By
Impactpool
How to implement a proactive recruitment approach
Proactive recruitment is transformative for mission-driven organizations. But large-scale, sweeping changes aren’t realistic given your operating conditions. Humanitarian and international development organizations need a manageable, pragmatic path to change.
Here’s a step-by-step roadmap you can get started with today, to start progressing towards more proactive hiring.
1 – Choose a focus area
Eventually, you’ll recruit for many roles and programs using this proactive approach. But don’t bite off more than you can chew now. Start by identifying your biggest hiring challenges or skills needs and focus your attention there.
At this stage, you needn’t aim for strategic buy-in across the whole organization. It’s all about small, manageable change, not wholesale transformation. (That’ll come).
Maybe you start with one role you know has been consistently challenging, for example.
If you don’t have analytics to give insights into your skills gaps, pinpoint a sensible starting point through qualitative best-guesses. Everyone has to start somewhere – don’t let the scale and scope of global operations intimidate you into inaction.
2 – Source talent and build a pool
You’ve identified your first priority area. Now you need to source, adding suitable prospective candidates into a focused talent pool (or roster). (Here’s a detailed walkthrough of that process).
There are lots of ways to handle that, depending on the tooling and channels you use. In practice though, it’s much easier with:
A sector-specialist global talent community. Generic job boards and professional networks boast global reach – but the quality of that reach is questionable. Sifting through an enormous database of mostly irrelevant, often disengaged candidates is a huge time-drain.
A talent suite built for talent pooling. Spreadsheets are hard to search, manage, and track, and they don’t enable candidate outreach, which is a vital part of the proactive recruitment equation. Mission-driven organizations need talent software designed to meet mission-driven recruitment’s challenges.
3 – Engage and nurture your pool
Lots of organizations start and finish with step #2. As a result, vanishingly few talent pools and rosters are actually useful. Wasted time, wasted effort. And worse, this situation can hurt recruitment’s credibility, making it harder to get support for a new approach in the future.
Engaging and nurturing your pool is critical, to keep prospective candidates interested in your organization and mission for when you have an active opportunity.
You’ll find this much easier and faster if you’re using talent software with integrated CRM functionality, to power candidate outreach and targeted campaigns. Proactive recruitment demands proactive outreach.
If you work with Impactpool, we do lots of the engagement heavy-lifting for you. We’ve built an engaged community of 900,000+ impact-sector professionals – and growing by 3000-5000 members weekly – because we’re known as a value-add career partner providing engaging, relevant content and resources. Your talent is already much more engaged than is typical with generic professional networks or job boards.
4 – Showcase your employer brand
In step #2, you actively sourced candidates into your talent pool. Another key component of proactive recruitment is building an inbound channel that attracts candidates to you. The stronger your employer brand, the more sustainable your recruitment becomes.
Mission-driven organizations have a natural advantage here. For example, Deloitte’s 2024 Gen Z and Millennial Survey found that 86% of Gen Z and 89% of millennials say a sense of purpose is very or somewhat important to their overall job satisfaction and well-being.
If you haven’t already got one, now’s the time to create a careers site where you can share the brilliant mission, purpose, vision and values that set your organization apart. This can become a hub where you drive traffic from your jobs, social media, and any recruitment marketing campaigns.
(And even if you do have one, now’s a good time to check that it’s properly accessible. We were shocked by the results of our analysis of 50 mission-driven careers pages).
Impactpool’s Virtual Career Fairs are also a popular tactic for brand building, allowing you to showcase your organization to a huge community of impact sector talent in an engaging, interactive way.
5 – Keep your pool ‘clean’
To be useful, talent pools and rosters should be a living repository. Not a desert of outdated details and disinterested candidates.
There’s no point investing time building a 200-person list of Communications Specialists if you can’t contact half of them and the other half aren’t Communications Specialists anymore. Or if you rule out profiles because their old CV says they don’t have the right conflict experience, when they’ve since spent 18-months exactly where you need them.
To that end, there’s an element of continuous management to proactive recruitment too. Your talent pooling software should allow candidates to opt-in pools easily and leave when they’re not interested. Equally, candidates should be able to easily update their profiles and set availability.
Ongoing talent pool hygiene is one big reason that over 2500 mission-driven organizations work with Impactpool. Because our ecosystem is inherently collaborative, candidates within your talent pools also sit within our wider 900,000+ community. That means you benefit from the engagement efforts of every organization we work with.
When a candidate updates their CV to apply to, say, the UN, that updated CV doesn’t only go to the UN. It also gets updated on their profile within your talent pool. In other words, you always benefit from an engaged, relevant list of candidates without having to maintain that list solely yourself.
6 – Build momentum
You’re on the home straight now. By this point, you’ve got an active, engaged talent pool around the key priority you identified in step #1. And you should start to see the benefits of this proactive approach in your ongoing hiring.
Now it’s about using the time you’ve saved, lessons you’ve learned, brand you’ve built, and buy-in you’ve earned to build momentum across the organization.
What’s the next priority?
Embrace proactive recruitment with Impactpool
When you’re overrun with demand, battling huge time-pressure, and hunting for needle-in-a-haystack skills, adjusting your recruitment approach can feel impossible.
But supported by the right tools, humanitarian recruitment teams can get started being more proactive today. In moments. Small steps ladder into big changes.
Build your first talent pool now with Impactpool.
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.