Getting Recruitment Right
How to plan your recruitment
Marketing your Volunteer Opportunities
What’s so special about my group/organisation?
Attracting volunteers
Make recruitment effective
Removing barriers - recruitment tips
If you plan ahead and prepare well you'll be rewarded with the right volunteers. Here are some tips on 'how to'.
How to plan your recruitment
- Decide who is going to be responsible for recruiting volunteers and who will be part of the recruitment team. You could include members of your committee, or other people who volunteer with you to help.
- Decide what you want volunteers to be involved with. This is where the role description comes in.
- List the qualities, skills, attitudes and interests that you would want from potential volunteers. This is the personal qualities and skills – you can divide this into essential and wishlist.
- Outline what your organisation can offer to potential volunteers; What is in it for them? Volunteers are not motivated by money, but they are motivated – what is so special about your organisation?
- Agree how many volunteers you would like to recruit. Volunteers want to be busy.
- When should recruitment take place? One volunteer at a time - which would mean an ongoing recruitment; or in groups once, twice or four times a year – what is most useful to you as an organisation?
Marketing your Volunteer Opportunities
Marketing your recruitment is about getting your recruitment message across to individuals who will be interested in volunteering with you.
There are lots of ways to market your recruitment of volunteers. You may be able to identify a budget for recruitment, but probably you will be looking for low cost or free ideas.
- Register your volunteer opportunities with Volunteer Centre Merton
- Register on the do-it website (Volunteer Centre Merton will do this for you)
- Printing posters, leaflets and other display materials
- Contact the local press, radio etc
- Develop a website
- Give presentations to local groups
- Take part in Volunteers Week – and any other Days or Weeks relevant to your group
- Investigate local Employee Volunteering programmes
- Look at national advertisements and pick up ideas from those
- Where is the best place for your promotional material?
What’s so special about my group/organisation?
Answering this question will help to design an effective recruitment campaign. Often volunteers are not attracted by the role, but by the ethos of your organisation. For example there might be many people who want to volunteer with homeless people, environmental causes or helping animals. They could volunteer in a variety of different roles as long as they feel they contribute to the cause.
Finding something unique about your organisation could attract volunteers that will be committed to the cause and ethos. Don't forget to emphasise how their commitment will make a difference.
Attracting volunteers
Interesting roles are a magnet to volunteers. Be open to adapt the role to suit volunteers needs. Perhaps you can think of a role for a volunteer with a unique set of skills?
Are you offering roles that volunteers will actually want to do?
Before an organisation begins the process of recruiting volunteers, it needs to identify the tasks that are appropriate and inappropriate for volunteers. A basic principle governing this process is that volunteers should complement, not cover, the work of any paid staff.
It may be tempting to identify tasks for volunteers that are easy to pick up and which involve little training (eg collating a mailing). The danger in doing this is that volunteers may be bored with the work, and that they feel that they have a low status within the organisation. Conversely, giving volunteers tasks which they find too challenging may also discourage them from staying involved. People will differ in what they find too routine or over-challenging. It is important to be as flexible as possible and identify a range of tasks that volunteers can undertake.
Attractive role check list:
- Do you have work that would satisfy a range of motivations in volunteers?
- Are there immediate short term tasks for volunteers to do if they, or you, are unsure of their involvement?
- Are there more complex long term tasks for people who are looking for development and commitment?
- Do you have work for people with varying amounts of time?
Make recruitment effective
Effective recruitment is when you are getting the number and type of volunteers that you want to involve in your organisation.
You may have regular sessions or training courses which you recruit to, or you may be able to recruit volunteers at any time.
If you find that you are not attracting the volunteers you would like, think about your recruitment process – what works well and what is not so effective? Might your current volunteer recruitment process be putting up barriers which discourage people from getting involved?
Your recruitment message
The essential core of any recruitment message must be an emphasis on the benefits of volunteering to the potential volunteer.
Overcome the negative perceptions of volunteering by illustrating the range of activities; the benefits in terms of social contact, fun, development of skills, responsibility and new experiences; the achievements of existing volunteers.
Reduce anxiety over some of the practical difficulties – the payment of expenses should be made explicit and training and support given should be emphasised.
Defining your message
What tasks might volunteers do?
Why is the project or their role in it worthwhile?
- What are the aims of the project?
- What is important/exciting/worthwhile about the project?
- What is special about the role of volunteers in the project?
- What will volunteers gain from being involved?
Who do you want to have as volunteers?
- What sort of skills are you looking for?
- What sort of experience are you looking for?
- What sort of attitudes, qualities are important?
What should people do if they are interested?
Removing barriers - recruitment tips
If you are not getting the right or enough volunteers to apply for your roles, think what are the possible barriers. Below is a list that might help you to establish potential problems:
- An unintentional bias to particular groups of people
- A lack of sensitivity to age, race, culture, religion, gender or extra support needs
- The need for references and disclosures
- Lengthy application forms
- Publicity ie posters or leaflets – that don’t stand out
- Using too formal language or terminology – simple English is always best
- Too general recruitment messages – that don’t appeal to anyone in particular
If these, or any others, apply – think about what you can do to lessen or remove their impact.
