Search for candidates and volunteers.

Adopting a skills-first approach to hiring and finding volunteers can help expand your talent pool by nearly 10x on average. It is also the most direct way to hire for what you need, rather than what a role prototypically requires.

Start by considering which skills your team needs most. Look for skill gaps that could be filled by an employee in the position you’re hiring for. Consider how versatile skills among potential new volunteers could help serve multiple needs at once.

If you’re ready to take your skills-based hiring to the next level, LinkedIn Recruiter or Recruiter Lite allows you to filter candidate searches for skills directly.

After you’ve developed your list of desired skills, ask internal stakeholders to do the same. Schedule a meeting with each of these stakeholders where you will compare notes to understand your organization’s needs and begin building an ideal candidate profile for the role you’re trying to fill.

Creating an ideal candidate profile helps you define the skills and experience that are valuable to the role. From here, you can build a list of keywords that are likely to appear on the LinkedIn profile of a high-potential candidate.

You can adopt this approach when searching for volunteers with specific skill sets as well.

After you’ve identified strong candidates or volunteers, consider revising your job post to match up with their experience and background. This is a perfect opportunity to highlight aspects of the open position or benefits associated with working or volunteering for your nonprofit that you think would resonate with your prospective pool of candidates.

For example, if your list of promising candidates all share on their LinkedIn profiles that they value a culture of learning, be sure to include any professional development opportunities available for employees in the position’s revised job description.

After you post a job or volunteer position, share the post from your nonprofit’s Page, along with an informal and enticing summary of why someone might be interested in it.

After you create this post, encourage your employees to share it with their networks to spread awareness.

While you don’t need to post about your job and volunteer openings constantly, you can make them an important part of your employer brand.