replaced its ad this summer with a more concise, breezier version that emphasized appealing qualities of both the museum and the city of Evansville, it quickly got responses from 25 highly qualified applicants, Ms. Warren says.

Instead of crowding in job functions, physical requirements, and perfunctory qualifications, the new ad was much more lively, including this prerequisite: “Must like kids, working independently, kids, multitasking, kids, brainstorming oh, and did we mention kids?”

A new development director starts this month.

“The culture of our museum is not a 32-point list of job functions and details,” Ms. Warren says. “We are a warm, inviting place, and we came to realize we needed an ad to reflect that.”

Creating want ads that attract the best candidates is a challenge for many charities, say human-resources officials and consultants who specialize in recruiting candidates for key nonprofit positions.

Recruitment ads must be written with the same approach a charity might take in producing a 30-second marketing spot, using words and phrases that excite and draw in job seekers, they say. At the same time, the ads have to lay out enough details — about qualifications, job duties, and contact information — to both satisfy candidates and keep those who aren’t qualified for the job from applying.

Putting together effective ads is especially critical now, as baby boomers enter their retirement years and many skilled charity executives are leaving their positions, creating a wave of vacancies. Meanwhile, the number of nonprofit groups is growing fast, and the competition for top staff members, particularly skilled fund raisers and executive directors, has increased.

“We’re all struggling, competing for these qualified people,” says LaJuan Lyles, a senior vice president who oversees human resources at the United Negro College Fund, in Fairfax, Va. “We are all asking ourselves, What will get their attention?”

Ms. Lyles says she uses her charity’s reputation to appeal to job seekers.

On most job ads, she says, the organization’s name appears in large type at the top with its signature slogan, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

“The idea is that people want to come here because of what we do, and we want people who are passionate about that,” Ms. Lyles says.

Too Much Passion?

Other charity officials say they are seeking people who care about the organization’s mission, too: so much so that the word “passion” shows up in many job ads for nonprofit positions.

But recruiting experts disagree on how much want ads should promote excitement about the mission of an organization versus the job itself.

An ad should primarily be designed to attract people with the skills and experience to do a job, not people who just happen to care deeply about a particular cause, says Renata J. Rafferty, a consultant in Indian Wells, Calif.

“You have to believe in the work of the organization, yes,” she says, “but if you can’t do the job and work well with people around you, it’s not going to work out.”

Hildy Gottlieb, co-founder of Help 4 NonProfits & Tribes, a Tucson consulting company, however, says that a charity’s biggest selling point is its mission — the attempt, whatever it is, to make the world a better place.

“Especially at the executive level, people aren’t looking to change jobs, but they see something in a job ad that they can’t resist: Do you want kids to be safer and healthier? Work for us,” says Ms. Gottlieb.

At the same time, she says, employers should be specific about the kind of person they want. Instead of asking for five years’ fund-raising experience, for example, they should ask for experience building from scratch a database to collect information on donors, or whatever skills are important.

“A person could have two years’ experience doing something absolutely phenomenal, but you’ve disqualified them because they don’t have five years’ experience,” Ms. Gottlieb says. “You can have five years’ experience as a really lousy development director.”

Ms. Gottlieb urges charities to think about the story of Mary Poppins when they write job ads. In the popular children’s movie, the parents cannot find a nanny to meet their standards. So the children write their own want ad.

“They didn’t say they wanted five years’ experience — they said they wanted someone kind and sweet who would play games with them,” Ms. Gottlieb explains. “And they got Mary Poppins.”

Unrealistic Expectations

Employers shouldn’t be overzealous, though, experts caution. Post a wish list that goes too far, and it could discourage qualified candidates.

“You see these ads that ask for the ability to walk on water and a master’s degree,” says Stacy Swadish, director of development at Alverno College, in Milwaukee.

Leonard J. Doran of DeWitt & Associates, a consulting company in Staun- ton, Va., says that such ads are a symptom of unrealistic expectations, particularly among board members.

“They want someone who can turn an ocean liner around in a bathtub, and that desire is reflected in the ads,” Mr. Doran says. Many people who are considering moving into nonprofit work are instead starting to search for jobs at brokerages, Internet firms, and other places, he says, “because they are turned off by the expectations that job candidates have to be perfect.”

Want ads not only should reflect reasonable expectations about what any one person can do, but also be truthful, says Kevin D. Feldman, a consultant in Castle Rock, Colo., who has been looking for a full-time development director’s job for about four months.

He says he has found a disturbing tendency among employers to overstate the importance of a position, exaggerating, for example, its leadership duties.

“Because there’s a shortage of qualified professionals, organizations, to attract qualified people, are becoming a bit more devious in their job postings,” says Mr. Feldman, who has worked in the nonprofit sector for 18 years. “The hope is that good candidates will still be interested in the position, even if it is different from how it was described.”

Mr. Feldman answered an ad this summer for a development director with a proven record in planning a fund-raising program.

He assumed the ad meant that planning would be a key component of the job. But he found out during the interview that the head of the organization, along with outside consultants, would be doing the planning for the development office, not the new fund raiser.

Pulling People In

No one says want ads should be misleading, but recruiters do say that job announcements, like car ads, need to pull people into the showroom. And the Internet, they say, gives charities new cost-effective ways to bring people in and show off their wares.

Laura Pruteanu, president of NonprofitOyster.com, an online job site, estimates that in the last five years, the average length of an online ad has doubled to four or five paragraphs.

“The mindset has changed from the print mentality, which was about being concise, to an Internet mentality,” she says. “But you still have to be careful not to go on too long. The bottom line is still the same: You have to get people to read it, and then go to the next step.”

The thinking that goes on about a job opening before it is ever advertised is just as important as where and how the ad is placed. Recruiters say that want ads should be written only after charity officials take time to reflect on where the organization is going and what kind of person would be the best fit for it.

Often groups move too hastily to fill positions, they say, and new employees end up looking exactly like the ones they replaced. But that doesn’t necessarily meet the organization’s needs.

Recruiting experts urge nonprofit executives to make sure their ads do not reflect badly on the organization. Anyone who has read a lot of want ads, they say, has seen plenty of grammatical or spelling errors, or glaring mistakes such as leaving off contact information.

Ms. Rafferty, the California consultant, helped the Evansville children’s museum draft the ad that won 25 applications. But she says the museum was lucky that its ineffective first ad didn’t sabotage the search. Sometimes if a position is open for a long time, she explains, it raises red flags for job seekers.

“It may be that the ad is written so poorly that nobody is moved to answer it, or it may be that the job is not so great,” she says. “People aren’t sure. It is best to get it right the first time. When you try to change it, it may look like you’re putting lipstick on a pig.”