The Fine Art Of Hiring Outside of the Box

What do a handbag salesperson at Neiman Marcus, a stay-at-home mom/community volunteer, a TV producer, an assistant at Vogue, a restaurant server, and a DJ all have in common?

I have hired and trained all of them to become amazing development professionals. 

Often when hiring, we look for candidates with experience in the field. The average job posting for a fundraiser requests five to seven years. But why?

My 27-year career in this amazing sector is a result of someone seeing beyond the resume and looking for the scalable skills. He hired a hairdresser.  

There are skills you can train for and skills that are innate. You can teach someone the mechanics of fundraising, but I’m not sure you can teach someone how to build a relationship in three minutes or less. I learned that skill during my hairdressing days!

When I was training the handbag salesperson to manage a donor pipeline, he got the hang of it right away because he did something similar at Neiman’s. His skills were scalable. By the way, he went on to become the CEO of a million-dollar nonprofit. 

As for the stay-at-home mom, she knew all about organization. If her home wasn’t organized, she said, chaos would ensue. We used the metaphor of a kitchen: front-burner priorities, back-burner priorities, and cold storage. Her scalable skills made her a fantastic community organizer.

When I speak with colleagues who say it’s impossible to find quality fundraisers, I push back and ask, Why not look in nontraditional places and find people with scalable skills?   

A great fundraiser is:

• A relationship builder

• Passionate about the cause

• Articulate

• Organized

• Coachable 

• A team player

If you are searching for your next superstar fundraiser, think about looking in the less obvious places. You’ll find people with all of those skills, whom you can coach, mentor, and train.

When we see the potential in someone and are willing to put our knowledge in service of their growth, we all thrive. People are so grateful when you see how much you’re willing to invest in them. 

Another thought: when you hire outside the box, you’ll find people who haven’t yet developed bad habits. Think of a carriage wheel. When the wheel travels on the same path over and over again, it wears a groove— a rut. When you hire talented people with scalable skills, there are no ruts to overcome, only potential. 

With gratitude to those who see beyond and lean into potential.