How to Drive Employee Recruitment Success with Volunteering

In recent years, job seekers have increasingly pursued and prioritized employment opportunities with socially responsible companies. In fact, studies show that 75% of millennials (who also comprise the largest portion of the American workforce) would take a pay cut to work for a socially responsible organization.

With these trends in mind, it’s no wonder CSR has taken center stage as a talent acquisition asset. In this guide, we’ll explore how you can leverage a popular CSR program—employee volunteering—to attract the top talent to your company.

1. Volunteering Bolsters Your Employer Brand

Your reputation as an employer significantly shapes your ability to engage potential talent. Developing this reputation (known as your employer brand) lays the foundation for the rest of your recruitment practices. 

With that in mind, volunteering and other CSR initiatives are must-haves for any socially-conscious company. By actively developing and investing in your employee volunteer program, you’ll set your business apart from competitors and disseminate your brand through broader channels, reaching audiences new to your products or services. 

According to Lever's guide to recruitment marketing, you can further develop your outreach by:

• Using social proof. To win over potential candidates, display your genuine commitment to volunteering. Strengthen your messaging by collecting quotes from important stakeholders, such as employee volunteers and beneficiaries, that speak to the impact of your volunteering program.
• Boosting thought leadership in the nonprofit space. Public speaking opportunities (such as webinars or panels) allow you to spread your awareness of your business and build credibility, especially in the nonprofit space. By addressing critical social issues in a public forum, you can attract candidates who could help solve the presented issues.

Ultimately, purpose-driven outreach will help your company develop a more favorable employer brand while maintaining communication and fostering transparency with prospective candidates for your open roles.

2. Volunteering Develops Company Culture

Studies show that 88% of job seekers think having a strong company culture is important, yet only 15% of employees perceive their company cultures as strong. Develop (and promote) a robust company culture to beat these trends and attract new recruits. 

Investing in your employee volunteering program is a great way to strengthen your company culture on all fronts. With many businesses reporting trends like increased employee engagement, loyalty, and productivity due to their programs, it’s only natural to increase your buy-in into employee volunteering.

To gauge your volunteer program’s impact on company culture, measure data like employee satisfaction with company culture and compare it with your volunteer program signup information. If those trends mirror each other, survey employees to confirm whether volunteering has impacted your company culture and how.

If you find a positive relationship, you can speak to that in your recruitment marketing materials. If there’s room for improvement, both with overall employee participation or program operation, prioritize working with your team to address any issues. 

3. Volunteering Provides Extra Experience

Whether you need to maintain a donation page or package meals for a local food kitchen, employees can learn new tactical skills and strengthen those they already have via volunteering.

When gauging recruitment success, your data-gathering should extend past the initial contract signing and even onboarding processes. You’ll also need to work with HR to collect metrics that measure the intersection between hiring quality, professional development, and company culture.

For instance, according to JazzHR’s guide to recruitment data, you might track these key performance indicators (KPIs):

• Hiring manager satisfaction, which gauges how satisfied hiring managers are with candidates after a certain period of employment (usually measured on a quarterly basis).

• Quality of hire, which gauges the ratings of new hires by multiple managers or team members (usually measured on a quarterly basis).

• Employee retention rate, which measures how long employees stay with your company over time.

Not only does employee volunteering provide skill-building opportunities, but it can also help your team provide a great initial experience to the employee. Strengthening their connection to the company via volunteering can improve long-term metrics like those mentioned above, informing your hiring strategies going forward. 

4. Volunteering Helps Source New Hires

Volunteerism is often based on community outreach and support. This means that your team is likely to actively engage with new organizations and communities regularly through your volunteering program.

This is a direct pipeline for your business to make new connections and promote your hiring efforts. Plus, you can use skills-based volunteering activities to find prospects naturally gifted at certain roles and develop their skills before encouraging them to apply to your company. 

Engage prospective hires by:

• Providing educational resources, like pamphlets, that explain what your business does and which roles you have available. 

• Collaborating strategically with certain nonprofits, like those related to your business’ products or industry.

• Working with the host nonprofit to cross-promote your hiring opportunities to beneficiaries outside volunteer sessions.

Take these efforts even further by empowering job seekers directly via your volunteer program. For instance, you could offer interview etiquette and resume resources to candidates sourced from volunteer opportunities. Through these workshops, your employees can volunteer to help job seekers write winning resumes and speak to their skills compellingly.

Remember, this offering isn’t meant to give these candidates an unfair advantage in your job pool—you should instead approach it as a learning opportunity that bridges systemic gaps and encourages passionate people to apply.

At the end of the day, getting your employees to volunteer can bolster your business’s talent acquisition process. However, your success depends on your business being present in the community you’re seeking talent in and creating pathways for engagement that lead to proactive recruiting.

Your hiring team needs to work closely with your CSR team to pull off this shared messaging effort. Meet at the beginning of the year to create a talent acquisition strategy that supports both your department’s needs and your business as a whole. Then, check in with each other every quarter to ensure you’re on track.