Facing increasing global conflict, the climate crisis, and economic factors escalating needs in many hard-hit areas, humanitarian organizations are under enormous pressure to continue providing support where it’s needed most.

Deploying the right people to the right places – at the pace needed – is critical. But recruiting for humanitarian operations presents enormous challenges. Let’s talk about some of the issues you’re likely facing – then we’ll show you a more effective, efficient way to tackle them.

The challenges of effective humanitarian recruitment 

Recruiting for humanitarian emergencies is high-stress, high-stakes and often, extremely challenging. Recruiters’ ability to adapt to these constraints determines how fast you can get support where it matters. 

Unpredictability 

Despite improvements in forecasting tools over the past several decades, humanitarian crises remain inherently difficult to predict. As the London School of Economics writes:

“Early warning systems are now characterised by a higher degree of sophistication and reliability than ever before, thanks to consistent investments in this sector. Yet they do not function as planned in the hands of humanitarian actors in terms of risk prevention or reduction.”

The only incontrovertible truth for humanitarian organizations is that crises will happen. But exactly where, when, and what support will be needed is unclear.

That puts talent acquisition professionals in a difficult position. You know you’ll need people – likely huge numbers of people, across many different areas and specialisms. But you don’t have the luxury of foresight that many other sectors enjoy. 

So when disaster strikes, you’re under immense pressure to find and recruit as fast as possible. Lives are at stake. 

Breadth of required expertise 

The Swedish Rescue Services Agency (SRSA) points out the “large and varying range of professional skills and specialties” that humanitarian operations often require, like:

• Logistics

• Electronics

• Communications

• IT

• Air movements

• Urban planning

• Road and bridge engineering

• GIS

• Environment

• Water and sanitation

• Field office coordination

• Assessments

• Rapid environmental assessments

For recruiters into disaster or emergency zones, ensuring coverage over this breadth of roles can be challenging. Especially when different scenarios can require such radically different support.

Specificity of skills and background

Global humanitarian recruitment is extraordinarily complex, often demanding extremely niche combinations of skills, background, languages, past experience, and cultural familiarity. Finding the right people can feel like finding a needle in a haystack. 

Humanitarian recruiters don’t ‘just’ need a communications officer with 5+ years’ experience, for example. More often, you need a communications officer with 5+ years’ experience working with uninterruptable and alternative power systems; fluent English, Arabic and French; and with previous experience in conflict areas, ideally Syria. Available yesterday. No small ask. 

Demand surges

Even where there’s a robust supply of skills, the nature of emergency response means when demand comes, it’s sky-high. 

Recruitment across other sectors is driven by myriad factors – some macro but many not – but recruitment for humanitarian operations (certainly surge recruitment) is incited by the same emergency. 

Collaboration is critical. As the European Commission writes, “a well-coordinated response to human-induced disasters and natural hazards can avoid duplication of relief efforts. It can also ensure that assistance is tailored to the needs of those affected.”

But competition is difficult to avoid when demand skyrockets, making it hard to find and recruit the people you need.

High turnover

High staff turnover is a major concern for most humanitarian organizations. For example, the Humanitarian Practice Network (HPN) conducted qualitative research across a number of agencies, finding:

 “A striking majority of agencies consider turnover to be a problem and acknowledge that it has both a financial cost and a direct impact on the quality of programmes. A majority of HR directors also believe that turnover is higher in the humanitarian sector than in other organisations.”

The paper outlines how, although there are good reasons for humanitarian companies to embrace some degree of turnover, high turnover “comes at a cost and results in considerable inefficiencies”.

One of the biggest consequences of high turnover is additional pressure on talent acquisition to find, recruit, mobilize, and onboard new staff. And as ever, the stakes for getting this right are huge.

Hard-to-reach passive talent

Reaching and building relationships with passive talent is critical to ensure you can deploy people fast when you need them. But doing so is challenging, because prospective candidates are often deployed elsewhere, often in conflict zones and hardship locations.

They’re not checking their email every hour for a message from a recruiter, in other words. And constant chasing takes time you don’t have. 

Legacy recruitment systems and processes

The nature of humanitarian work has meant many organizations still struggle with legacy processes and tooling. When crises strike, organizational improvements understandably take the backseat. But there’s little respite from crises. As a result, many humanitarian organizations haven’t prioritised modernization – which has often meant years of accumulated technical debt and cobbled-together processes. 

Recruitment then becomes even more of an uphill battle, as complexity and demand increase but capability stagnates (or decreases). 

