Make Sure People Will Fit At Your Not-for-Profit - Before You Hire Them!

Hiring people is usually thought of as a supply-side activity at a typical Not-for-Profit. You know what you need and you try to get the best for the least. No argument there. But taking it to the next level, you can also hire for fit with your organization’s unique culture. Since your culture is a function of how people interact, you’ll need to measure your candidates’ ability to team in the distinct way your company requires.

Teaming Characteristics

The biggest challenge in any job is often something other than the knowledge, skills, and talents we hire for. It’s the way we expect people to work together. That’s true whether we’re talking about a development team, a short-term project staff and the client, or a sales person and their prospect. It’s all about the teaming characteristics needed to nurture, secure, and maintain those relationships.

Personality traits have been extensively measured and applied to business situations, but they focus on the ‘components’ of an individual—not on the holistic aspects of ‘teaming’, which predict how well a person will work with others in a given context. Someone with great teaming characteristics can get along with almost anyone, in almost any situation. But even those who don’t enjoy chit-chat can still have fine teaming characteristics. It’s all a matter of what the environment demands vs. what (and how) a person is oriented to contributing.

What Does Your Organization Demand?

This may seem like a frivolous question, but it’s critical if you want to weed out, in advance, those who are likely to ‘wash out’ within the first few weeks or months. Remember, you are looking for fit.

There are no right and wrong answers. And these are just a few questions for your consideration:

• Does your organizational culture give opportunities to people who want to move into a new role or try something they've never done before? If so, does it also give them the support they need to succeed?
• For managers, in particular, does your organizational culture favor power players or cordial citizens? Does either type have a lock on seats in the boardroom? What is your preferred metric for managerial performance?
• Does your organizational culture expect people to be more than workers? For example, does the company value what people do outside the organization, whether what they do serves themselves as individuals, the company, or society as a whole? Is personal growth supported and valued, or is it seen as a waste of time or a diversion from work?
  

This is also a good time to ask yourself if you apply these demands across the board or only to some positions – or people. There’s no value in increasing the quality of your hires when you’re also exposing the company to claims of unequal treatment, harassment, or discrimination.

Improving Your Hiring Process

There is a great deal of activity these days around Quality of Hire, and recent industry surveys indicate a rapid increase of interest in employee assessment tools. But it’s not enough to buy a product that claims to tell you where people will ‘fit’, and says it’s been ‘validated’. For example, such assessments will confirm that most salespeople have similar personality traits—but as anyone who has ever hired or managed salespeople can tell you, personality does not equal performance! What you are looking for is a way to predict a person’s ability to add value, and that means answering only one question: Did your new hiring process demonstrate sustainable positive impact on your bottom line?

As W. Edwards Deming observed, decades ago, “Put a good person in a bad system, and the system will win, hands-down.” So in order to improve your hiring process, you should also take a look at some of your current onboarding and operational processes.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself:

• Do your new employees ‘onboard’ quickly? Do they merge seamlessly into your – or your customer’s - cultural mainstream and quickly learn how to work well within it? Do people stay with you or do you have double-digit turnover? Is your turnover higher in the positions most critical to your success?
• Do your qualified employees advance in the organization? Do they seek out challenging assignments and invest in their own career development, or is that kind of initiative discouraged?
• Are your performance reviews opportunities for growth, development, and encouragement – or threats of termination?
• Are your staff members advocates for your organization and their colleagues? Do they mentor others, resolve conflicts effectively, and bring more to the table every day?
• Do your managers seem to galvanize their work team to achieve more creative undertakings? Do they add to the intellectual and social capital of the organization?
• Do you have totally satisfied customers? Your customers can be external or internal – either way, customer satisfaction has been demonstrated to have a positive effect on the bottom line.

Doing it Better, Faster, Cheaper

The bad news is that, if you look objectively at the overall picture, you are likely to uncover some problem areas. The good news is that hiring people with good teaming characteristics will tend to make process improvements easier to identify and implement, and you don’t need a crystal ball to predict how people will work together in a team. You just have to use the right tool: one that was designed to measure how people will perform in teams. There's a completely new way to do this, called Role-Based Assessment (RBA), and it works better than trying to make assumptions about how one personality might work with another. This is business – not an exercise in touchy-feely.

Hi everyone -
I wrote a piece for NASVF.org (just published yesterday), but without the offer of the 'RBA business solution at no cost'. I'd be happy to offer it to you to for your NPO. Just contact me at DrJanice(at)thegabrielinstitute(dot)com. You can learn more at www.thegabrielinstitute.com or my blog, CEO2CEO.wordpress.com.
Best,
DrJ