We are pleased to announce the promotion of three team members to the position of Senior Vice President. Anne Johnson, most recently Vice President and Senior Search Consultant, joined Aspen Leadership Group in 2015. She leads searches in all parts…
THE GREAT RETHINK | CANDIDATE INSIGHT: Inclusion Is a Learning Journey and a Core Competency – and It’s for Everyone
byOver the past two months, as we have been exploring the topic of Inclusion, it has become clear that Inclusion isn’t just one thing. It has many facets, and it can mean many things to many people. It’s also not…
As executive search consultants, it’s our job to help philanthropic organizations attract the best pool of candidates available. To that end, one of the most important areas of discussion is the issue of remote and hybrid work. It’s one of…
Two things happened when the pandemic hit at the beginning of 2020. First, in a matter of just a few weeks, almost all of us were forced to change our notion of “workplace,” as office-based jobs shifted to online work.…
Upheaval in The Job Market Presents Tremendous Opportunity for Employers and Candidates Alike In the past couple of years, tens of millions of people have left their jobs, as changing life circumstances, declining unemployment, and a tight labor market have…
The success of advancement work depends on engaging all potential constituents as fully as possible. Most nonprofits would benefit from increased cultural competency—the ability to understand, appreciate, and interact with people with cultural backgrounds different from one’s own—in order to engage more constituents more fully. A more diverse workforce has a greater capacity to strengthen a team’s and organization’s overall cultural competency.
If you’ve been involved in hiring, chances are you’ve heard a colleague use the term “cultural fit” when evaluating a candidate. Authors Steven Wallace and Ron Schiller suggest rethinking the notion of “fit” in order to minimize bias in recruitment, think more expansively about what is needed for the team’s overall cultural competency, and produce better outcomes for the organization.
Diverse pools are a means to an end. Building diverse teams, while involving more intention than building diverse pools, is also only a means to an end. It takes diverse teams, working in an inclusive culture, and making the diversity of the team count, to engage more stakeholders and raise more money. Diversity is not only a moral imperative—the “right thing to do”—it is a business imperative for everyone involved in nonprofit leadership and philanthropy: boards, volunteers, CEOs, C-suite leaders, and engagement and fundraising professionals. Until everyone involved in the recruitment process understands and can articulate diversity as essential to stakeholder engagement and fundraising outcomes, recruitment efforts will fall short.
Inside Philanthropy – Help Wanted: How to Remove Barriers to Hiring Fundraisers From Other Fields
by“Unwillingness on the part of the fundraising profession to pay attention to transferable skills has not only diminished the pipeline of talent, but also diminished success in objectives for the profession to become more diverse,” says Ron Schiller of Aspen Leadership Group. “We’re missing out on plenty of people with strong skills and relevant passion who could put those skills to work for something that matters deeply to them.”
Your ability to quickly reset your organization’s overall financial situation after COVID-19 will likely depend on attracting significant philanthropy. While all arms of your organization will make difficult sacrifices, your advancement team may be key to protecting your organization’s long-term viability, and you must work closely with leadership to assess, rethink, and reset critical staffing decisions.
The strongest candidates will not view an interview as a test but rather as the first step in establishing a relationship. According to dozens of development leaders who have hired hundreds of frontline fundraisers, the in-person interview is the most…