Building Alternative Talent Pools

The greatest challenge in the social enterprise space: scale. How do you move beyond a few cases of great work and great impact to a sector that has the potential for scale? How do you institutionalize and build good organizations around the successes that many social entrepreneurs have had with small pilots? There seems to be a lot of hype around some small scale organizations, but there needs to be a big push – a big push to create models that are actually scalable, cost effective, and efficient; a big push to attract investment; and finally, a big push to attract talent to the sector.

This is what Neera Nundy, Managing Partner of Dasra and leader of the track on Intellectual and Human Capital at the Khemka Forum on Social Entrepreneurship tomorrow, emphasized when I had the chance to sit down with her last week. According to Nundy, “As organizations think about growing their outreach, they need to think about growing thier teams in terms of expertise and skills.” Funding needs to be thought of as not only supporting programs, but being used to hire the people that you need to grow.

At the Khemka Forum, Nundy will be speaking about Alternative Talent Pools (ATPs). A fairly new term, ATPs are the groups of people who are attracted to the social enterprise sector but would not come to the sector through the normal streams. They can be housewives, women who have had children but want to be reintegrated into the workforce, government officials who have retired, students between undergraduate or graduate education, etc. They are a group of people who can be tapped to fill some of the HR gaps in the sector. And they are normally volunteers. For this reason, we must be cautious. According to Nundy, “It is really important for an organization to figure out what aspects of their work they can have ATPs really do. You don’t want a critical piece of your business to be temporary or volunteer. You need to think about matching the skill set with what the organization requires.”

An example of an organization that has successfully leveraged ATPs to scale, you might ask? I’ll give you three.

- Akanksha, an after-school program for primary school children, uses 300 housewife volunteers. Akanksha uses this group for fundraising , providing for and giving back to the children, and working with the children.

- GOONJ, an organization that collects used clothing, has used retirees to facilitate the collection process.

- And the winner? Dreamcatchers, an organization that helps children who have been affected by trauma heal. Dreamcatchers hired a blind woman to help them expand their work into other communities. It has been a huge success and she is now a paid employee, fully integrated into the team.

This said, finding talent is probably the number one issue most organizations face – whether they are for-profit or not-for-profit. So, how do we attract talent to the sector? Nundy notes that survey by Harvard Business School found that the number one thing people are motivated by is their immediate supervisor – how they help you, foster you, the relationship you have with them. Second – how important you feel your role is in the organization and if you are contributing to the successes in terms of the organization’s overall achievement. And, a lowly, third – pay. So what is the key take away? Not-for-profits and social enterprises need to stop grumbling that they can’t attract talent because of pay. It is no longer an acceptable excuse. According to Nundy, “If you motivate and inspire people, there is actually a lot of great talent. There is a lot of great talent that actually wants to make a difference. And it has actually become quite popular in a way. And so, a lot of it has to do with how the senior managers are inspiring enough to attract that talent, to create an environment in which these driven and talented people are motivated.”

We, as the social enterprise sector, need to give individuals the freedom and flexibility to take leadership roles easily. We need to create structures in which talented individuals can thrive. In another survey conducted among 1000 Fortune 500 companies that Nundy referenced, it is the first six months in which you determine if people are going to stay for a long time or not. “So, building a huge amount of support and integration and motivation in the first six months is critical. Investing in feedback, sitting with leadership, exploding new hires to work that you’ve been doing and your impact will all directly relate to whether an employee is going to say, which I think is not something that enough of us do. Instead, they throw you in and now it’s ‘sink or swim.’”

So now what? The Khemka Forum aims to spur action, to plot the roadmap for social entrepreneurship in India. Nundy’s approach to her track at the forum – to create a learning space where people bring problems to the table but we work together to find solutions. “It is challenging to build forums with the expectation that there is going to be a significant amount of action afterwards. A lot of times, especially when you have intellectual and human capital, people start to say – oh, no one wants to come, we can never pay them enough, or they join and then they leave. And it becomes a complaining session. We need to change that. We need to lay out the problems, to use the talent of the panel as well as the talent that is coming to Khemka to individually solve some key problems that are common to everyone.”

“We are going to work with the group to figure out what action you can take post-that. But I’d like everyone to leave our track feeling like some key issues were solved and that there were things that they could do once they return to their organizations. To actually change things.”