Episode 156: Hiring the Right People - What to Look For to Avoid the Square Peg in the Round Hole

Welcome to another edition of "Around with Randall" your weekly podcast about making your nonprofit more effective for your community. And here is your host, the CEO and founder of Hallett Philanthropy, Randall Hallett.

It's wonderful to have you here on this edition of "Around with Randall". Interestingly, as I deal with clients in multiple countries and multiple continents I'm seeing a very consistent issue, and that is hiring. And in a recent conversation I was having with one of my clients we were discussing the options as they look for the right personnel, the right fit. And I got into a little bit of a not quite diet but I would call it kind of a vested thought process on what I think we're doing wrong in hiring. And the commentary from the client was you need to talk about this because it could be helpful to others. And thus, we're going to talk about today's podcast subject is what should you be looking for in employees in whether that's gift officers, or leadership, or in the infrastructure team, or whomever that might be.

So let's start from the traditional, kind of the philosophical, what have we always looked for over the course of time. I think that it's always been assumed that the best value you can get in employees is based on the thought process of years of experience, the dollars raised, the level that they achieve, those type of gifts looking for examples and things of that nature. I would also add if you are looking for someone to manage and supervise people, what has been your experience there, and the size of the team, and the dollars that they raise is normally in a traditional sense critical. I'm not here to say those things aren't important but my question really is, are those the exact things you should be looking for? And really I don't believe that.

So a couple of circumstances. I have a friend in, a colleague who's out looking for a job. She has really a lot of those kind of traditional kind of job description or on the resume filler legitimately so option opportunities or experiences in her career, she's really struggling to get a job the way that maybe she wants to because in some ways I wonder if the round peg and the square hole issues being really understood. We'll talk about that here in a minute. I've got a knowledge of a former client who is literally going through the process of finding kind of a upper-level manager, leader, supervisor. Not the CDO, but maybe one level down, and they've gone through, I can't tell you how many candidates and finally someone reached out to me and said, look we're having problems with this. What do you think? And so walk me through, so they've been through I believe three rounds getting people through the initial and they have a hiring firm that employment firm that's helping them who they they get through the first round and the second round. They bring on someone onto campus. They have conversations and they say no this isn't the right fit. They've done that three times and the staff's getting mad. Like what are we do doing here?

The third is another friend, not even a former client, who has gone through a very similar situation as the one I just described. They have been through a number of iterations and now we're stretching into years where they're looking for this right fit. Part of the problem and challenge is that there are more openings than there are qualified people, and I think what the pandemic did in some ways was issue opportunities for some people to move towards the idea of remote work, and that's the only option they'll accept, or at least a good portion of it. And I think the second part is that some people retired. I think the third part is it illuminated the frauds in our industry that all of a sudden you're not raising any money for two or three years because we're not doing special events and you know just unknown gifts coming in where people are claiming credit aren't actually happening as much, particularly in the last half of the pandemic or the time that we kind of associate with the pandemic. And so all of these things are bringing us into these situation scenarios where we're looking for people and those traditional models of experience, and dollars raised, and level of giving, and administratively as I mentioned are the cornerstones of what we look for, and what I have come to believe and I've actually believed for quite a long time but really have more, been more boisterous about it over the last several years is that these are the wrong things to be looking for.

Those are tactical elements that, if present, can be indicative of someone that's good. But to be candid, I think a lot of candidates can hide behind things that you can't find out like dollars raised. I raised x amount of dollars every year for for 10 years. Well how would you check that? Are you actually going to call the donors that are, that were at the former employers when that prospect or that candidate doesn't want you contacting their former employer because they don't want to lose their job? They're looking for elevation. I think we need to turn more to skill sets. Yes the skill sets I'm going to discuss in a minute may be embodied in those traditional kind of aspects of what we might look for, but what I find is when I talk about this more and more I get more and more people say yeah that's what I'm looking for. I said well then go find that test for that, and so what are those things?

There are four things that I think are really important in the nonprofit world, and I would argue actually this probably applies to the for-profit world when we're looking for the right fit. We want the round hole and the round peg to come together and what I'm seeing more often is the round hole and we're trying to fit an oval peg for it in there and what ends up happening is because we're looking at the wrong things we don't realize that the peg's actually more round than we realized. We just didn't ask the right questions or the peg's actually really square and because you didn't ask the right questions someone gets in the door and it doesn't work.

