TL;DR

Charity Entrepreneurship is trying for the second time to recruit a Director of Outreach. It’s a crucial and impactful role that will manage a team tasked with creating and maintaining diversified talent pipelines of participants for our programs. If you refer someone who ends up being selected and passes their probation, CE will donate £1,000 to a charity of your choice. 

The problem

As CE scales up, one of our biggest bottlenecks is finding highly talented, value-aligned people to apply to our programs, receive training, and launch the top charity ideas our research team has found or become top-notch researchers. In the past three years, we have found that the best predictor of which incubated charities will end up causing the highest impact is the quality of the co-founding team. We estimate the impact of the average Incubation Program alumnus to be equivalent to donating USD 300,000 per year to effective charities, so finding these gems is difficult but extremely high-impact.

CE seeks a Director of Outreach to take our outreach strategy to the next level and solve this bottleneck. We unsuccessfully tried to recruit for this role in Q4 2023, which we suspect was ironically due to lower-than-optimal outreach. The resulting pool of candidates was small, and the median quality needed to be higher. This time around, we’re casting the net quite widely and trying new approaches to increase the quality of the talent pool, such as a referral program.

The referral program

A conventional referral program motivates current employees in an organization to find and refer qualified candidates from their connections. Usually, as an incentive, the employer offers a referral bonus to the employee who made the referral if the person referred successfully gets the position. Some evidence suggests these schemes are an effective way to source high-quality candidates, leading to better retention and better overall performance.

We think it would be worthwhile to experiment with such a program, particularly for a role as crucial as Director of Outreach, where the returns on a high-quality candidate could be significant. To make it more aligned with our values (and also to enable the broader community to participate), we are adapting the program and committing to donating £1,000 to a charity chosen by the person who refers a successful candidate to us (‘successful’ meaning that they’re selected for the role and they pass their probation). 

The chosen charity would need to be registered in their relevant country of operation (or have a way to collect donations via, for example, a fiscal sponsor). Individuals or groups working on charitable projects are not eligible, although if the referrer works for the charity chosen, that is fine. We will ask for some light documentation before making the donation (e.g. proof of registration). 

How you can help

If you suspect someone you know would be a good fit for this role, send them the job ad and encourage them to apply! Even if you’re uncertain about fit and all you have is an inclination, share the job with them anyway. They are also encouraged to apply even if they don’t think they fully meet the requirements, as we care deeply about mindset and value alignment with our approach and are skilled at finding people with high potential whose growth we are happy to facilitate.

A question in the application form asks them to select how they heard about the job. Make sure to mention they should select ‘Someone I know referred me’, and we’ll be in contact to know who that someone is. 

If they’re selected and successfully pass their probation (around 3 months after their first day), we’ll contact you to let you know and get instructions on who you’d like to donate to. 

Thank you all!