Recruiting in Dangerous Times

As global hot spots boil, relief groups look for skilled hands and cool heads

Help wanted:

New opportunity working in international hot spot. Competitive pay and benefits. Dismal living conditions, poor medical care and danger likely.

The advertisements that relief and development organizations craft to recruit workers to some of the world’s most volatile and dangerous regions surely aren’t as blunt as that. Yet the reality is that finding talented workers to go to certain parts of the globe — especially these days, as wars and civil unrest have turned up the heat in some regions — carries a host of considerations beyond salary and benefits.

Just ask Stephen Steinbeiser, a Pennsylvania native who works for the Baltimore charity Catholic Relief Services in Jerusalem’s West Bank.

“I get this question a lot,” says Mr. Steinbeiser. “Why would anyone want to go to a developing country and live under conditions of instability, material deprivation, and anxiety when they can find competitive salaries in the U.S. where the life is comparably easier and less stressful?”

The short answer: Mr. Steinbeiser wants to “live differently in the world” and help improve the lives of others. Recruiters for international relief charities who work in some of the world’s most unstable regions say Mr. Steinbeiser is far from alone.

Charities that place workers in international hot spots, such as Afghanistan, the Darfur region of Sudan, Gaza, Iraq, and Somalia, say there is typically no shortage of well-intentioned people interested in humanitarian work. The key challenge lies in finding workers with the skills and experience to succeed in dangerous and challenging environments that can sometimes get too “hot” even for seasoned relief professionals.

Oxfam, for instance, pulled out of Iraq in 2004 due to security concerns. The organization, with U.S. headquarters in Boston, continues to monitor the situation and may consider a return to a more stable region of the country some time soon.

To help ensure a steady stream of talent through the pipeline, relief charities are stepping up efforts to offer internship programs as well as making pay and benefit packages more attractive. They are also capitalizing on emerging trends, such as the rising number of qualified applicants who are native to the country where the charity operates, and the growing number of job candidates from the business world who are seeking work that carries more meaning than a typical 9-to-5 job.

Relief organizations aren’t reporting labor shortages, but they do say that placing workers these days presents significant challenges.

The very real dangers of working in troubled areas of the globe hit home for Mercy Corps last June when an aid worker from the Philippines was shot in the head in the restive northeast area of Sri Lanka. The worker, who survived the shooting, had been on a trip to monitor post-tsunami projects. The shooting came a few weeks after the murder of two local Sri Lanka Red Cross volunteers.

Avoiding ‘Crash and Burn’

While those incidents represent the extreme, they heighten the reluctance among relief groups to send inexperienced workers into war zones or volatile situations.

“We are very proactive in our approach of trying to recruit by tapping networks within the relief community,’’ says Mignon Mazique, who oversees recruiting at Mercy Corps, working from the charity’s headquarters in Portland, Ore. “These are difficult posts to fill, because you need a considerable skill set. When we recruit for a volatile region, we require that they have some type of experience living and working in that type of environment.”

Richard Evans, international recruitment and staff-development adviser for Mercy Corps, says Afghanistan represents a prime example of a location that faces recruiting challenges.

“Afghanistan is a dangerous environment,” Mr. Evans says. “It is challenging in terms of medical quality, food, and complexity, with many different tribes, cultures, and religions. Some people simply can’t cope and they crash and burn — and it’s costly to send someone out in the field to crash and burn.”

In an effort to prevent that scenario, Mercy Corps looks for recruits who possess personality traits that would serve them well under pressure — traits such as flexibility, resilience, curiosity, and maturity, Mr. Evans says.

The group also encourages recruiters to work closely with hiring managers and people who oversee relief projects in specific countries, to gain better awareness of what challenges and nuances exist in a particular region.

“I was recently in Afghanistan and I have a far better understanding of what the jobs there entail,” says Mr. Evans. “Experiencing firsthand the challenges of even just getting there and seeing how a person is going to actually live is absolutely huge. I can talk to a candidate and give them a far better understanding of what’s involved. I can also better gauge if there is real interest from the candidate in moving into a position.”

Local Workers

John Ambler, senior vice president at Oxfam, who has years of experience working in areas such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Vietnam, says recruiting efforts have received a considerable lift from the growing number of natives of the countries in which relief groups operate who are qualified to fill many roles.

“The talent out there is really quite amazing,” Mr. Ambler says. It’s only in the last decade, he says, that large numbers of nationals have developed the skills and education to fill posts that previously were reserved for workers from Britain, the United States, and other developed countries.

