A longtime CASE volunteer reached out to me the other day with an unfortunate, but familiar, announcement. “My annual fund director just gave me her two-week notice. She was snapped up by another institution,” he said. 

This time of year, it’s a familiar refrain—people are moving on from one role to another. They often stay within educational advancement, but they move to a different institutional type or a different role at another school. The frustrating piece—and one we have been talking about for decades—is that we tend to poach from other schools or colleges to fill our openings, creating a revolving, chessboard of moving pieces within advancement with no end in sight. 

The questions are obvious, but the answers are not: how do we stop this cycle? And how do we ensure sufficient workforce in educational philanthropy and engagement? 

For mid-career professionals like a Director of Annual Fund or a similar role, we need to consider candidates from outside the field with transferable skills. Roles like sales, admissions, banking, customer service, business development, event management, and others lend themselves to various types of work within advancement. 

Are we considering those candidates with the same weight as others who have specific institutional experience? The only way forward for many schools will be to find ways to attract talent but be willing to take a risk in order to infuse our industry with both new ideas and fresh faces. But how do we assess for those sorts of skills that make someone good at advancement? For front-line roles and engagement professionals, here are several ideas to get you started:

1. Assess for data-driven thinking and acumen. Perhaps someone has never used a fundraising database or comes from a role where they haven’t had to use much data before. In order to assess a candidate’s ability to either learn new things or find clues in a dataset, ask them to sit for a brief assessment as part of the interview process. Ask them to do basic functions in Excel or to intuit in your actual database a way to pull a certain report. Perhaps they could look at snapshots of your dashboards at a certain point and make observations about what the numbers are telling them. Either virtually or in the office, create a dataset or redact an actual list of donors and ask the candidate to tell you what they’re seeing in the numbers.
    
2. Assess for strategic thinking. Building on the data assessment, design a strategic assessment to the role for which you’re hiring. If the role is for annual fund, perhaps include year-over-year data and ask for observations; perhaps drive the conversation to potential strategy around a certain outcome. While the candidate will likely not have tried-and-true answers or ideas, ask probing questions to ascertain if they approach the work with the right mindset. If the role is for a front-line or major gifts fundraiser, try using redacted donor data and profile notes to generate a conversation about those donors. Someone with sales experience will immediately recognize the concept of moving a prospect from one stage to another, so ask that person questions about how they might approach asking for a gift using the available notes and data as a guide. The approach works for engagement roles as well; create fictional or quasi-fictional scenarios and ask the candidate to walk you through how they might go about solving common problems faced by advancement professionals.
    
3. Assess for drive and follow-up. Stewardship is at the heart of every role in the advancement office, so assess for a candidate’s follow-through and sense of emotional intelligence. Ask them to design a stewardship campaign, giving them a fictional budget and timeframe. Or, more simply, ask them to discuss ways in which they’ve felt cared for by an institution in their life and how they might apply a similar approach to the work at your school. Most importantly, ask specific questions about timing and urgency; finding candidates who feel a sense of urgency around connection and issuing the all-important “thank you” will go a long way to determining a candidate’s aptitude for this work.
    
4. Assess for listening skills. Active listening skills are important to any facet of work in schools, but especially in external affairs. All advancement professionals in schools are at some point forward facing, so assess for someone’s ability to really listen to constituents. During the interview process, set the candidate up with one or two other people on campus (a parent volunteer, a division head, a teacher—anyone you also know fairly well) with the sole goal of “getting to know” someone else in the school or more about the school itself. Follow up with the candidate after those conversations to find out what they learned about their potential new colleagues. Were they able to read between the lines? Pick up on important cues about what’s important to that person? Their ability to relay pertinent details to you after the fact will tell you a lot about whether that person might be suited to a forward-facing role.
    
5. Ask specific questions from references. If you find the right candidate who you believe could be a good fit, ask pointed questions about them. Instead of asking about strengths in the workplace, ask about strengths with other people, with listening skills, with making data-driven decisions. Ask those references to cite a time when the candidate had to solve a problem with limited resources or make changes to existing plans on the fly. We’re nothing if not unpredictable in schools. Ask references (and the candidates!) how comfortable the candidate is with pivoting from one plan to another and how they might approach a mid-strategy change. Moreover, ask how the reference thinks this person might fare in a different role or industry from the one they’re leaving. You’ll gain lots of insight about that candidate and you’ll be better positioned to judge whether they’ll be a fit at your school.

These are just a few ideas to get you started, and this list is obviously not exhaustive. We need to seriously consider how we publicize our openings and from which sectors we might draw new talent. While posting within association boards and other similar school-only sources is certainly valuable, it is important to cast a wide net. We should also consider how to structure a role description to include language about transferable skills. Decide what your “musts” are and then state that you’re willing to give on-the-job training to the person with the right transferable skillset. While we’re in the thick of hiring season, remember that many of us in this world didn’t go into advancement on purpose, at least not at first. You could be in a position to find the next rising star coming from another field.