How to tackle these challenges and deploy humanitarian talent faster

Some of these factors are outside humanitarian recruiters’ control – but many aren’t. They make a hard, stressful job harder and more stressful than it needs to be. And it’s the people who need support most who feel the impact.

We founded Impactpool – a global talent ecosystem for the impact sector – based on decades of experience facing these challenges. Here’s how working with us equips humanitarian talent acquisition teams to find and deploy the right talent, faster. 

React faster to emergency recruitment needs 

Impactpool has built an engaged global community of more than 900,000 impact sector professionals across 195 countries. And 54% are women. 

Using Impactpool you can:

Easily create and post jobs

Reach candidates with the right background, experience and skills from specific countries and contexts, including crisis and conflict situations. Our advanced AI-matching capabilities connect the right people to the right jobs, based on granular sector-specific criteria. 

You get huge reach among highly-relevant people – without building your own database from scratch. And without wasting time trawling through thousands of irrelevant profiles from a generic professional network. Plus it makes it much easier to reach your diversity goals. 

Search for specialists 

Search our community and contact candidates through the platform. We’ve spent years training our AI algorithms using over 1M job descriptions from thousands of impact organizations, so it’s the most advanced tooling you’ll find. 

It’s also totally transparent, ethical, and fair – unlike other black-box AI matching tools. Ongoing availability checks are coming soon too so you know exactly who’s available. 

Increase response rates

Impact-sector professionals trust Impactpool as a value-add career partner, so our community is engaged. Webinars, events, virtual careers fairs, and broad career coaching offerings means our community is growing by 3000 to 5000 new members weekly.

Plus, Impactpool is an inherently collaborative ecosystem. Every organization benefits from everyone else’s outreach – because emergency response demands collaboration, not competition.

Improve recruitment efficiency

Impactpool connects a huge community of sector-specific talent with recruiting, nurturing, and analytics tools. That means you can tackle your end-to-end global recruitment from one place, instead of juggling multiple inefficient systems. Including sensitive roles, thanks to role-based and user-based visibility permissions.  

More efficient recruitment processes also contribute to a better candidate experience. To decrease attrition, improve quality-of-hire and alleviate unnecessary extra pressure on your team. Bureaucratic processes foster bureaucrats, not innovators.

Start hiring immediately

Unlike many other talent acquisition tools, Impactpool takes moments to get started. No lengthy implementation process; just boots on the ground. Post jobs immediately and easily set-up your recruitment workflows and processes how you need them with intuitive toggle-based back-end control.

But Impactpool isn’t just about reacting faster. We also empower you to become more proactive – so you’re ready to deploy faster next time too.  

Get ahead of hiring demand  

Many humanitarian organizations aspire to a more proactive approach to recruitment. But without the right tools, that’s often been unattainable. 

Proactive hiring is one of the biggest benefits of working with Impactpool. 

Build your employer brand

Having a presence with Impactpool means building your brand among the people you care about most. Easily build a careers site to showcase your open positions, post jobs on our jobs board and promote via social media and our newsletter. 

Impactpool helps connect impact-sector talent to the jobs where they can make a real difference. So you attract attention, even if you’re not a household name.

Build talent pools and rosters

Use Impactpool to build talent pools and rosters around your hardest hiring needs, so you’ve got the right people ready-to-go when you need them. Intuitive, easy-to-understand visual analytics show you your talent pool demographics, so you can spot gaps and recruit proactively to supplement. 

Engage candidates

Communicate with candidates, run outreach campaigns, and attend virtual careers fairs, to engage and nurture your talent. Our talent suite includes sophisticated CRM functionality so you can handle hiring and candidate outreach from one place. Better engagement when it’s not urgent makes positive, fast responses more likely when it is. Good talent pools and rosters are living documents.

Drive continuous improvement

Impactpool’s talent suite comes with simple, intuitive recruitment analytics, so you can understand job performance and comprehensive talent demographics. Identify where you can improve and where you’re doing a great job already. 

Hire impact talent faster with Impactpool

Humanitarian recruitment is always going to be stressful. You work in this sector because you care – when disasters strike, you’re all too aware of the stakes.  But there are some factors that you can take control over, to relieve some of the pressure. And, most important, get the right people where they can make a difference, faster. 

That’s what Impactpool is all about. We’d love to chat. 

Get started instantly with a free trial. 

Impactpool is a talent ecosystem for the global impact sector. We help mission-driven organizations attract, source, engage, hire, and deploy sector-specific talent faster.  Impactpool gives you everything you need to build teams for the world’s most critical challenges.