Hire the best person for your role
Written by katie test davis
Many of you are gearing up to make a communications hire in 2025. We’re so excited for all the growth to come!
But in the meantime, hiring and onboarding can be tough. Finding the right fit happens on a lot of different levels. Values. Skills. Culture. Approach. We have a ton of tips in our new (free) hiring guide PDF to help you do this right.
Today, let’s break down how to find the right human for your open communications role.
what experience do they need to have?
First, determine how experienced this person needs to be. I’m actually not an advocate of hiring for a specific degree, or number of years in the workforce. I like to know about what the person has done in their career.
Ask yourself: What would this communications human be doing today, if they were already rocking and rolling in the job? Would they be:
Writing tweets, or deciding which social media channels your organization should be on, and why?
Pitching a reporter a story about your most recent report, or helping your program team create the entire report from scratch?
Writing an internal newsletter, or helping strategize for a new reorganization that they’ll be responsible for announcing?
Overall, ask: What big projects will this person be responsible for in the next year? What about the next three years?
At Forthright, our teammates have played all kinds of roles in nonprofits – from leading as the only communications person at a foundation, to serving as a specialist on a whole nonprofit team.
When we tap in and serve as an interim communications director at an organization, we’re often asked to straddle the line – do some hands-on creation (like create an annual report or develop a new one pager) as well as help guide the organization through big communications decisions.
Asking the right questions about what the day-to-day role is will help you to think through how much experience they need to have – are they an implementer or a leader? A mix of both?
Want more guidance?
how will they fit into our organization?
The next thing to consider is how this person will support the larger picture. Ask yourself:
How will this person support our current strategic plan?
What objectives or programs will this person support?
Is there a knowledge set that is either required or strongly preferred?
What would this person NOT be doing? What skillsets should we deprioritize?
For example, if this person will focus on storytelling and video creation, hiring someone whose expertise is website SEO and digital advertising won’t get you very far.
The answers to those questions will help you hone in on how to shape your role.
Need more hiring resources? We’ve got them in spades.
Check out the Hiring & People Category on our blog for advice on all kinds of things, such as:
Want extra support? We created a whole new service line specifically to help you through communications transitions! We’re happy to stand up a communications function at your organization for the first time. We’re also happy to come in and serve as your communications department or lead while you hire! We’re even happy to sit in on the hiring process and lend our expertise.
Ready to learn more? Reach out to Forthright VP Niki Juhasz at niki@forthrightadvising.com, and we’ll put together something specifically tailored for your needs.
