We’re holding a free live Preparing for a Job Search Clinic on September 4th 2025 (click here to register), and there are opportunities for individual counseling (click here for details).
This article builds on points made in two other articles:
Writing a Resume suggests a three step process to constructing a resume; and
Writing a Cover Letter advises to keep to a one-page summary of your unique value proposition as a solution to a nonprofit’s challenges.
Taken together your resume and cover letter make the case: “I can solve your challenges, so interview me.” Once you have your resume and cover letter, then what?
Next Step: Get Your Resume and Cover Letter Seen by Those Hiring
People hiring fall into two categories: those who already know you and those who don’t.
Getting an interview is a breeze IF the person hiring already knows and likes you, and IF you’re a good solution to their particular nonprofit’s problem-set. If you know such people and are on a job hunt (or expect to be), call them. Call them right now. Get in front of them. They’ll glance at your materials, but most of the time they’ll just want to chat with you and think through whether you’re a good fit for the position. You should know fairly quickly.
More challenging is getting in front of people who don’t already know you. This is where the vast majority of potential opportunities are, and these folks are likely already inundated with resumes. Platforms are designed to make it easy to get lots of AI-shaped and supplied materials. On these resumes will be all sorts of claimed qualifications.
Below I’ll list various options you have to receive serious consideration as a candidate, but first off it’s important to understand that your materials (resume and cover letter) and every other element of the process will be part of your pitch to the people hiring and their influencers.
Written materials should be authentic. These materials, your way of approaching those involved in the recruiting effort, your style, the facts you present (or gaps in factual data), and everything about you that is available on-line … all are part of your audition for the role you wish to occupy. You are the product, and there are organizations that need that product. Your job is to make the market aware of your existence and unique value proposition. There is only ever one opportunity to make a good first impression, and every interaction builds on that first impression.
People hiring who don’t already know you, have specific needs. They must quickly gain insight into your accomplishments at different organizations, your likely knowledge of their key workflows, the different challenges and environments you’ve worked in that might be relevant to them, and then your motivations, professional style and character. If at any point they find important gaps they will turn their attention elsewhere.
Your challenge is to bridge the knowledge gap while collecting information that you need. You too don’t want to waste your time pursing opportunities that never materialize.
Getting in Front of People Hiring
Getting in front of people hiring is a workflow with logical steps and specific tasks that can be learned and practiced. Anyone can become very good at it. The breakdown of steps will be familiar to anyone who sells products & services or who raises funds. There’s no secret sauce, just hard work, a reasonably thick skin and persistence. Candidates who learn and execute this kind of workflow will end up holding more satisfying positions at higher salaries.
Target. Identify nonprofits that could have a potential interest in your services, then determine whether they are hiring for a particular role that interests you. Next identify the actual people doing the hiring, and know their titles, names and contact information. When you have the name of such a nonprofit, the role in question, and the name of the person (or people) involved in hiring, you have a mature “lead”. By way of contrast, an immature lead is one where you suspect there are roles you’d like to occupy at particular nonprofits, but you have very limited intelligence on whether there is a need right now and who the deciders are. A cluster of leads is called a “pipeline”. You can analyze your pipeline along two axis: desirability of a position to you personally (every individual is different so you will have a lot of different criteria to weigh) and your chances of being selected for that particular job.
Once you have your leads listed, you’ve gathered intelligence on them and you have analyzed the opportunities in your pipeline, you will have segmented the market for your services. In other words, you now have a specific agenda of people to call and engage, in a particular order. Market segmentation is an iterative process and is never done (at least not until you have landed your next position). Now your job is to increase your chances for an offer, and that leads to the next step: approaching and engaging the decider – the person hiring.
Approach. Always use the most direct possible approach to the person hiring, and fall back to the next most direct approach if needed… and the next. If you know the decider personally, call the decider. If you don’t know that person but know an influencer, call the influencer and have that person introduce you to the decider. If the decider uses a search firm, then that search firm can provide your path in. If you can’t talk to a person, write. If you need to go through a series of filters then go through those filters.
While it seems to be becoming quite rare, some organizations still use HR professionals in traditional ways, where a valued HR lead has a deep understanding of the strategies and needs of the organization and its chief executive. m/Oppenheim Executive Search collaborates with some professionals like this, along with CEOs and other executives. Such HR professionals are no-nonsense, deeply knowledgeable and are a real asset to candidates and to recruiters like us. Never be afraid to ask such people for guidance.
The most shallow and undifferentiated path into your target will be through gateways everyone uses – platforms like LinkedIn, Indeed and/or an Applicant Tracking System (ATS). Such platforms have their place… just know you are competing with all the other data points in their system, each data point increasingly shaped by AI and distanced from reality. Platforms favor those HR people and those recruiters who willingly function as a sort of human platform interface. Along with everyone else you’ll participate in those systems, particularly if that’s your only route in, but always actively seek other routes in where the context of your work and your fit can be assessed by the people hiring.
The fact is that transforming candidates into datapoints is a singularly ineffective way to select nonprofit leaders who are expected to deliver outcomes for and with other people. Context is what differentiates each candidate, and when a potential nonprofit employer tolerates you being treated like just another data point it’s generally a sign of a poorly led organization. More information on this topic from the point of view of those hiring can be found in our article, “A thousand resumes walk into a bar…”
Bottom line for candidates: your Approach to gain access to those hiring should include a combination of methods and tools. The least effective approaches are those where you’re treated like an undifferentiated number that is herded, categorized and filtered by machines that use human interfaces. The more personal approaches are far more effective, but require particular skills to engage your target. It will require repetitive hard work, a lot of in-person communication, and the resilience to persist in the face of rejection after you’ve invested effort and emotional capital. Keep going and stay positive – you can do this!
Meet & Pitch. The objective of meetings for both sides is to:
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- collect intelligence about whether the candidate has the technical skills and other qualifications required for the role, and whether the role remains interesting to the candidate;
- assess personal and cultural fit;
- build relationships through repeated exposure.
If you are hired, such meetings can also position you for a good start in your new role. If you are not hired then you can sometimes build relationships that are useful in getting you another position.
There is a lot about a job hunt that is like the instructions on a bottle of shampoo: wash, rinse and repeat – execute the same relatively simple workflow over and over.
Embrace the skills of a hunter, become an empowered candidate.
Seeking a job isn’t very complicated, but it does require organizational skills and a particular work ethic. You will need to follow specific steps. You will need to practice your pitch, and ensure you clearly communicate your unique value proposition without wasting time. Candidates must learn to get along with, possibly even make friends with, all sorts of people, and in the process navigate all sorts of issues raised by deciders and influencers. And we all must learn to persist through rejection.
A job search is an opportunity to strengthen really valuable life skills. I don’t want to wax poetical or get too esoteric here, but we professionals can learn a lot from interacting with other professionals, and we can always improve our interpersonal skills. Because income is at stake, looking for a job is stressful. If we also inject some perspective and see the job search as an opportunity for personal and professional growth, it can change our experience of the process.
So let’s get out of our comfort zone, meet new people, build our professional networks and knowledge while we also build on our outreach and social skills. Let’s also practice having a more balanced perspective. A whole lot of good can come from a job hunt if we embrace it with positive energy.
And you will always have our support – please click on the links below at need and we’ll try to help, coach and be a trusted sounding-board.
We’re holding a free live Preparing for a Job Search Clinic on September 4th 2025 (click here to register), and there are opportunities for individual counseling (click here for details).
To recruit nonprofit c-suite leaders & staff or for strategy support services, email info[@]moppenheim.com or call (415) 762-2650.