Angela Manginelli · Recruiter, Funraise | Although she's only been with Funraise a matter of months, Angela has had a profound impact on our culture and practices. Hear how she's leading the #HumaneHiringMovement and how you can do it, too.

If you're following Funraise CEO and Co-founder Justin Wheeler on LinkedIn, you know that Funraise is hiring. We have lots and lots of positions to fill and we're not shy about getting the word out. You may also be hearing the AWESOME public feedback that we're getting on our hiring process—even from candidates that we didn't hire.

What you may not know, though, is that getting to that point was not easy. To help us navigate these new hiring waters, we brought on an incredible recruiter, Angela Manginelli. Although she's only been with Funraise a matter of months, Angela has had a profound impact on our culture and practices, including starting and leading our new humane hiring movement, so we thought it was high time we had her on the podcast to share her wisdom.

Angela has lots of experience dealing with awful hiring processes—she started her own nonprofit guiding new graduates through their first job hunts. And although building a new hiring blueprint has had its challenges, watching Angela lead our candidates and staff through her hiring process has convinced us that a great company culture starts with that very first interaction.

Listen in as Angela explains how infusing the hiring process with equity, transparency, and a great candidate experience isn't just the right—and humane—thing to do, but the best thing for your bottom line as well.

And if you're looking for your next awesome nonprofit job, subscribe to Funraise's newsletter and keep an eye on our Cool Nonprofit Jobs section. At the bottom of each week's newsletter, you'll find ways to do your best good work ever.

Hello, I'm Justin Wheeler, and welcome to this episode of Nonstop Nonprofit!

If you're following me on LinkedIn, you know that Funraise is hiring. We have lots and lots of positions to fill and we're not shy about getting the word out. You may also be hearing the AWESOME public feedback that we're getting on our hiring process—even from candidates that we didn't hire.

What you may not know, though, is that getting to that point was not easy. To help us navigate these new hiring waters, we brought on an incredible recruiter, Angela Manginelli. Although she's only been with Funraise a matter of months, Angela has had a profound impact on our culture and practices, including starting and leading our new humane hiring movement, so we thought it was high time we had her on the podcast to share her wisdom.

Angela has lots of experience dealing with awful hiring processes—she started her own nonprofit guiding new graduates through their first job hunts. And although building a new hiring blueprint has had its challenges, watching Angela lead our candidates and staff through her hiring process has convinced me that a great company culture starts with that very first interaction.

Listen in as Angela explains how infusing the hiring process with equity, transparency, and a great candidate experience isn't just the right—and humane—thing to do, but the best thing for your bottom line as well.

Let's dive in!

Justin Wheeler All right. Welcome back, listeners to Nonstop Nonprofit. This week, we're doing something a little different. We are interviewing somebody that works here at Funraise. And her name is Angela. Angela, how are you doing this morning?

Angela Manginelli I'm doing great. How are you doing, Justin?

Justin Wheeler I'm doing pretty good, thank you. Angela is our internal recruiter, which means she is involved with candidates at the very beginning of their journey here at Funraise. And we hired Angela at the beginning of actually 2022, as we knew we were getting ready to ramp up internally our own headcount across many different functions. And today, the reason why we're talking with Angela is because we want to talk about a concept called humane hiring. It's something that actually Angela brought up quite a bit during the interview process, and it's something that we have been stumbling through, hopefully gracefully as we've been implementing our own new sort of humane hiring practices. And so to kick start, Angela tell us a little about yourself, your background and what you do here at Funraise.

Angela Manginelli Absolutely. So I am, my name is Angela Manginelli. Pronouns are she, her, hers? I have been with Funraise for four months and I serve as the talent acquisition manager and recruiter. Prior to coming to Funraise, I was working in higher education and specifically in international education and career development. So I was kind of on the other side of the process working with students when they came back from studying abroad to know how to take the transformative experience they had had, put it on paper, talk about it in interviews and things like that. I also had the opportunity to, with colleagues, start and unfortunately a decade later closed down my own nonprofit, which is sort of what led me to Funraise. When I learned about Funraise as a tool and as a company, I was really excited because it would have been a game changer had I known about it a decade ago or, you know, many years ago. And for me, it was what I love about my job is having an opportunity to kind of change things on the other side of the hiring process. So yeah.

