Before you rush off to search for and engage volunteers, stop. Thrashing around, doing ineffective recruitment is easy.

There are many reasons for why volunteer recruitment will fail – or at least will fall well short of the manager’s ideals.

Your CSO must be fit to recruit.

Understand variables

Engaging volunteers demands that the CSO displays a sound image – something that it wants to communicate to the would-be volunteer. We discuss what’s needed. Image takes time to build.

It’s illuminating to review the adverts for volunteers on CSO online forums and gateways. Over periods of months, there’s little change. For some, there’s little change year by year with the same adverts repeated time and again. The CSOs never seem to find their volunteers. And those who do often advertise again for the same post some months later.

Certainly, our own experience is that CSOs that advertise often fail to attract the right person. They often engage someone temporarily and make a wild card appointment some significant time later. Then they start all over again.

To make sense of the search process, managers of volunteers must understand three interacting variables: trigger, image (or opinion as we call it in the image), and opportunity. Like chicken and egg, it’s difficult to know where to start. For the CSO, it should be with image. Would-be volunteers must have a good positive attitude toward the organisation based on a positive image.

Building an image in potential volunteers is a long-term ongoing activity and we devote other articles to this alone. But for the would-be volunteer, everything starts with the trigger.

There are many triggers occurring in people’s lives. It may be that, when children start school, the parents are motivated to contribute to their community. Or when adults retire, they feel need to make friends and see volunteering as a means.

But trigger and image (opinion) are no good unless the potential volunteer can perceive how they might contribute, and how they might benefit. With attitude stemming from image, they are minded. With trigger, they might act. But there’s nothing certain that your CSO would be the beneficiary when the time comes. The would-be volunteer must perceive a role for themselves.

The trigger, image (opinion) and opportunity triad imply a long-term process. First build the image, then advertise the opportunities and catch those who, at a point in time, experience a trigger. It’s sadly so often an arm’s length process, where impersonal managers work to attract impersonal volunteers. They hope that when they meet there’s a spark and they hit it off. A bit like online dating. Swipe right for a match. A lot about chance.

But in the economy and employment, many firms abandoned this approach years ago. It might work for routine service jobs – with hundreds of applicants pouring duff CVs into an online portal for the hiring manager to sift. But for any sort of specialism, the firm makes the move. They headhunt – searching for exactly who they want. This is the model we advocate for volunteer recruitment, and we discuss this fully in other articles.

Dystopian management

Secondly, why would you try to attract new volunteers when you know your management of volunteers is dystopian?

Research suggests that most volunteers are unhappy about the quality of management in their CSO. And if those who joined think it’s poor, you can be certain that those who didn’t join, or those who ignored adverts, felt even stronger. This issue is so great that investigation and introspection is essential. Simply, is your management of volunteers good? Employees might tolerate poor management because the job pays the bills, or it is a stepping stone in a career, but volunteers won’t.

Start by completing leaving interviews – chats with every volunteer who leaves you to find out why they’re going. Knowing why they’ve left helps you as manager change management methods to ensure volunteers stay in the future.

Strip away all the crap that you do. It’s called the acid test – metaphorically pour a dose of acid over the whole CSO. The aim is to melt away all the poor processes, procedures, and methods. Anything that passes the ‘acid test’ is sound. Of course, you as incumbent manager may think that stuff that you do is valuable and good. You likely implemented it, after all. It may therefore take an external consultant to help you see what’s good and what’s not.

Why, for example, have poor communications or technology or methods prevailed in your CSO such that new volunteers can't contribute? Like your insistence that governor meetings are held in person when modern society has moved on from that ancient paradigm. Why, for example, do you turn a blind eye when your lead volunteers take a fortnight to respond to emails from volunteers with basic questions that stop them making task progress. Or do you lazily include remote trustees via a cellphone placed in the middle of the table? They can't see the slides, or the people, or hear the proceedings. CSOs are full of this sort of stuff – arcane and broken management policies, procedures and practices.

Before you start recruitment, get your house in order. You must be ready. When volunteers join you, you must know they’ll stay.

Use methods known to work

Thirdly, determine what your recruitment and selection policies, procedures and practices will be and why. Only use those that are known to work.

There are many examples of poor recruitment and selection practices based on myth. Here are a few.

Why demand references when you know they're not worth the paper they're written on? Most organisations and private individuals will not give a reference citing anything other than fact. And fact can be found from many sources without demanding a reference. Extending questions to ask about trustworthiness, for example, is futile. And many volunteers won’t want to ask a friend for a reference until they are sure they’ll like volunteering with you. Until they’ve started volunteering. References burn a lot of social capital – you might be discouraging volunteers by demanding something that’s worthless anyway.

On this theme of crass practices, why hold hideous panel interviews where each of three, or even five, panel members throw questions at the volunteer. They are so confrontational and set the tone for a poor volunteer-CSO relationship from the start. The volunteer is thrust in front of a bunch of nodding heads. And it gets worse when no-one on the panel knowns how to interview and the event has not been set up to work in the first place. We discuss interviewing later.

And why advertise and sit waiting for folk to come to you when you know who your future recruits are. The Scouts are an example of an organisation that had many thousands of volunteers over many years of its existence. These volunteers moved through life stages and many ceased involvement years ago. Some moved away. But many didn’t and stayed around. They may now be at a different life stage and be open to an approach to volunteer again. Metaphorically, it’s seeking the low-hanging fruits. Approach those who left you in the past. They might now be open to renewed involvement.

Get your management in order

Start by asking very basic questions about what you know, who you know, and how you will go about finding the right volunteer for the right volunteer post. Ditch the myth. Do what will realise success.

But beware – your management policies, procedures and practices may take months, even years to fix. Change may be at a local level, or at district, regional or national level with change affecting hundreds of people. Revising management may even need personnel changes.

Start now. Don’t wait util you are under pressure to find a new lead volunteer because the Cub Pack, or whatever, is about to fold.