Mimi Kravetz had her dream career. The Harvard MBA oversaw employee recruitment marketing at Google, hunting for the best and brightest in one of the most competitive skilled-labor markets in the world.
Then, in 2015, Hillel International called. The nonprofit, which serves Jewish college students at chapters around the world — and for which Ms. Kravetz worked for three years after earning her bachelor’s — had a new vision for attracting and retaining high-performing employees. Its leadership needed someone to implement it.
Today, Ms. Kravetz is chief talent officer at Hillel, her hiring one piece of a major recruitment and professional-development effort the likes of which is little seen at nonprofits.
Among other incentives, Hillel is boosting pay and offering employees online courses to sharpen their skills. And it’s raised $50 million in private donations — including one of the largest grants in its history — to pay for it.
The nonprofit pulled off the fundraising feat by convincing donors of Ms. Kravetz’s philosophy: “Putting people first allows the best outcomes.”
“To me it is so simple and straightforward to recognize that the most important asset you have isn’t a particular program that you’re running or a particular curriculum you’re teaching,” she says. “Certainly you need a good product, but it matters so much, the people who are delivering that product and the way that they deliver it.”
A year and a half after Ms. Kravetz’s arrival, donors are preaching her doctrine.
“The quality of every Hillel is only as good as the quality of its professionals,” says Randall Kaplan, former chair of the nonprofit’s board of directors, whose family gave $2 million to the effort through the Leonard J. Kaplan Fund of the Jewish Foundation of Greensboro. “Investing in the skills and knowledge of the professionals is fundamental and key.”
The organization will gauge its success by measuring employee retention and promotion rates and staff members’ engagement with the students they serve — for example, tracking how many students take part in Hillel activities, and how often.
Down to Business
Hillel International, which reported annual revenue of more than $126 million last year, oversees a network of campus organizations that provide programs to Jewish students, such as hosting weekly Shabbat celebrations and coordinating trips to Israel.
Hillel’s nearly 850 campus staff members manage operations and facilities, raise money, and interact with students. Along with organizational duties, they must be knowledgeable about Judaism and Jewish culture.
“It’s got so many facets to it,” Mr. Kaplan says of what the nonprofits needs in its employees. “No one can ever walk into the job knowing all those skills.”
Recognizing this, Eric Fingerhut made professional development a priority at Hillel soon after becoming chief executive in 2013. The nonprofit started raising money to support staff training and searching for a chief talent officer.
Donors were responsive. Mr. Fingerhut credits their interest to three factors.
First, many have a background in the business world, where they “earned their livings and built their foundations and resources on people,” he says.
Among them is Bernie Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot, whose foundation committed $38 million to Hillel’s professional-development work.
“Bernie told us early on that his success was always determined by his ability to hire great people,” Ms. Kravetz says. “Most of the savvy business people I have had a chance to meet immediately get it when I start pitching this case.”
Second, donors recognize Hillel’s role as a gateway employer in the Jewish professional sphere. In addition to supporting people who work with college students, contributors “know that the professionals they’re investing in are likely to continue giving back to the Jewish world, whether they stay at Hillel or go in a different direction,” Mr. Fingerhut says.
Hillel has made that connection explicit through its participation in the Talent Alliance, a partnership with Moishe House and BBYO — nonprofits that respectively serve Jewish young adults and teens — that helps employees pursue career opportunities at all three organizations.
Although Hillel’s role as an employee incubator for the Jewish nonprofit world makes it unique, the idea of investing in nonprofit employees should resonate with all donors and grant makers, Mr. Fingerhut believes.
“We do need to work more collaboratively in the talent space,” he says. “We should recognize as a sector that people are going to move.”
Made for the Job
The third factor is Ms. Kravetz herself. Her boss credits her drive, leadership skills, and engaging personality for much of the progress Hillel has made carrying out its plans.
Plus, Mr. Fingerhut adds, “You could not have found a better background for this job.”
Having participated in Hillel while an undergraduate at Tufts University, Ms. Kravetz went on to work three years for the branch serving Stanford University. She left the nonprofit world to earn an MBA at Harvard University, then worked at American Express before joining Google.
At the tech giant, she helped lead re:Work, a project that disseminates information to other companies and the public about best workplace practices. It was during that period that Ms. Kravetz got a call from a recruiter asking if she knew anyone who might be interested in leading Hillel’s new talent-development work.
She did: herself. In 2015, Ms. Kravetz joined Hillel in a position made possible by a $16 million grant from the Jim Joseph Foundation that was partly earmarked for employee professional development.
