Most Charities Fail to Fill the Gap as Businesses Decrease Their On-Campus Recruiting Efforts

JOB MARKET

By David Whelan

As the special-projects manager at the YMCA of the USA, Shawn Dunn this year found herself assigned to review the group’s recruiting system. The Chicago organization is the umbrella group for more than 2,500 organizations, and by her count, about 1,000 jobs — many of them entry level — open up at YMCA affiliates every year. These positions, she says, have been hard to fill with qualified workers. Imagine her surprise, then, when she discovered that the YMCA was neglecting one of the most obvious sources of fresh talent: colleges and universities. Nobody at the organization had been setting up tables at career fairs, or otherwise making graduating seniors aware of job opportunities at the YMCA.

With recruiting season under way on most campuses, charities are mostly doing what they’ve always done: not much. Campus career counselors say that although they try to persuade nonprofit employers to take advantage of job fairs and other recruiting opportunities, few accept the invitation. Corporate recruiters conspicuously outnumber nonprofit ones on campus. This year, at a time when businesses have scaled back recruiting in response to the slowed economy, nonprofit groups are not actively filling the void by scooping up talent, according to college job-placement counselors.

Many charities, especially small organizations, say they don’t recruit at colleges because they have determined that the expense and hassle of recruiting on-campus isn’t the most effective way for them to find workers. Despite the overall trend, some charities stand out by using innovative approaches to on-campus recruiting.

Personalized Pitches

Ms. Dunn says she worked hard all summer to develop the YMCA’s new campus-recruiting strategy. She plans to visit 14 large institutions this year, such as the University of Wisconsin at Madison. At career fairs, she will collect résumés and ask applicants a few quick questions about where their interests lie. Back at the office, she will enter all of the information into a database and cross-reference the applicants with job listings nationwide. “If someone tells us that after college they want to move to San Diego, or New York, we can see if there’s a job opening up there,” she says.

By making the process more professional, Ms. Dunn hopes to make the YMCA a viable alternative to a business career. “We need to make students realize that we run like a business, that we have budgets,” she says. The economy, she says, does not make her job any easier because the most talented people will still be sought by employers of all sorts, even in lean times.

Elissa Clapp, vice president of recruitment and selection at Teach for America, shares this sentiment and does not expect her group to stand out only because of aggressive self-promotion. Teach for America, perhaps the most ubiquitous nonprofit recruiter on campuses, hires graduating college seniors to teach in school districts that serve large numbers of needy youngsters. Ms. Clapp says the organization aims to compete with all the best graduate schools, fellowship programs, and businesses for the best and brightest young recruits.

Teach for America, in New York, hires about 2,000 students a year. To do so, while maintaining a high-quality applicant pool, the group uses an energetic grass-roots approach. It tries to identify potential candidates before senior year by deputizing graduate students who served as teachers in the program to give presentations to student groups and lobby candidates individually. Though the organization still sets up tables at job fairs and puts up fliers at campus career offices, Ms. Clapp says that it tries to make its recruiting as personal as possible. A network of recruiters pays special attention to the 35 campuses that have traditionally supplied about a third of the teachers. But the group has also made inroads on another 350 campuses. “We seek out every little pocket of students,” Ms. Clapp says.

Not surprisingly, this refined approach also requires more resources. The group spends approximately $1,000 to recruit each teacher it hires and about another $7,000 to train each one, Ms. Clapp says. At the end of the process, she says, only 17 percent of those who apply get hired. In effect, most of the legwork is done to make the applicant pool diverse and the application process competitive, she says.

Deterrents to Recruiting

Teach for America’s comprehensive approach to campus recruiting represents an exception to the rule, says Carl Martellino, who runs the career-development office at Pomona College, in Claremont, Calif. He says he would like to convince more nonprofit groups to make job presentations on campus. The charities that directly recruit Pomona students, he says, are usually local social-service organizations, while charities from outside Southern California often cite the expense of traveling to the campus as a deterrent.

Most Pomona students who are interested in charity work, he says, look for jobs on the Internet or in newsletters received by the career office — they cannot afford to sit around and wait to be recruited. Mr. Martellino also encourages them to seek out volunteer opportunities so that they will be well positioned when an opening arises. In fact, Pomona goes so far as to subsidize students’ “volunteer” activities by paying them $450 a semester to dedicate six hours a week to nonprofit work.

Even with all of the encouragement from the school, few nonprofit groups make appearances on campus. And none, besides perhaps Teach for America, adopt the aggressive approach of investment banks and management-consulting companies, which advertise jobs in the student newspaper and conduct on-campus presentations and interviews. Mr. Martellino acknowledges that charities have neither the resources to compete nor the staffing needs that would make such an effort necessary. But he worries that students may not understand why fewer charities come to campus, and may get the wrong impression. “Many students don’t realize that almost any position that can be held in a for-profit also exists in a nonprofit,” he says. “Students equate ‘nonprofit’ with ‘low pay, ‘ and that is not always the case, given the skills that can be attained and the speed of advancement.”

