Due to the fact that nonprofit organizations operate within principles and domains significantly different from those applied to for-profit businesses, the process of personnel recruitment also differs. Since no profit is generated by charitable companies, their workforce needs are addressed primarily by volunteer recruitment, making volunteers the key human resource. Hager and Brudney (2011) devote their article to the problems that nonprofit organizations encounter when recruiting volunteers. The authors claim that there exist two categories of forces that predetermine recruitment strategies, including those that depend on the organizational nature and those that derive from the organizational management and might be influenced by nurture (Hager & Brudney, 2011). In this paper, the article by Hager and Brudney (2011) is summarized, analyzed, and reflected on from the perspective of theoretical considerations of nonprofit management.
The process of volunteer recruitment is complex and ambiguous due to the variety of driving forces that motivate people to become volunteers. As the authors of the article state, “motivation to volunteer is the individual question; recruitment of those volunteers is the organizational one” (Hager & Brudney, 2011, p. 138). Thus, it involves appealing to the philanthropic domain and engaging in deliberate recruitment strategies to attract volunteers who would perform on behalf of the organization and help accomplish its mission. In the article, the authors consider the problems of volunteer recruitment, trying to find the roots for those problems in nature (the organizational characteristics that fall beyond organizational control) and nurture (a strategic decision that might be controlled and changed to solve recruitment problems) (Hager & Brudney, 2011). On the one hand, innate organizational features cannot be adjusted to attract more volunteers; for example, a charitable organization cannot shift from one served population to another to attract more volunteers. Nonprofits are limited to referring to the populations that most apply to their clients’ communities to increase the probability of recruitment.
On the other hand, there are problems that are not inherent but acquired due to the strategies and decision-making approaches characteristic to an organization. In such cases, nonprofit organizations might increase their volunteer management capacity and improve their organizational culture to motivate people to join as volunteers. However, despite the possibility to influence volunteer decisions, the authors emphasize that conventional human resource management strategies might disrupt the recruitment of volunteers due to the inherently different nature of nonprofit organizations.
As the materials learned throughout the course show, nonprofit organizations are reliant on a volunteer workforce, as well as they depend on volunteer charitable giving. Indeed, when considering the general perspective of nonprofit performance, one might identify that the principles of philanthropy deal with the motivation of people to contribute without significant material interest (Bekkers & Wiepking, 2011). Instead, volunteers are recruited based on their potential to make an impact and join the charitable efforts to serve a better cause. Since nonprofit management theories mostly concern leading performance with the priority set on public welfare rather than the organization’s profit, conventional human resource management that dominates most businesses does not apply to nonprofits (Anheier, 2014). On the other hand, similarly to the issues addressed in Bekkers and Wiepking’s article (2011), Hager and Brudney (2011) identify the voluntary giving of services as the primary source of workforce for nonprofits, which at the same time is managed by strategic organizational means.
Such a perspective on volunteer recruitment involves an interdisciplinary approach that balances nurture and nature and intertwines nonprofit and business-related strategies for effective recruitment. Thus, volunteer recruitment problems are complex issues that require tackling from the perspective of individual cases. No universal approach is proven to work for all nonprofits due to the uniqueness of their performance areas. However, as Hager & Brudney (2011) concluded, the simple the volunteer recruitment strategy, the more beneficial outcomes for the organization and the served community.
References
Anheier, H. K. (2014). Nonprofit organizations: Theory, management, policy (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Hager, M. A., & Brudney, J. L. (2011). Problems recruiting volunteers: Nature versus nurture. Nonprofit Management and Leadership, 22(2), 137-157
Bekkers, R., & Wiepking, P. (2011). A literature review of empirical studies of philanthropy: Eight mechanisms that drive charitable giving. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 40(5), 924-973.