Humanitarian aid and global development recruitment is uniquely tough

IDOs, NGOs, and humanitarian aid organizations stand up to be counted where it matters most—in the fight to make our world a better place. That mandate can’t succeed without the right people in the right places to create impact. 

But recruiting for these organizations can be tough. A 2023 study in partnership with Impact46 listed several challenges that burden NGO recruitment:

• Candidate attraction: 52% of all NGOs surveyed stated that attracting skilled staff is a major problem. 

• High turnover: staff turnover in NGOs is up to 85% higher than the private sector, with some NGOs losing a quarter of all staff to churn.

• Legacy HR tools: 40% of NGO respondents stated that poor HR management tools limit their capability and efficiency.

Globally almost every sector is plagued by skills shortages. (Korn Ferry predict an $8.5 trillion talent shortage by 2023, for instance).

But the humanitarian aid and development sector faces even bigger challenges in sourcing talent, because of the requirement for unusually deep and broad specialist expertise. Often including experience in specific countries and contexts combined with specific nationalities and genders, to ensure you’re achieving representation goals. 

A private sector organization might struggle to recruit, say, a full-stack developer  with 5-7 years of experience. Even with a luxurious office in New York and sky-high salary and benefits. 

But an IDO might need a full-stack developer with 5-7 years of experience – and fluent Arabic, Kurdish, and English; and who’s willing to work in Aleppo. And who understands that you can’t put a price on having a life-changing impact – but if you could, that price likely wouldn’t compare well to New York compensation packages. 

Then there are the added challenges that come with staffing for crisis situations. Namely, that you need those specialist skilled staff yesterday. While many other humanitarian organizations are seeking the same skills, which pushes up competition when collaboration is what’s needed most. 

Plus, the people you need mostly aren’t sitting by the phone waiting for your call. They’re engaged in life-changing work, often in high-stress, hardship locations. Reaching people can be hard enough, let alone hiring them. 

In other words, recruiters for the impact sector have their work cut out. And that’s one of the main reasons why we built Impactpool. 

Our founding team has decades of experience working in HR and recruitment within the humanitarian aid and international development sector. Impactpool was born from many, many years of seeing ongoing hiring challenges hurt international organizations’ ability to make a meaningful impact. 

We built Impactpool because we wanted to fix it. 

The business case for Impactpool 

Impactpool is a talent ecosystem for the global impact sector. We help mission-driven organizations like government agencies, NGOs, INGOs, IDOs and humanitarian organizations attract, source, engage, hire, and deploy sector-specific talent faster. 

Here’s why there’s nothing else like Impactpool.  

1 – Reach the world’s largest community of impact sector talent 

At the heart of Impactpool’s talent ecosystem is the world’s largest community of sector-specialist talent. More than 900,000 impact-sector professionals are part of Impactpool, from 195 countries—and 54% of them are women.

Using Impactpool you can easily create and advertise jobs across this community, increasing visibility among exactly the right audience. Plus, unlike generic job boards, you aren’t slowed down by (or paying for) an enormous volume of irrelevant profiles. 

Read how the Danish Refugee Council got one million professionals from 206 countries to view their jobs, thanks to Impactpool. 

The result is more job applications from more suitable applicants. With less time trawling through CVs that don’t even meet minimum requirements. Increasing application quality is a huge boon for efficiency, which is vital when you need to deploy fast.

2 – Surface candidates with advanced AI screening console 

Advanced AI-matching is a core part of how Impactpool works. We’ve spent years training our AI algorithms using over 1M job descriptions from thousands of impact organizations: it’s the most advanced tooling that exists for our sector.

Our powerful AI screening console means you can search our entire talent community — plus anyone in your own database — using nuanced, granular, sector-specific filters. 

Our screening filters allow billions of different filtering combinations, so you can surface talent around your specific needs much faster than trawling through traditional professional networks. 

This has a huge implication for time-to-hire. The less time you spend sourcing talent, the fewer drop-outs and the quicker you can get boots on the ground.

There’s also an implication for diversity and inclusion. Provided it’s used in a transparent, ethical way, AI can support IDOs and humanitarian organizations to build a more inclusive, more consistent, more objective recruitment process.  