The experience of one recent Pomona College graduate bears that out. Tiombe Jones Osisanya graduated in June with a degree in sociology. She did not realize until late in her college education, she says, that she could make a career out of activism. The epiphany came after she heard a presentation by a group called the California Black Women’s Health Project, located in nearby Inglewood, Calif.

Though she wasn’t successful in landing a position with the group, she did get a clearer sense of the kinds of opportunities available to her. She expanded her job search to a wider swath of charities using a nonprofit-jobs newsletter produced by the Management Center, in San Francisco, which provides management training to California charities. Now she works as director of development at Proyecto Pastoral at Dolores Mission, in Los Angeles, which provides training, education, and social services, including shelter for homeless people and child care.

From her new vantage point as chief fund raiser for a group with a $2-million budget, Ms. Jones Osisanya says she understands one reason that charities do not make it onto campus: “Sometimes we do not even have the money to take out newspaper ads for jobs.”

Challenges for Small Charities

Small groups that do venture onto campuses adapt their recruiting efforts according to their own needs and limitations. For example, Food for Lane County, a food bank in Eugene, Ore., often recruits staff members directly from nearby University of Oregon. Jessica Chanay, the group’s assistant executive director, is an alumna of the university, and when she has a job to fill, she contacts the institution’s career-services office and her former professors in the policy and public-planning department. She hired Food for Lane County’s accountant after meeting her last year at an on-campus job fair.

Ms. Chanay says that because charities cannot predict when a position will open up, interested students must deal with a certain amount of confusion about whether there will be an opening, and when the job might start. Her group’s close relationship with a particular university, she says, means that she can focus on one set of applicants, informing those students as soon as a job opens.

Money does not need to be a deterrent, says Ms. Chanay, because resourceful recruiters can find ways around paying the fees that colleges charge. For example, she says, Oregon’s career center charges $50 for tables at its job fair — a lot of money for her cash-poor group. “We get donations from people for $25, and that’s not how we want to spend their money,” she says. This year, she worked out a deal whereby the university will waive the fee if she participates in a panel discussion for students considering careers in public service.

Larry Smith, who runs the career office at the University of Oregon, says he is happy to work out such arrangements if it means that more nonprofit recruiters come to campus. The university’s students want to hear from such employers, he says, because public service is highly prized there. One statistic illustrates that sentiment, says Mr. Smith: The university ranks sixth in the nation in the number of students it sends to the Peace Corps. He emphasizes the public-service bent when he asks charities to recruit on campus. And this year, he added another pitch: For-profit recruiting is down, which brings new opportunities to scoop up talented graduates. “You can’t just sign up for that $30,000-a-year job anymore with a company,” he says.

Nonetheless, he says, it’s nearly impossible to get national charities to come to campus. The nonprofit recruiters mostly include local groups like Food for Lane County.

Leaving Campuses Behind

Some national charities, however, have tried on-campus recruiting and have deemed it either ineffective or too expensive — or both. Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a 25-person advocacy group in Washington, D.C., only needs to recruit one or two new people a year on average, according to Robert Boston, the group’s spokesman. He says that in the past, he has tried to use his network of contacts to fill entry-level positions, starting with his journalism professors at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He does so more out of loyalty to his alma mater, he says, than because it is a winning strategy. The group always ends up filling entry-level positions with people who respond to classified ads in The Washington Post.

Mr. Boston says he doesn’t consider scouting trips to colleges and universities to be typical of the hiring processes of most nonprofit groups. “I associate on-campus recruiting with corporations and government,” Mr. Boston says. “There is no shortage of bright people who want to come to Washington and work in public policy.” And, he adds, they all know how to pick up the newspaper. The ability to fill jobs simply by placing a classified ad, he says, may explain why so many charities do not make campus visits a high priority.

Max Stier, head of the Partnership for Public Service, a charity in Washington, D.C., that encourages people to consider careers in civil service and prods the government to attract talented workers, says that such a passive approach will ultimately serve charities poorly.

His organization employs approximately 25 people, including two who were hired right out of college. Mr. Stier says that to seek out the most talented college seniors, he enlists staff members to visit their alma maters. He also has started relationships with universities that have internship programs in Washington, such as Stanford, Cornell, George Washington, and Georgetown. And to make sure the group’s applicant pool is sufficiently diverse, he advertises positions through organizations like the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities.

He sees all this on-campus activity as essential for his group’s present and future. “There is no more important decision,” he says, “than who you hire.”

Does recruiting on campus pay off for charities — and if so, what are the best strategies? Tell us about your group’s experience in the Job Market online forum.