Justin Wheeler Yeah. I mean it's, it's been really interesting to see it. I think we've hired over ten people since you've been on board at Funraise and it's been really interesting, you know, not just to get their feedback about the process they went through to get a job to Funraise. But also even candidates that were turned away who maybe didn't meet the qualifications that we were looking for and even to hear positive feedback from them about their experience. And that is 100% due to your commitment and effort to a humane hiring process. Can you tell us what does that mean for organizations tuning in? And the reason why we're talking about this today is because I know and we all know that there is a lot of open job positions in the nonprofit industry today. We see it all the time, left and right organizations looking to find great people. And I think this is often what we see is you don't see, you know, strong human resources. You don't see strong recruiting efforts at the nonprofit level. And so I want to talk to you about this because we see this as a big opportunity for organizations to stand out with a still a very competitive candidate pool. So all that said, what is humane hiring and why is it important?

Angela Manginelli To me human hiring is a shift away from treating people like a number, right. We know that on average in this is pre-pandemic, there were 250 applicants for every position that was posted. That's a lot of people, right. And I think we hear these nightmare stories of candidates applying and they're like we never hear back from a company. And I think we have a really unhealthy way of approaching hiring just sort of nationally and globally. And to me, humane hiring is an opportunity to really keep the candidate and their experience at the forefront. So making sure that we are being really thoughtful and it doesn't cost money to do that, right? It's merely communicating with candidates, letting them know what is going to be expected of them as they navigate the interview and hiring process. Just being really as clear and transparent with them at the beginning as possible. In my mind, greater transparency equals a positive candidate experience and it allows them, I mean, I've had countless candidates that have said, I can't believe how transparent you were in your job description. You know, you're sort of laying everything out for me. And I think, you know, speaking to what you mentioned earlier, as far as candidates that go through the entire hiring process and then don't get a job offer, still sending us really positive feedback and saying, you know, I'm really glad that I went through this process. I've learned so much and I'm going to be a stronger candidate in the future because I've gone through this process. So to me, human hiring is a. Into doing things differently and more humanely.

Justin Wheeler So on the transparency side, what's the difference between, you know, a transparent experience and a non-transparent experience? Like how can an organization, because some organizations might think we're transparent, like here's the job description, here's what you're going to do. So what do you mean by transparency and how can organizations take it up a notch?

Angela Manginelli That's a great question. I think for us at Funraise, transparency does begin. In the job description, we give the salary expectation. That to me is such a small thing, but it's so important not only from an equity standpoint in making sure that candidates are being paid fairly, but also just knowing, is this a process that I want to engage in? Is it worth my time? Right. If you're going to pay someone $75,000 and they want $110K, then they probably don't need to go through our process, right. So just making sure that you are giving salary transparency, talking to them about what the interview process is, okay, you're going to submit the application, then you're going to hear from the recruiter. You know, you're going to be invited to a phone screening. From there, you know, there's two more interviews, that sort of thing. One of the things that I appreciate that we've done at Funraise is we've capped our interviews at three. That is the most interviews you're going to go through. That's two and a half hours of time, right? Half-hour phone screening. And then typically a hiring manager interview, which will be up to an hour and then a group cross-functional cross-departmental interview, which is up to an hour. That's still a significant commitment. But I've talked with a lot of candidates and they're like, you know, I've gone through ten interviews. You're not talking about being the president. You know what I mean? Like, this is what we are putting candidates through is ridiculous in a lot of cases. So I think that just those two small things just adding, you know, what you're going to be paying and what the process will look like is a small but important step going beyond that, we have 30, 60, 90-day expectations for each role, as well as how a new hire will continue to be evaluated in that role. We're letting them know in advance like this is a part of our process. We have a really a beautiful career development program that was was here before I got here. But that ties directly like the job description, ties directly to how they're going to be reviewed and how they're going to receive salary increases and things like that as they go. So there's a really intentional throughline through the process.

