Increasingly more organizations are compensating job candidates for interviews, yay!

Hi everyone, remember a few years ago when most organizations didn’t list salary numbers in job postings, often instead putting meaningless stuff like “competitive salary,” and many of us fought against it? Our rabble-rousing worked, and now, I’m surprised when I see any job posting that DOESN’T disclose the salary, and ones that require salary history are very rare (and thoroughly embarrassing). Let’s all pat ourselves on the back and take a short nap to celebrate.

When you get up, let’s tackle another equity practice that should become standard in hiring: Paying job candidates for the time they spend interviewing and doing special assignments. I wrote about this earlier: “It’s time we pay interview-stage job applicants for their time.”

Paying job candidates when they reach the interview stage is equitable for several reasons, including:

·       There are tons of costs that job candidates must absorb, including taking time off from work and paying for childcare, transportation, professional clothing, hair care, and other expenses.

·       People who are doing the hiring work are compensated, while job candidates are expected to provide free labor

·       Like everything else, the issue disproportionately negatively affects people of color, women, disabled people, and other people from marginalized communities.

It’s been five years since I wrote that article, and, prompted by a friend who’s been trying to convince a board to pay job candidates for interviews, I asked colleagues for updates on who has been adopting this practice. The responses gave me hope. Lots of organizations are doing this! Here’s a sample of things colleagues said: 

·       “My organization, Grow Food Northampton, pays candidates for their time interviewing (second interview after a brief screening interview)”

·       “Funders for LGBTQ Issues paid me (fairly, even generously!) for my 3rd interview work assignment/presentation several years ago.”

·       “My agency Alimentando al Pueblo paid $250 for the 2nd interview which required a presentation.”

·       “DreamRider paid interviewees $100 as an honorarium for time spent working on small assignments that were part of the hiring process. It made the interviewees without exception feel good about the idea of working for our company. Great hiring engagement tool.”

·       “Alabama Arise does this. It's the right thing to do, and also from a prudential view, for candidates who end up not getting a position, they'll remember how their time was valued anyway, and our statewide nonprofit community is very interconnected.”

·       “Creative Evolutions has been paying all search candidates for the past three years. Probably over 100 people by now.”

·       “I was paid $100 by Movement Voter Project.”

·       “We compensate for 2nd and 3rd interviews. $50 for 30 minutes. We also do this for consultants (at various amount ) if they need to put a proposal or a response to an RFP together. People are very very grateful for this gesture, and it leaves them with a more positive experience/impression, even when they don't get the job.”

·       “When I was the HR coordinator at the Center for Community Organizations, we introduced the practice of paying $100 for interviews (in addition to a pre-existing practice of having stipends available if needed for childcare or transport to be present at the interview). I am unsure of current practices.”

·       “Yes, I’ve had this twice. The first time it was the third or fourth round - they gave me a week to submit a presentation and I was paid $500. The other time it was the second round and a more modest presentation and it was $150.”

·       “The LeadersTrust paid a stipend for interviewing.”

·       “FoodShare Toronto I believe is another who practices this. That was the first time I ever heard of it, was it mentioned by them, very awesome idea!”

·       “FoodShare Toronto $75/interview”

·       “My daughter was a finalist last week for a job at a nonprofit in SF, CA. For the 4th interview that included a 25-minute presentation and was four hours long, they paid her $1,000.”

·       “We do this for anyone who is a finalist at Student Clinic for Immigrant Justice-SCIJ”

In case you think these are just organizations with large budgets, and that smaller orgs can’t do it:

·       “I introduced this as a practice when I was Executive Director of Planned Parenthood Ottawa from 2021-2025 among many transparent and equitable labor practices. We paid people $30 for any interview, recognizing that people are often taking time off work, paying for childcare, and preparing extensively even for a first interview. It’s a small gesture that lets people know the kind of organization you are and how you’ll be treated. We had a budget of $500K — pretty small org, but we had record staff retention rates and award-winning programs during that period.”

·       “When we have 2-4 finalists and do a 1-hour interview with a 20-minute presentation, we pay each finalist $50. The presentation focuses on past work they’ve done so they aren’t creating from scratch. Next time we interview I will bump it up a bit more! Our org budget is 280k and our reserve is tiny, but doing something is better than nothing.”

Of course, there were a few colleagues who were bewildered by this practice, so I want to address some of their points here:

“We are having problems giving current staff raises. Paying applicants for interview time is not practical.”

Yes, it certainly does cost money to pay job candidates for their time spent interviewing. But many equity practices do. Hiring live captioners for your events can be costly. Making buildings accessible to wheelchair users can be very costly. It may not be possible to do now, but it should be a goal, and as we see from the organizations with budgets of 500K or less, it’s doable to pay job candidates for their time interviewing.

“Fewer candidates with non-traditional experience, resume gaps, and without degrees will get interviews when there’s a higher cost to saying ‘why not, let’s meet them and see what they’re about.’”

That is a good point to keep in mind. Organizations should strive to have an entire equity mindset to prevent that from happening. What I often find, though, at least anecdotally, is that when people start being intentional about one equity practice, it often leads them to being more intentional about other equity practices, not less.

“What has this person done for the organization that justifies taking money from programmatic support? Every dollar spent on [paying candidates for interviews] is money not spent on fulfilling your mission.”

What job candidates do for nonprofits is help them find the right team member, which includes taking tons of time out of their lives and spending their own money to help organizations in this task. Without team members, you won’t be able to fulfill your mission, which is why you’re hiring in the first place. So paying job candidates for interviews is helping fulfill the mission, just like paying staff or consultants to manage the hiring process.

“There’s philanthropic, and there’s appearing needy.”

As we see from the many comments above, no one who gets paid for an interview thinks the organization is “needy” or “desperate.” Instead, this practice shows you’re being thoughtful and equity-minded, and it builds goodwill, even among candidates who don’t end up hired.

“As an HR professional and consultant, when possible I recommend that orgs do this for work exercises, not for interviewing alone. It is equitable to, in some way, shape, or form compensate them for doing work exercises, not for interviewing […] paying ppl for interviewing alone is suspect to me because I think it makes the orgs feel like they can subject the candidates to whatever and that is decidedly not equitable because it gives more power to the wrong end of an already existing power imbalance.”

If an organization is unethical or has crappy hiring processes, paying a job candidate or not for interviews won’t make a difference if they plan to subject candidates to unfair or unethical practices. There are plenty of organizations that don’t pay job candidates for interviews while making them go through three or more rounds of interviews. If compensating for interviews is widespread enough (and it will be), it will likely disincentivize employers from wasting job candidates’ time, because the more they make job candidates do, the more they will need to pay.

Thank you to everyone who provided comments. I’m excited to see this practice becoming increasingly common. As my friend Erin puts it: “If we’re paying search firms thousands of dollars, then we can spread some of that around to others. The hiring industrial complex needs to modernize.”

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Vu’s new book, Reimagining Nonprofits and Philanthropy, is out. Order your copy at Elliott Bay Book Company, Barnes and Nobles, or Bookshop. If you’re in the UK, use this version of Bookshop. If you plan to order several copies, use Porchlight for significant bulk discounts. Also, if you're buying 25 copies or more, I'll be glad to call in for a 50-minute discussion; please contact NWBspeaking@gmail.com.