“It was really exciting to me to have the opportunity to come back to this organization I had loved,” she says.
‘A Whole World of Talent’
One of Ms. Kravetz’s first big leadership decisions was a personal one: She opted to remain on the West Coast rather than relocate to work at Hillel’s Washington headquarters. It set a precedent for subsequent hires.
There was concern among the staff that this would hinder workflow. But as Mr. Fingerhut’s own busy schedule — full of travel and Skype calls with people across the country — made evident, “the world has changed,” he says.
“If you say, ‘We want to hire the best people and we want it to be someone who will move self and family to D.C.,’ you’re actually limiting yourself significantly,” Mr. Fingerhut says. He believes Ms. Kravetz is more productive living the way she prefers “than she would be if we were telling her how to organize her life.”
After all, Hillel is a distributed organization, with operations on hundreds of campuses in 17 countries. “The idea that the people running that distributed organization need to be in the same place doesn’t make sense anymore,” Mr. Fingerhut says.
Allowing Ms. Kravetz to open a Hillel office in the Bay Area created “a mind-set about putting people first,” she says. That’s helped Hillel “find the best talent wherever that talent is.”
“As soon as we came to grips with it, it was one of those ‘aha!’ moments,” Mr. Fingerhut says. “It opened up a whole world of talent we never could have had otherwise.”
Recruiting Help
Hillel has made use of its millions of dollars in donations by creating multiple professional-development programs. One involves what the nonprofit terms “talent grants,” to be awarded to its campus branches to help with recruiting, retention, professional development, and technology support. Most of the grant money will be spent on staff compensation, Ms. Kravetz says.
Another major new effort is Hillel U, an education series that will offer in-person and online courses to the nonprofit’s campus employees. The curricula will cover Jewish life and Israel, student engagement and wellness, and management and leadership.
“One of the insights I bring from Google is that management is important,” Ms. Kravetz says. “One of the most critical elements of whether you’re happy and sustained in the job has to do with your direct supervisor.”
Eventually, Hillel employees will be able participate in two courses a year, lasting six to eight weeks, plus a professional-development experience over the summer. Although Hillel leaders helped develop the courses, the nonprofit will pay external educators to teach them.
Ms. Kravetz is also working to improve the organization’s core human-resources practices regarding recruiting, setting goals, and evaluating performance. For example, Hillel recently ran its first employee-engagement survey, a common practice at many companies.
“I think these combined set of activities will hopefully really change the experience of our professionals in the field and really impact the experience of students on campus,” she says.
‘Employer of First Choice’
Efforts like Hillel’s will help bust the prevailing myth that nonprofits have a leadership deficit, says Rusty Stahl, chief executive of Fund the People, a nonprofit that advocates for increased investment in the nonprofit work force.
Rather, the sector suffers from “a deficit in investing in our leaders and our people,” he says. “It’s incumbent on everyone in every role to begin maximizing investment rather than wringing our hands about a supposed lack of people. Let’s invest in the people we’ve got and help them do their best rather than continuing this deficit mentality.”
Indeed, there’s a growing consensus among experts that the nonprofit world is blessed with an abundance of young, ambitious employees but cursed with a dearth of opportunities to train them for satisfying careers. Building an internal leadership pipeline is common at corporations but less so at nonprofits, Ms. Kravetz says.
“The talent that will be most successful is the talent that grows internally,” she says.
Hillel leaders hope that new investments in professional development will entice talented people to both join the nonprofit’s team and commit many years as loyal workers.
“We want to be an employer of first choice,” says Mr. Kaplan, the former board chair.
Although employees at Hillel will likely never earn the same salaries as their peers at tech companies, Ms. Kravetz says she’s optimistic that these new resources will help talented young people “justify the decision” to work for a nonprofit without requiring them “to make major sacrifices” financially.
“I think that we will get people who already have a heart for this work and a deep desire to do it to seriously consider it in a way they haven’t before,” she says. (Some of her business-school peers, she adds, are jealous about her move to the nonprofit.) “I think by paying more competitively within our context we can do that, we can get some of those great people.”
If more nonprofits make professional development a priority, foundations will follow their lead, Mr. Stahl says.
“It’s got to come from their leadership — they can’t wait around for some funder to tell them what to do,” he says. “It’s great to establish this as a priority and base their fundraising around that. Many funders are not going to invest unless they hear their grantees coming to them.”
Correction: A previous version of this article said that Eric Fingerhut was Hillel’s executive director rather than chief executive.