Plus, our AI can also support international organizations and multilaterals — who aren’t bound by the same legislation as the private sector — to achieve gender parity through Affirmative Action. 

3 – Build talent pools and talent rosters

When you’re juggling niche, hard-to-find expertise, specific demographic requirements, and, often, surges of huge demand, there’s a compelling answer: proactive recruitment.

But despite ambitions most international development organizations struggle to make progress, for several reasons:

• You don’t have time to spare after ad-hoc recruitment

• You’re reliant on spreadsheets that make talent pooling impossible

• Your legacy software doesn’t have the right functionality

• You struggle to keep your talent pools engaged and useful

Impactpool helps mission-driven organizations recruit more proactively, by empowering you to build talent pools and talent rosters.

Impactpool supports talent pooling with: 

• Excellent search and tagging around the criteria that matter

• Flexible access permissions you can control yourself

• Integrated candidate outreach straight from pools

• Integrated ATS to pull candidates straight into jobs

• Easy-to-understand, comprehensive talent pool analytics

Talent pooling with Impactpool helps IDOs hire and deploy faster, improve diversity, and tackle turnover by improving quality of hire. 

4 – Strengthen your employer branding 

A strong employer brand helps “businesses compete for the best talent and establish credibility”, the CIPD say. For international development and humanitarian organizations where your mission, vision and values are so integral, employer brand is an enormously important tool to attract talent.

But like talent pooling, employer branding is a proactive recruitment strategy that IDOs are often forced to shunt onto the backburner.

Having a presence with Impactpool is an easy way to strengthen your brand and increase visibility among highly relevant talent. Using Impactful you can:

• Build a careers site to showcase your brand and open positions

• Distribute jobs to our community, via social media, and our newsletter

• Attend virtual careers fairs targeting the talent you need to hire

• Engage candidates with bulk recruitment marketing campaigns 

Plus, our integrated sector-specialist ATS means you can manage end-to-end global hiring from one place, without needing multiple platforms (although we offer lots of integrations if you need them). 

With Impactpool, all your recruiters – local and global – and hiring managers where they’re needed, can recruit from one place using one database as a single source of truth. 

Ultimately that means less rework; fewer errors; fewer compliance issues; and less manual admin: huge efficiency gains which create time for approaches that otherwise have been pipedreams. 

5 – Strategic talent engagement 

Talent engagement is a major challenge for IDO and humanitarian recruitment teams. Whether you’re building talent pools or recruiting ad hoc, disengaged candidates translate into:

• Wasting time pursuing irrelevant out-of-date CVs 

• Missing relevant candidates because they haven’t updated their CV

• Impossible-to-reach passive candidates who don’t check job boards

• Fewer, slower responses from candidates when you contact them

• Less commitment from candidates and more dropouts

But talent engagement has traditionally been an area where most international development organizations struggle. Most organizations would love to do more but simply don’t have capacity. 

We understand these challenges intimately and built Impactpool to address them head-on.

Firstly, our integrated CRM makes it easy for organizations to engage candidates from one place, either individually or at scale. 

But we also do lots of the engagement heavy lifting for you. 

Our talent ecosystem is inherently collaborative, with centralized candidate profiles. That means when candidates update their profile to apply for any of the positions with any of the 3000+ organizations in our network, their profile updates for you too.

We also treat candidates as a major stakeholder, building a value-add career platform. Our community is growing by 3000-5000 members weekly because it’s not just a dead library of information but an active, engaged network.

6 – Recruitment analytics

For mission-based organizations to recruit better, you need easy-to-understand, easy-to-access analytics so you can continually assess and optimize your hiring strategies. That’s traditionally been difficult, especially if you’re using lots of disparate spreadsheets and legacy tools for different recruitment units.

Impactpool helps you understand your recruiting efforts, highlighting performance insights so you can decide best next steps and showcase ROI. 

Our talent ecosystem also shows you the skills and demographics of your entire talent database. Identify skills and diversity gaps at a glance, to empower better workforce planning and more strategic hiring.   

Try Impactpool in moments for free

Impactpool exists to help the people doing some of the world’s most important work do that work more effectively; by helping you understand, connect, and engage with the world-changers your mission needs. 

Sign up for your free trial today and get started with Impactpool instantly.

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