Justin Wheeler That's great. Thank you for that information. I think, you know, for the executives listening, you know, something I hear quite often is specifically around transparency with compensation on the job hosting itself. You know, the concern executives have is, well, you know, the people on my team that have the similar positions that were here two or three years ago, they're actually not making as much as we're posting these new positions because, you know, the market has changed and so forth. And so, you know, just from one executive to the next, you know, that was a real challenge we had and we've had to do true-ups, right. And we've had to make it right with team members who hold the same titles, and the market has shifted. I mean, in many, many cases it has shifted overnight with inflation and so forth. And so, yes, like this is part of what I mean when we stumbled through it, it's we post the positions didn't think necessarily through how this could impact existing team members and we've had to right size and make that adjustment. You know, the lesson learned there is it shouldn't take putting a job with a salary request to right-size your employees. It really should be something that we do more consistent on an ongoing basis, right. And so I think that the idea of like posting comp on a job description is only radical if we're not taking care of our employees to begin with. If we're taking care of our employees, it's not so radical and it's not going to cause problems. And so I think that's an important step for sure in recognizing and also as a challenge, right. And I think the thing I want to communicate to you is this can be incremental, right? You can make incremental steps to become a more humane hiring team. Certainly, that's what we've done. Again, we haven't gotten it right every time. We're still going through the process. Okay, moving on from what is humane hiring and onto the why behind this. Why should organizations why should nonprofits care about putting their candidates through a humane process?

Angela Manginelli That's a great question, and I think it actually kind of goes back to what you were just saying as far as having to do evaluations about pay and making sure that you're being really thoughtful about that. The hiring process is the first, it's the beginning of the long term relationship with the candidate who becomes the new hire, who, you know, you want to have tenure at your organization. Humane hiring starts the relationship in a positive way and I've had so many candidates that have said, if you're this transparent from your job description and from your hiring process, I can only imagine what a joy it's going to be to work at the organization, right. So you're creating this really good foundation that's going to help retain employees. I mean, there's all sorts of data about how, you know, when employees leave. It cost thousands of dollars to be able to replace them. So the goal not only for me as a recruiter, but for you, as you know, the CEO and a co-founder, is to want to keep good talent when you have it. And I think human hiring allows you to do that. You're creating this trust in this relationship with the candidate that is going to continue for their entire employee lifecycle. And that's really important. Yes, it's the right thing to do. Yes, there's you know, there's all sorts of reasons that are small and speak to the individual. But like, bottom line, this is going to positively impact your bottom line. It's going to keep talent with you. It shows your employees that you care about them and that you're being really intentional in how you treat them in the entire process. And I think that's super important. You know, one in four people left their previous roles in 2021. That wasn't a coincidence, right? It was because people want to be supported and trusted and appreciated and compensated. If you do that as a company, that's more than half the battle, right? You're keeping people there. And it starts from the beginning with how you treat them in the interview process. If you treat them poorly, there it's not going to get any better when they're working for you. Right. But if you treat them, if you treat them fairly from the beginning, they're going to trust you and they're going to be willing to go on a journey with you. And I think part of that, too, is in the interview process, admitting where you are, like we talk with candidates about, you know, we are, we're a tech startup and things will change, but we're going to communicate with you. And I think candidates really appreciate our transparency and our honesty about that. And then it's up to them to make the decision, hey, is this going to suit where I want to be in the next chapter or not? But again, we're sort of playing the short in the long game, right? We may not bring someone on now or they may say, you know what, this is not where I am right now in my career. But that doesn't mean that we're not starting a positive relationship that we'll be able to maintain in the future. And hopefully, there will be an opportunity in the future for them to join our team.

Justin Wheeler Absolutely. When you think about sort of like the experience that you can provide a candidate and how that sort of foreshadows what their experience is going to be like as an employee of the organization. You go back to your first example of an individual you spoke with that was like on their 10th interview and didn't know what was next and didn't even maybe even have a sense of whether or not they were going to get hired. At that point, that almost is like that person should be compensated for their time if you're really taking up ten interviews. You know, you can get a sense for how your employer is going to treat you as early as your experience in the interview process. And you know that's something I didn't appreciate until we brought you on the team and your sort of just commitment to this process is that, no like the candidate's experience is going to be their starting point, you know, at the organization. And so really need to hear that. Another actually a couple of questions here. So what are some things are some ways that organizations can do to be more humane in their hiring? Any like tips, I know we talked about kind of transparency in the job title, or job description and so forth, but anything else that you think is worth mentioning to help organizations understand what this looks like.

