How Non-Profit Workforce Development Organizations Can Build A Successful Recruitment Roadmap

Bridging the gap between what employees need and what job seekers want

The shortage of people with critical job skills in the United States is increasingly serious: according to Manpower, nearly 7 in 10 companies reported talent shortages and difficulty hiring in 2020 - a 15-year high, with workers in operations/logistics, manufacturing/production, sales/marketing, IT/data and administration/office support in the highest demand. 

In this context, nonprofit workforce development organizations play an important role in bridging the gap between what employees need and what career-seeking students and individuals want. However, recruiting for such programs can be difficult, as target recruits are often facing significant time and money constraints. Deciding to sign up for a job training program, even if there is no direct financial cost, often means the need for more childcare, more time off from paid work and more after-work obligations. This often makes the consideration phase for target recruits a long one.
 

However, nonprofit workforce development organizations face a critical challenge. Like all nonprofits needing to recruit participants for programs, they must market their programs effectively over an extended period in order to push recruits over the finish line, but they often must do so on a limited budget. Success requires a comprehensive, strategic recruitment roadmap based on audience insights, compelling messaging and understanding the most appropriate channels.

Audience Insights 

Audience insights mean knowing who your target recruits are and what they care about, and inferring their motivating factors. To be successful in recruitment, a nonprofit must align its value proposition with the target audience’s desires.

There are several ways to understand what these desires are, and a good place to start is one-to-one interviews with your current participant cohort, if one exists. Since commitment is often the biggest consideration, start by gaining an understanding of what type of commitment seems reasonable to them - 6 months, 12 months, or more? Sometimes a “bootcamp”-like approach is best, and the commitment to shorter, high-impact training programs seems to resonate with target recruits. 

Besides time commitment, what are some other things your target recruits care about?  Cost, skills development, well-being and social proof (how participation in the program may impact social status) are other important considerations. 

Insights can also come from alumni and teachers/mentors, who are on the front lines with the target demographic.  It is critical to develop one or more prototypes for your target recruits - for example, career-seeking college students; people in their 40s and 50s who want to change careers; and caretakers - those who have at least one child or dependent, who are seeking job stability and higher wages to support these dependents. Distinguishing between subgroups in this way allows for highly targeted messaging. 

Compelling Messaging

Creating compelling messaging begins at the audience insights stage. What is your audience interested in? The messages should be relevant and simple, evoke emotion, create an emotional connection and incite strong calls to action. To be effective, target recruits must also be able to see themselves in the messages, and here, representation matters. 

When target recruits see themselves in your current participant cohort and alumni ranks, it allows them to feel like your organization will enable them to accomplish the goal of starting, changing or advancing their careers. 

You also must remember that messaging is a journey. With a relatively long decision-making process, it’s critical to use different messages at the various touchpoints in the target recruit’s journey. For example, if they’re just getting introduced to your organization, you can go big and aspirational to show the future they can have and how it will impact their family and loved ones. If they’re in the consideration phase of determining which program to invest their time and energy into, switching to a language that sets your organization apart and establishes your competitive advantage goes a long way. 

Retargeting capabilities are also important - they serve as a “reminder” for target recruits, who may have visited your website but not yet taken decisive action. Specifically, retargeting allows organizations to show prior site visitors relevant visual or text ads when they visit other websites. These campaigns can be vital for maintaining connections with target recruits and can be done with the help of Google Ads, Facebook retargeting, LinkedIn ads and other retargeting advertising platforms. 

Finally, remember that testing is key, and organizations should run focus groups for messaging and testing messaging. You need to understand which images and calls to action are likely to resonate the most. Messaging is never a “set and forget” process - the focus needs to be continuous improvement and constant iteration is normal. It could be as simple as changing the language from “jobs” to “careers,” or it could be finding nuances in how you speak to the various locations you serve. 

Leveraging the Most Appropriate Channels 

Once you’ve identified your target audiences and crafted messaging, you must understand what are the most appropriate channels for reaching these audiences - i.e., where these target audiences spend most of their time online. 

As noted above, messaging is a journey - and the relevance of a channel may also depend on where particular targets are in the “consideration funnel.” Pay especially close attention to millennials - this segment currently makes up one-third of the labor force, which is why it’s important to monitor their media consumption behaviors closely in order to know where and how to reach them.

Understanding what are the most appropriate channels also requires you to have some sort of way to track where leads are coming from. “Referral traffic,” e.g. understanding what sources are driving traffic to your website, may not be good enough.  Rather, you want to know - what sources are actually the most effective in originating the most clicks, registrations and ultimately, full enrollments? Again, many of the major social media sites offer analytic tools providing a good level of granularity and visibility into this attribution. 

Paid social is key, but so too are email (collect as many addresses as you can), radio ads (attribution can be harder in this example, but it never hurts to ask enrollees, ‘how did you first hear/learn about us?’) and organic social. Here, you want to utilize platform-specific features to your advantage. For example,consider using features like Instagram Live to share stories or experiences from students or create Facebook Groups to bring prospective students together. 

Conclusion

Believe it or not, even once you have successfully recruited and enrolled your targets, your job is not finished. Just as many colleges and universities rely extensively on alumni donations to build their endowments, nonprofit workforce development organizations have an opportunity to cultivate these relationships in order to ultimately transition program participants into donors. This means shifting from awareness and recruitment, to fundraising and advocacy, and with millennials proving to be one of the most philanthropic generations ever, this is a huge opportunity.

Laying the groundwork for effective recruitment, through audience insights, compelling messaging and understanding the most appropriate channels, is the first critical step in this process and nonprofits must do their due diligence. Only then can they grow their communities of targeted recruits and deepen relationships over the long-term, driving enrollments and ultimately establishing long-term donor streams.

Ryan Dobran is Account Director at Media Cause. Connect Ryan Dobran