So what are these things? Four. The first is fire in the belly. Philanthropy, fundraising, the work that we do is sometimes not easy. I can teach, and do teach, gift officers from a very early stage in their career how to be a fundraiser using moves management and techniques involving qualification, cultivation, how do you build relationships from the annual giving kind of the leadership, annual giving perspective, all the way up into the principal gift, planned gift, major gift, anywhere in between. I can teach all those things, walk people through scenarios. What I can't teach is a fire in the belly.

My son came home after basketball practice last week and we've kind of moved into the basketball season. I coached the team and he comes home and he's upset because another player has gotten better and is scoring more points and is doing some good things. And when I say more points we're in fourth grade here, so we're talking about four points to eight points, but it's noticeable. And I looked at him and I said first of all we don't complain about teammates, considering we're winning almost every game. We should celebrate that. The goal is to win the game as a team, not as an individual. More importantly to this point, what are you doing about it? What's your fire in the belly? And when we got down to it he says I want to be a better basketball player. I said what are you willing to do to be that better basketball player? And he finally came out, he says I'm willing to practice. And I said well having coached high school basketball many years ago before I went to law school, I can teach you every drill. I'm not going to walk you out on the court and force you to do it. I gave him the skills, gave him the drills, gave him some things to work on, stapled the, or nailed the kind of the one page sheet of what he can do every day, just kind of some drills and what the goals would be. He's been out every day, multiple days in a row, spending 45 minutes doing those drills. Fire in the belly. He wants it. How do we find it? Will you start asking things like what time do you get up in the morning? What's your morning routine? When do you get in? How do you know when you're doing well? What motivates you? How do you, how do you know that you're growing? Those are entirely different questions than well tell me how much money you've raised. What moves you? Why does it, what are the things in life that are most important and why are those things a priority? It's a different series of questions. I can teach the tactics. I can't teach a fire in the belly. I can't teach someone to be 10 minutes early to every meeting. I can't teach them to get there a little bit earlier every day and stay a little bit later. I can't teach them that. If they don't want to grow as a professional I can't teach them how to do that. First thing I think we need to look for is fire in the belly because the the other thing it'll do is it'll take us out of the realm of looking for just fundraisers. If we can teach that the the applicable work, some of the skills, the knowledge that goes into being successful then we don't just need to look in fundraising sales is an area where we could look for people at for giving database.

There's a great person who I just had an opportunity to listen to who came into the nonprofit world in terms of managing leading databases from out of the medical profession. A database is, a database, man is he good if they' have been looking for someone with just experience and, you know managing a systemwide database they never would have found the guy because he doesn't have nonprofit experience per se, but he is unbelievably talented. Fire in the belly. Find out what motivates people, then you'll find the fire in the belly, or you might find none.

Number two, resiliency. And by the way, let me add real quickly on fire in the belly if you're an administrative person or looking for an administrative position, how do they motivate people. How often do they go and see them, the people they're supervising formally, informally. How do they help them grow? That's all fire in the belly. Resiliency is number two, particularly with gift officers because if we're doing our job correctly eight, seven times out of 10 the people that we want to ask we don't ask for various reasons. And we may not ask them because they tell us up front they're not interested or we get all the way to the particular ask and they say no. Got a client we're working with in a campaign, literally twice in the last two weeks they had made an ask and it was told no and they were told well the reason why it was too big the ask was too big, and frankly, the client did all the right things including is this a reasonable amount. Well they were told it was too big. Why don't you just tell us that? Resiliency. Do you simmer on that issue or do you try to find out what happened, try to alleviate that problem and move on to the next donor or prospect? They're moving on. Unbelievable resiliency with this particular client. Sometimes we get in the mode where we feel like it's us. We're doing something wrong, and what I teach and what I talk about, and maybe what you've experienced is most of the time what goes on in a no, whatever reason, has very little to do with us. It has to do with what they're going through. So from a gift officer perspective can you let that wash off your back, the duck, let it go off the feathers, off the back, and move forward from an administrative perspective? Can you figure out how to work with a team member or lead a team or parts of the team where sometimes things don't go as well and you have to be the bigger person? So how do you find resiliency? Ask them about their struggles. What they do to overcome them, how long it takes them to overcome them? When something bad happens what do you do? Give them a scenario. If this were to happen in your personal, professional life, can't make it about family or anything that would be, you know, go past the rules HR provides for us, here's the scenario how would you deal with it? How long would it take you? And you begin to see if you ask the questions in the right way are they resilient. You have a team member who's a real problem. You're you're going to be the leader. How would you deal with this? How do you work with them? Resiliency is important because more often than not in our profession there is some type of negative, some type of not happy moment that we have to deal with. Number two, resiliency.