Angela Manginelli Absolutely. Well, I think something that I appreciated that Funraise was doing before I got here was sending out the questions for the interviews. Work is very rarely a pop quiz, right? And knowing that interviewing is inherently stressful for everybody involved, like why can't we make that just a little bit easier? And that was something, for me as a candidate, it gave me faith that Funraise was going to be at a point to move even more humanely in their hiring process, right. Because you were already doing it. So sending out questions to candidates and that really speaks to running a structured interview. You should be asking every single candidate for the role the same questions in the same order. And obviously, you know, they're going to bring up things and you can ask follow-up questions. And that was certainly something that we, you know, when we talk about like stumbling, that was something we had to figure out organizationally. Is it okay for us to ask follow-up questions? Yeah. So candidate is bringing something up in the interview, absolutely. But I think just making sure that you are giving each candidate the opportunity to showcase their talents, their abilities and and the best way to do that is to ask every question in the same order, right? So that way it's fair and equitable just at the base. I do think that also what else I'm trying to think of all the things that we do in this process. We let them know from the very beginning, one of the things that I do as a recruiter is I tell them, you are encouraged to negotiate your offer, when an offer, if an offer is made right. Top talent negotiates. We know that. It is a conversation. So that's something that I just tells candidates at the top. We actually have a video that we make, It's a video I made a short ten-minute video. It's nothing. It's not a Scorsese sort of thing, but it's like, hey, it's me sitting at my desk saying, with my background in career development, I want you to be successful. And here are some tips to being successful. Much like staff may not have had experience with interviewing in the past, I think we in being humane, we can provide tools and say, if you want to be the most successful in your application to this organization, here is what we encourage you to do for us, for our account executive role. For example, we do a role play. And so in the video that I've made for candidates, I just sort of talk, I walk them through, here's what our sales cycle looks like. Here is what the interview format is going to look like. And we've had so much positive feedback from candidates. Now, granted, part of this is in the candidate's court, right? Like you can give them all the tools and they may still not prepare. I recognize candidates are likely navigating multiple interviews with multiple companies. That's understood. But we are giving them every tool that we can to make sure that they're successful. And I think that is what we're doing differently and what I would love to see more companies doing. Having information on your website about, you know, here is our sort of ethos when it comes to hiring. And that's something that's a work in progress for us as well. I also think that surveying candidates after the experience, whether they get the job or not, is really important, right. This is an iterative process. We as you mentioned, we don't have it all figured out, but we are committed to constantly evaluating it and constantly making sure that we are keeping candidates top of mind in the interview process. So one of the things we're going to be doing before the end of the summer is surveying all of the candidates that basically I've been working with since the end of February and getting feedback from them whether they got the job or not and saying, you know, was this process humane for you and what could we be doing better? And then we can take that feedback and put it into play in the future. Outside of that, I think just really also communicating with candidates. We let candidates know within seven business days whether they are moving forward in the process or not. And we use an ATS, an applicant tracking system, so we can very easily see, you know, what date the candidate applied and where they are in the process. We have little sort of notifications if they're reaching that seven business day mark so that we can make sure we communicate with them. Candidates understand if you need more time, for example, as you're kind of wrapping up interviews, but they want to be hearing from you and knowing that you haven't forgotten them. There are nightmares of, you know, I joke that like I applied to a university years ago and I'm still waiting to hear back if I got the job right. Like, it's it's one of those things it cost nothing to send an email and to let candidates know where you are in the process. And so I think just communicating and being transparent and really thinking about what sort of process would you want to go through if you were a candidate at your own company.

Justin Wheeler Right, yeah. That's super helpful. And, you know, I think one of the items that you mentioned that I think is really hard in practice is sort of the feedback for candidates that ask, you know, why they didn't advance to the next phase or why they didn't end up getting the job. And a lot of organizations just kind of shy away from that for liability reasons. But I think, like, there are very practical and when you've committed to, you know, humane hiring from the beginning with a candidate, it's that part of closing the loop is incredibly important, and it can be done in a way where there's not. It removes liability. I don't think that this is something companies really need to need to be worried about if they do it and they approach it correctly, because we hear again, we hear lots of feedback from candidates. So it's a way around that, that they appreciate that and it makes them a better candidate in the future. And who knows if they come back and apply Funraise, maybe it prepares them more for the different positions that we have. And so lots of good stuff there. What are some lessons you learned in implementing humane hiring here at Funraise? We'd love to share some of those lessons with our listeners.

