In 2012 the University of Virginia created a new recruiter position in the development department with the goal of taking a more proactive approach to hiring fundraisers.
A.J. Davidson started in the role of development community senior recruiter in April of that year. Her mission is to build a better pipeline for the university’s large fundraising staff, which numbers about 500 employees. They’re spread across a central development office and more than 25 university-affiliated foundations and programs.
Before Ms. Davidson started, the university’s hiring approach was simple: Post the opening on the university’s job website and as paid advertising, and then choose a candidate from the resulting pool of resumes.
Today the process is more involved.
So, what did Ms. Davidson do -- and what was the thinking behind the steps she took?
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Created a development careers website. This may seem like an obvious step, but it provides a central location to post both university and affiliated-foundation positions and pushes job seekers in right direction, Ms. Davidson says. The site includes a job board, staff biographies, and a page about the university’s Charlottesville, Va., community. It gets more than 900 unique visitors each month—and that number has been increasing.
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Built a recruitment database. This system is similar to a donor database. Ms. Davidson stores resumes, notes, documents, and contact information for potential fundraising candidates. These include both candidates who have applied and individuals she has identified.
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Researches potential candidates. Although the university still does some paid advertising of job openings, Ms. Davidson has put more emphasis on individualized outreach, something she says is new for the university. She contacts fundraisers who might be potential candidates for an opening and people whose backgrounds she finds intriguing and whom she wants to get to know better. LinkedIn is a great place to look, she says.
Ms. Davidson’s searches usually include a combination of keywords in profiles, individuals who live within 100 miles of the university’s ZIP code, people who have a connection to the university, and those in similar kinds of positions at other schools.
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Started a newsletter for potential candidates. In early 2014, Ms. Davidson created a quarterly e-newsletter that highlights open positions. It typically features three short position descriptions. She sends the newsletter to about 3,000 recipients, mostly people in the recruitment database.
The January 2015 newsletter had a 47 percent open rate, Ms. Davidson says. The first two newsletters each led to the university hiring experienced fundraisers who are also alumni.
In both instances, the candidates contacted Ms. Davidson after receiving the newsletter, and she worked with them to find positions that were a good fit. In December 2014, she also sent a short holiday email message with a photo of a campus tradition, the “Lighting of the Lawn,” and a link to the job page.
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Conducts informational interviews. Ms. Davidson is the central point of contact for people who want to have an informal conversation about working in development at the university. While she says this is time consuming and isn’t the most effective recruiting strategy, she meets with about 20 people each month. Of those interviews, she refers about three to five candidates to a hiring manager or another staff member to continue the conversation.
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Follows up with unsuccessful candidates. In the past, hiring managers didn’t always follow up with candidates who weren’t moving to the next round of interviews. Ms. Davidson helped establish a process so that nobody feels forgotten. This is also important for smaller organizations, where fundraisers may act as hiring managers.
The goal is to make sure that unsuccessful candidates feel like they were treated with respect. “Follow-up communication is so key because we don’t know when we might have a new position that’s a perfect fit,” she says.
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Takes advantage of employee connections. While not every organization can offer an employee referral bonus, like the UVa fundraising department does, Ms. Davidson recommends coming up with some kind of incentive program that encourages employees to consider people they meet at conferences and other professional events as potential candidates. “From a recruiting standpoint, that costs nothing,” she says.
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Reworked job descriptions. Development job descriptions at the university are now longer than they used to be. Instead of just stating the number of gifts the officer is expected to secure, the descriptions go into more detail about the unit the position is a part of.
The goal is to get candidates’ attention and differentiate the position from others like it, Ms. Davidson says.
“At one point in time, it felt like as an employer, we had the upper hand and people would want to come work for us,” she says. “Now we’re realizing that it’s a two-way street and candidates, especially good ones, have multiple options, so we have to sell ourselves while also expecting the candidate to sell him or herself.”