Number three is communication. Do they communicate well? Do they communicate well from a written perspective? Do they communicate well from an oral perspective? Have a good friend who was going for an interview onsite and they gave her two weeks to prepare a presentation to the team about what they would do if they were presenting to a group of donors, and she says well I don't normally do this, and I said I think it's brilliant because what they're trying to get to is can you communicate in front of a small group to articulate a mission, know the content. Are you able to stream some type of thread together that connects all of this. Can you bring it to a conclusion? Do you know what the next step is? Written communication, which seems to be just at least the way I grew up, haphazard at best, do they write in complete sentences. This is important from a gift officer perspective, but also from an administrative perspective. How do you communicate with your team if you're the leader? Are you actually open and honest? I like and love, most of you probably know who listened, football, the best football coach is the one that look at a player and say you're player B, you're the second stringer. They're player A. Here's why they are the starter and here are your, here's why there's a deficiency, why you're not the starter. Here's what you can do to improve, to become the starter. Maybe someday open and honest communication to test for this. have them write something, see what they, see what they write on the spot, put them in front of a group, make them present something, find out if in this leadership perspective if they're managing a team what would you do in these scenarios. Communication, number three.

Number four seems built in but I think it's really important. Number four is the idea of interest in the mission. Are they legitimately interested in what you do? You will have a longer term employee if they believe in your mission. Now it doesn't have to be to the letter. If they love kids and they're doing something that's kid-related they're more likely to be in tune with where they need to go to be successful and to help the organization as a whole. Find out what's their passion. Why are you applying for this job? What is it about our mission that moves you? By the way, you'll find the frauds really quick because they won't know what the mission was. They haven't read it. They didn't look for it.

Four things to think about. Fire in the belly. Will they get there early, will they stay late, will they get the job done? Is there a little bit of kind of impetus inside of themselves to be successful, just just generically at anything they do? Number two is resiliency. Can they let the downsides of a job like a duck, water off a duck's back, water off a Swan's back, let it go and keep moving forward. Three, can they communicate externally, writing and verbally, internally, leadership, honesty, setting direction. And four, do they believe in what you're doing in any connected way. those four things are so much different than the traditional years of experience, dollars raised, things of this nature. You can have overlap. I'm not saying they're independent but if you concentrate on the skills and the desires, I think you're going to find better employees because you can teach them instead of just trying to figure out what their resume says. Why someone does something is much more important than just getting a list of what they think they've done. And you're looking for the why in those four things: fire in the belly, resiliency, communication, and interest in the mission. Different way of of interviewing, different way of finding people that line with where you need to go to support your nonprofit mission.

Don't forget to check out the blogs at Halletphilanthropy.com just 90 second reads, couple a week. If you're interested in contacting me it's podcast@hallettphilanthropy.com. Complaint, thought, always love feedback, get it more and more interestingly enough, and I'd love your thoughts on this podcast or any other. Don't forget what we do is really important and it's chaotic right now. I think there's a lot of unknowns coming and that will be part of our December conversation about trying to predict 2024 and reviewing 2023's predictions that we did a year ago or more now. But what's key in all of this is that what we do is fill holes in our community to help people, which brings me to my favorite saying which I include every podcast and every opportunity to speak with, some people make things happen some people watch things happen, then there are those who wondered what happened. we're people who make things happen in philanthropy We're looking for others. Community leaders, philanthropy, they want to make things happen and our organization and the mission that we have is to move things forward for people who are wondering what happened. Patients in healthcare, students who are in education, Social Services, those people who are the under represented the not. Whatever you do, it's important and it makes a difference, and I hope you feel that and know that every single day. I'll look forward to seeing you next time we're right back here on another edition of "Around with Randall". Don't forget make it a great day.