Angela Manginelli Good question. I think remembering that you can take baby steps, right? I'm one of those people that I'm thinking about the short game and the long game all of the time, right. I'm very strategic. So I'm like, okay, I've got this big idea for what I want to do and let's implement it immediately. I recognize I came in very quickly and was like, I have some ideas and we were able to implement a lot of them. But I think one of the things I recognized is change is scary. And so being really mindful about making sure that you're having those conversations. And really getting buy-in from everyone that's in the hiring process, getting them to understand this is actually not very different from what you were doing already. Right. And it's not restrictive. It's especially with like the structured interview process, you know, making sure that the hiring managers understand, you're still going to be able to get the answers that you need to make the hire. But we're going to do this in a way that is is leveling the playing field for all candidates. And I think just remembering that it is an iterative process. We're a work in progress, right? So we're constantly going to be making adjustments. And it's really important to be like from my side, the one driving the bus, like, I need to be flexible and I need to also be able to meet hiring managers where they are. Like, I'm keeping the candidate experience at the top of mind, but I also have to make sure that I am, you know, being collaborative with hiring managers and making sure that they're comfortable. I think as much as possible, doing training, being an interviewer is not, it's not something that comes natural. It's not something that we do in our daily life oftentimes. And so if you have staff that have never interviewed before, it's really important to make sure that you're doing some training so that you can manage expectations and kind of align across the team of like, here's what we're looking for. These are the questions we're going to be asking. Here are follow-up questions that, you know, that kind of build from each round of interview and just knowing that you're going to make mistakes, right? We're human. We're going to make mistakes. And we learn from those mistakes. And we make it better in the future. You know, we don't expect perfection. We just want progress. And I think that's really important to remember just in general as well.

Justin Wheeler Yeah, absolutely. You know, something that I remember earlier on in the process in rolling this out, like one of the more challenging, I think aspects of it, at least internally for us, was around sort of like the rubric of like what makes a good answer, right? And so part of the process internally is when you create your interview questions, you know, you create well, what makes a good response to these questions, which is why I'm a big fan of getting candidates these questions ahead of time so they can think through it because, like you said, very rarely in the job place do you have to make like a knee jerk decision without actually thinking it through or consulting somebody else on the team. Like it's, you know, most decisions are made within teams, not at like an individual like do or die sort of situation. That's why I'm a big fan of getting questions out but then you know for for the interviewers to actually be thinking well what do I what to hear what are what makes like a really good response? And, you know, one of the things we talked about early on was this also helps remove maybe implicit bias that we may have as interviewers and in the process, right. And so I do remember this was a challenging point because as we're rolling out and as we're hearing candidates sort of responses, it was kind of like we were like, it's a little bit more fluid than this. How do we iterate on top of the rubric? How do we iterate to ensure that we're we are like, you know, really thinking through the response correctly? And that's something that comes to mind when I'm thinking through sort of like the rollout of this and what, where I saw, like, where I saw it a little bit more challenging for us to kind of to move forward on. But I think we have sent out a really great sort of rhythm there and it's become important, a very important part of our process.

Angela Manginelli And the thing is, and I fully recognize, it is a time commitment at the beginning, right, to put together what we internally call our hiring blueprint. The hiring blueprint is really where we look at each round of hiring and we say, we're interviewing, I should say, and we decide, okay, here are the questions that I'm going to ask in the recruiter call. And this is what the hiring manager is going to ask in the second round. And then, you know, if there is a third round, here's what we're going to ask. They're those interview questions should all tie back to the job description, which again takes time. Right. You've got to look at your job description and kind of make sure that the things that are in there speak to how a candidate will be evaluated when they're in the role. And then we want to make sure that, in my opinion, the interview questions really everything should directly point back to the job itself. You know you hear stories of different companies asking, you know, what kind of animal would you want to be and why? Like, really do you need to know that? Is that important for them being an account executive, probably not, right? So I am a fan of just making sure that we're being really thoughtful with the questions that we're asking and we're not wasting a candidate's time or causing undue stress in that regard. So it is a time commitment at the top, just making sure that the hiring manager especially understands the more thorough they are there, the quicker we can actually move when we get into the hiring process itself. And so you spend some time at the top and you get it back at the end, basically.

