By
Impactpool
6 reasons why proactive recruitment matters for mission-driven organizations
1 – Hire and deploy faster
Humanitarian organizations often face an endless cascade of emergency surges. Getting the right people onto the ground fast is critical to save lives, reduce suffering, and support long-term recovery and resilience.
But that’s complicated by a host of challenges, like:
Huge breadth and depth of skills needed
Skyrocketing demand encourages competition
Hard-to-reach or disengaged talent
Proactive recruitment helps you tackle these issues by building active, engaged talent pools or rosters around your critical hiring needs. So when you need them, you’ve got people ready.
2 – Improve diversity
Representation is integral to respectful, ethical recruitment that’s a net positive for the local communities you support. But it’s often tough to find the diverse global talent you need, especially with the right niche specialist skills.
As a result, meeting diversity goals can be challenging. As well as time-consuming, bureaucratic and costly, if progress demands an Action Plan.
Proactive recruitment empowers a strategic approach to attracting, sourcing, hiring, and tracking diverse talent. As a result, you’re better placed to improve staff representation and meet internal and external diversity goals.
3 – Improve quality of hire
Many humanitarian organizations struggle to recruit, especially for niche specialist roles, hardship locations, or emergency response. This creates pressure to hire anyone who’s suitable, rather than finding your ideal candidate.
Sometimes, this approach makes sense. When you urgently need people, anyone’s better than no one. But it can also exacerbate churn.
High turnover is a major problem for most humanitarian organizations, which drives costs up, hurts programme effectiveness, and increases the pressure on talent acquisition. Hiring poor-fit candidates can be a major culprit.
Proactive recruitment increases your pool of talent around specialist skills needs and creates breathing space to evaluate talent more thoroughly. It gives you more scope to find and hire your ideal candidates.
4 – Strengthen your culture
For mission-driven organizations, hiring the right people isn’t only about getting support into communities that need it. It’s also about building the right long-term workforce and culture to align with your values, purpose and mission.
As Harvard Business Review put it:
“Culture provides the underlying assumptions, shared values, and norms that shape employee mindsets and behaviors. Companies may profess a commitment to purpose, but without a supportive culture aligned to that purpose, employees won’t be supported to enact these shared values in their work.”
Proactive recruitment is strategic, conscious, long-term recruitment. And strategic, conscious, long-term recruitment is the cornerstone of culture and purpose.
When you recruit proactively, you’re able to attract, source, and engage professionals who are more informed about, engaged with, and aligned to what you stand for.
5 – Improve outreach response rates
Engagement is one of the biggest challenges for humanitarian hiring. The majority of candidates are passive – AKA, they’re actively engaged in something much more important than jobseeking. Most candidates aren’t checking their email every two minutes while also coordinating critical program supplies or working on the frontlines with asylum seekers.
You’re out of sight, out of mind – and that becomes a real problem when you need to mobilize fast.
That’s where proactive recruitment can make a difference. As we’ll explore below, hiring proactively doesn’t just mean building talent pools and rosters of suitable people. It means maintaining warm, engaged relationships with those people. So you’re front of sight, front of mind. Right when you need to be.
6 – More bandwidth for urgent hiring
However proactive your recruitment is, some hiring will always be reactive. The fast-paced, unpredictable nature of disaster response, for instance, means you might need unexpected skills. Or unexpected turnover can leave you suddenly in the lurch.
The great thing is, getting better at proactive recruitment also means you get better at ad hoc recruitment. When you recruit proactively wherever you can, it relieves huge pressure on your team – so everyone has more bandwidth to jump onto urgent needs.
Getting started with proactive recruitment is easier than you think
These reasons probably aren’t news to you. Most humanitarian and international development organizations have wanted to move away from ad hoc recruitment for years.
But often the how is more challenging. It can feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day; or people in your team; or candidates across the world.
And yes, there are certainly challenges. But the good news is, getting started with proactive recruitment is probably easier than you think. With the right strategy, approach, and tools, your recruitment could look very different in six months.
Check out this simple 6-step roadmap to get started today.
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.