Foreword

Development of Recruitment Resources

The Eastern Volunteer Recruitment Project (EVRP) was established in 2000 to assist and increase the Home and Community Care (HACC) service system’s capacity to recruit and retain volunteers.

From the beginning, Community Service Organisation (CSO) site visits, surveys/questionnaires and general sector forums have told us that the development of materials for volunteer intake & orientation would be of value. Additionally research commissioned by the EVRP has reinforced this need.

The research uncovered patterns or gaps relating to volunteer recruitment and retention and helped to identify other volunteer management-related needs. The report was completed and launched in November 2003.

The EVRP research identified the lack of available volunteering resources and the EVRP Volunteer Orientation Kit was developed first. This will now be complemented by the Volunteer Recruitment Kit.

This kit has been created to provide a good practice benchmark and to help CSOs with more effective volunteer recruitment.  However, it is recognised that a lack of resources will often make it difficult for CSOs to follow the best practice. 

EVRP Research highlighted several concerns in the recruitment process including that:

  • There is a need for support for small to medium-sized CSOs
  • There is an over-reliance on word-of-mouth as the major recruitment tool
  • Recruitment interviews for volunteer positions do not always take place
  • There is a lack of consistency of information provided to the applicant about the role and about the CSO at interviews
  • There are low numbers of income-support recipient volunteers being recruited

For many CSOs, attracting sufficient volunteers to operate their services is a major problem and the real challenge is to attract sufficient numbers of suitable prospective volunteers. 

The creation of a Recruitment Kit will assist in a number of ways:

  1. An easy-to-use guide to assist a CSO through the volunteer recruitment process.
  2. An opportunity to encourage a consistent approach to volunteer recruitment across the HACC sector.
  3. An opportunity for CSOs with established recruitment procedures to check that their procedures are effective.

The methodology for developing the recruitment resources included:

  • Collating and analysing existing volunteer management materials.
  • Inviting broad sector participation by asking for submissions of useful resource materials for consideration.
  • Reviewing the content of the resources through a pilot with representation of HACC CSOs in the EMR.