Justin Wheeler Absolutely. So I want to take a minute here before I. See the next two questions. Just to share a little bit more with our listeners, you know why we're having this conversation. And at the top of the interview, you and I talked about just yeah, there's a ton of open job opportunities in the market today. Lots of candidates are looking for their next sort of career move. And as we've seen this and we see this all time. So Funraise, we work with thousands of nonprofits, got tens of thousands of users. We've got 100,000 plus people subscribed to our newsletter. We care deeply about this industry. We always have and always will. And one of the opportunities we see in the market as a company that's continuing to invest in the nonprofit industry is the opportunity to really promote and to bring a wider audience to these job postings and these job listings. Right. We've seen this and have heard from many of our customers that this is such a pain point for them, is just to find good candidates or to promote their positions without having the right sort of budget to do so. And because we believe we're uniquely positioned to bring a lot of eyeballs to the positions that you're posting about, we want to actually launch and we are launching something very soon that will be promoting your job postings, whether you're a fundraising customer or not. The only criteria for your posting to be listed and for us to promote it is that it has to be part of the humane hiring movement. And so, Angela, what advice would you give or how can organizations take steps today to be a part of the humane hiring movement?

Angela Manginelli Yeah, great question. Well, one, I'm just I'm really excited already. I mean, again, I've been here four months and the fact that this is already becoming like a much bigger movement than just Funraise is really exciting. I think for nonprofits that want to join us, it's really just making a decision to do it right. Like your candidates are going to thank you. Your hiring managers are going to thank you. Really looking at what is your hiring process right now? What are you doing that candidates love and what can you be doing better? Are you being as transparent as possible? Are you putting them through ten rounds of interviews like can you join us in just sticking to three, right? Can you join us in that space making sure that you have salary and interview process transparency in your job description, I think is a baseline, right? If you do nothing else, that's going to be more equitable and be more enjoyable and humane for candidates. But then just again, keeping in mind that like you want to have everyone on board, so start having these conversations as a staff with anyone that's hiring and really help them to understand and buy into the benefit of humane hiring in general. I think that to me is like the first step.

Justin Wheeler Mmm, Awesome. Well, thank you. And then lastly, you know, I'm always interested in people's just their own personal motivation behind. And this is something that you've really spearheaded here at Funraise and have really changed our culture for the better. What's what is your motivation and what's your long-term thinking and goals around humane hiring?

Angela Manginelli That's I love that question. I mean, again, for me, prior to coming to Funraise, I was on the other side of the process. So I was working with college students and recent grads, and I was hearing all of these stories and hearing all of their anxiety and stress about interviewing. And that is what made me want to be a recruiter. It's what made me want to join, Funraise and really be able to help change a system and a process that has been broken for a very long time. Right. And change takes time. But again, it's so exciting to see that it is like all in with it and then also encouraging other folks, nonprofits and others in the tech industry to do that. Like my long-term goal is world domination when it comes to hiring. Like I want every organization to be humane in their hiring. That is my long-term goal. Now it's going to take a minute to get there, but I think it's a ripple effect, right? If we're doing it and we can encourage other nonprofits to do it and to join us, there's safety in numbers and there's power in numbers. So once we have nonprofit organizations that are working with us, there's going to be pressure on other organizations. Hey, if they're doing it over in this sector, in this field and industry, why aren't you? Great question. Right. And it's a candidates market right now. So if you're not treating a candidate fairly and humanely, they're not going to stay with you. They're not going to go through your process. So for me, it's really just thinking about how can we encourage more organizations to be doing what is best for candidates and ultimately then best for us as an organization?

Justin Wheeler Absolutely. Well, and so thank you so much for sharing this with us and our listeners today. For those tuning in, again, we're very excited about this movement. We believe it's not only important, but it's necessary. As we continue growing our own impact as a business and as nonprofits. And all we have is one request from you, and that is to join the humane hiring movement. Thank you, everyone. Have a great day.

 

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