Not only does the increasing use of local workers alleviate pressure on the expatriate talent pool, but it also helps cut recruiting costs for international charities, Mr. Ambler says. And many of the people who grew up in global hot spots possess skills that can’t be taught during a training session.

“Many of them have pretty finely tuned antennae for danger and they often immediately reduce risk through their linguistic skills,” Mr. Ambler says. “Most of the time they are speaking the local dialect and getting information that expatriates simply can’t get — like exactly which factions are fighting one another.”

Hiring local workers also creates more continuity after a disaster-relief effort, he says.

“Local staff are going to be there long after the emergency is past,” Mr. Ambler says. “There is a long period of healing and rehabilitation, and nationals are going to be there for the long haul.”

Building ‘Bench Strength’

To fill many of its leadership and emergency-response positions around the world, Catholic Relief Services focuses on grooming talent from within, says Glenn Ausmus, team leader for recruitment.

“It’s always challenging to find leaders experienced in emergency response,” says Mr. Ausmus. “Most of the people who have the skills and experience aren’t sitting around. They have jobs already.”

In recruiting, he says, even when looking to fill emergency-aid posts, the group looks for workers who see themselves pursuing careers in relief work: “We want people looking to make a commitment to a long-term role with our organization.”

Catholic Relief Services relies heavily on two key approaches — a fellowship program and referrals — to develop what Mr. Ausmus calls “bench strength.”

The charity’s International Fellows program is designed to give people interested in careers in international relief and development an opportunity to increase their overseas experience while gaining exposure to how Catholic Relief Services operates. Participants, like Mr. Steinbeiser, who is working in Jerusalem’s West Bank, get hands-on experience for one year in projects involving agriculture, education, health, HIV/AIDS, and peace efforts.

Each year, 20 candidates are selected and placed in the program. Mr. Ausmus says competition is tough for the fellowships, and those who get selected typically express their desire for a long-term career at the organization.

“We tell them when they start out the first year that our goal is to hire [them],” Mr. Ausmus says, and that is typically what happens: Nearly 90 percent of fellows end up as full-time employees of the charity.

The organization also depends on referrals from employees and others who are involved in international relief work. A Catholic Relief Services worker is awarded a $500 bonus when a person he or she recommended is hired.

“The referral system is great because it’s really such a small community around the world,” Mr. Ausmus says. “You can verify someone’s skills and ability and experience. When you hire someone it’s always something of a crapshoot. It’s great when someone you trust can say, ‘I know what he or she can do.’”

Both avenues led Mr. Steinbeiser to Catholic Relief Services: A family friend who knew his interests and career goals referred him, and he then applied for the fellowship and received an assignment to the West Bank.

Yet, Mr. Steinbeiser says, to continue attracting people such as himself, international relief charities need to step up efforts to offer competitive salaries — and also publicize the many unexpected benefits the jobs offer.

“A lot of NGOs need to market the lifestyle more attractively and more widely, emphasizing the opportunities for personal growth and making the difference in the lives of others,” Mr. Steinbeiser says. “There is already a lot of interest in these positions for these reasons, but the persistence of hot spots means the talent pool needs to be continually renewed and enlarged.”

Reaching Out

One way to enlarge that talent pool is to attract people from the business world, recruiters say. Yet that’s often easier said than done. Recruiters say that while many of those candidates have the desire and skills to contribute, they lack experience working in troubled overseas regions and don’t fully understand the risks and hardships involved.

To overcome that challenge, Mercy Corps is working with the Intel Corporation, in Hillsboro, Ore., to develop “tours of opportunity” for employees interested in international relief or development. Still in the discussion stage, the idea would be for Intel employees to go on three-month to one-year stints with Mercy Corps.

“Our hope would be that out of 40 participants, maybe 10 percent would ultimately join Mercy Corps,” says Ms. Mazique. “Most corporations these days have an evolved sense of responsibility. Some of their employees are searching for more meaning in their lives, so this offers a win-win opportunity.”

Whether it’s tapping people who already work for charities or recruiting from the business world, Catholic Relief Services’ Mr. Ausmus says the key challenge in the future will be for organizations to offer competitive salaries and benefits as well as the opportunity for personal and professional growth.

“There are a lot of people in the development and relief world who are getting their master’s degrees, so I think the pool of talent is actually growing,” Mr. Ausmus says. “It really comes down to which organizations do the best job of attracting that talent. We realize people need to make a good living, so we try to offer a great complete package with attractive benefits and incentives.”

And, he adds, relief workers’ standard of living is often better than new recruits expect: “We try to let people know they probably won’t be living in some little hut.”