Increasing diversity in the talent pipeline

About the company

This California community foundation serving local, national, and international communities is among the most prestigious in the sector. The organization oversees $3 billion in philanthropic assets and distributes an average of $150 million annually to charitable organizations that support causes like racial justice, community development, and quality-of-life programs.

The challenge

Managing inbound at scale 

As a fiscally responsible foundation, the organization has a small in-house recruiting team responsible for hiring across all departments and levels of the organization. Since the organization is thriving, it attracts a lot of passionate applicants to its mission who may or may not be qualified for the role. That perennial interest from prospective candidates became a double-edged sword since the recruiting team did not have the bandwidth to efficiently review, filter, and shortlist those individuals.

Costly outsourcing

To relieve the burden on the in-house team, the foundation leveraged hiring agencies to help search for talent across executive, technical, and non-technical roles. These third parties could cast a wide net and they had rich networks from which to draw candidates, but the organization did not have visibility into the composition of the pipeline. This outsourcing strategy yielded a good volume of high-quality candidates but at significant cost and with limited diversity in the talent pool.

Imprecise process

Ultimately, the organization lacked an automated method for ensuring candidates brought the right characteristics to the table – whether they were skills or experience attributes. Despite a diverse community, the agency talent pools lacked diversity.

The solution

The organization sought a more efficient and precise sourcing method that would enable them to reallocate outsourcing costs to other internal HR and talent initiatives. The solution was Findem.

One platform unites all hires

The organization began using Findem for all open positions as well as executive roles. Findem’s advanced attributes, dynamic org charts, and market maps can help to precisely source executive talent.

Speaking the same language

The days of parsing a bespoke job description into keywords and Boolean strings are over. With Findem’s 3D data and attribute-based search, the in-house team can import a job description and immediately reveal profiles that include matching terminology, experience, skills, and other attributes. The nuance of the hiring manager’s intent is preserved.

Attributes enable precision

The organization now identifies candidates by using the exact combination of skills and attributes they seek: Spanish fluency, philanthropic advisor, mission-driven, volunteer experience, long-tenured employee, development experience, etc. This perfectly tailored approach yields a highly matched candidate pool that they can easily calibrate by adding or removing attributes. Recruiters click any profile to confirm the candidate has the right attributes and experience for the role.

Automatically shortlist the best matches

Findem shortlists are among the organization's favorite features. The team can adjust the settings to display the Top 50, 100, 200, or 500 candidates. Then, if the composition isn’t quite right – too much corporate experience and not enough non-profit work, for example – the organization simply toggles certain attributes from ‘nice to have’ to ‘must have’ to generate the ideal pool of candidates who will advance to the next round.

Gain transparency into diversity hiring

The organization uses Findem’s diversity dashboard to monitor the balance of the talent pool by  gender, ethnicity, and even veterans. The organization can define the  underrepresented groups that matter to them so they can be prioritized in the matched results. 

Personalized campaigns protect the brand

Findem casts a wide net of precisely matched candidates and then filters them to the absolute best people to include in a personalized and automated campaign. The organization finds the campaign templates to be easy to set up, modify, and schedule, and they love how the recipients feel they’ve been singled out with a personalized message. Findem’s automated campaigns help the in-house team to use their time wisely and limit hands-on follow-up to only the best and most interested candidates.

The outcome

With Findem, the organization has gained a more powerful and configurable method to search for talent, which has ultimately reduced the cost per hire. The organization used to need 3-6 months to make a hire – even with the help of a staffing partner. With Findem, they’ve accelerated that timeline to less than 2 months. The foundation’s initial search using Findem resulted in a great hire.

Findem saved the team about one day per week through automation, improved sourcing, and better outreach. They also had a more diverse pipeline of highly qualified talent to hire from. From the cost savings, the organization reallocated 70% of the recruiting budget to other priorities, including a new HRIS and a new HR research portal.