Find the Best Talents for Your Cause through Contests

Whether you sit in a cafe or wait in a queue, there’s always a chance you have people with similar passions right behind you. Raising awareness for a cause that’s dear to your heart is easier if you can spot these people and ask them to join forces with you.

The reasons to search for talents for your cause

Initiatives focused on cause awareness are built by actively involved people. From a pet organization to an international fundraising program, every incentive is driven by time, resource, and idea investments. To move it forward, you need talents to help you accomplish the following goals:

• Create catchy content. Advocacy should be well-worded. By hiring people who understand the importance and advantages of your cause, you also provide outlets for your ideas.
• Volunteer. A devoted team can both initiate volunteering activities to support your cause and get involved in your potential partners’ projects to build useful connections.
• Generate ideas. Like businesses collect beautiful startup ideas through contests, you can collect ideas for cause promotion using the same medium.
• Make your cause buzzy. Recruiting the best talents through contests and public initiatives is a clear win-win. Apart from finding like minders, it also raises awareness about the cause on social media or whatever platform you use to power the contest.

Using contests to find the best hidden talents

Today you can find over 10 million active job listings on LinkedIn. Social media has grown into a centralized platform for hiring talents and launching recruiting contests. Tons of business organizations sponsor social media challenges and awards events. Why is it so common? The benefits of recruiting contests boil down to the following:

• You can hire an idea before hiring a person. When it comes to cause promotion, the key thing you should focus on is ideas rather than people. Through hackathons and creative contests, you can dive right into ideas prior to communicating with candidates. This way you see what fits your cause and don’t waste time on pointless interviews.

• Easy as pie. With the right system for contest recruiting in place, you can get it going in few clicks. Use a contest management system to automate submissions, set up public voting, and announce winners. There’s hardly an easier way to recruit the best talents.
• Benefit from referrals. Recruiting referral contests are another source of talents who can be interested in working for your cause. Whether these are your existing members or random contest entrants, you can ask them to tag/invite their friends and thus maximize your outreach.
• Quality over quantity. Cause-centered contests can be great “talent filters.” Use a theme that resonates with your cause, and you get only relevant ideas. If you make it right, your contest attracts only candidates who are interested in the initiative and ready to tackle it.
• No borders. Your cause initiative can thrive and shine online. In this context, there’s nothing that prevents you from hiring internationally. Online contests launched with the help of a foolproof awards management software can recruit talents anywhere.

Talent spotting environments

Where can you find candidates through contest activities? We offer starting with three essential settings  including social media, in-house, and corporation.

Social media contest recruiting

As follows from the Betterteam infographic, social media recruiting is no longer an extraordinary activity, but rather the first-priority, talent spotting tactic. The popularity of Facebook recruiting contests as well as online awards events launched on Instagram or LinkedIn is justified by current, great capabilities for targeting, global outreach, and easy to use voting/scoring instruments.

For whom: Youth initiatives, volunteering programs, and charity campaigns.

In-house awards events

A bright example of a talent-centered awards event is a hackathon that incentivizes a group of people to develop a new product or an idea within a limited time frame. Let’s say your cause is connected to blockchain technologies. To target the right audience, you can set up a hackathon with the mission of building a new cryptocurrency based on idea submissions.

For whom: Local companies & organizations.

Corporate contests

For those who believe the best hidden talents can be found inside an organization, corporate contests are must-have tools. By challenging your internal staff to compete with each other, submit a creative idea, or evaluate a colleague, you construct the right conditions for talent spotting.

For whom: Companies/organizations targeting internal promotions or new project implementation.

How to organize a contest that recruits

A well-thought-out contest can do all the recruiting legwork for you. But, before that, you have some planning to do. Check out the key steps you should take to organize a successful cause contest:

• Choose the right contest type. Find talents through contests to really make a good match for your cause, organization type, and budget. To get a wider outreach, you can combine several contest formats in the framework of one campaign.
• Set your goals and define “the best candidate.” Think whether you want employees to cooperate with your organization long-term or on a per-project basis. Develop the requirements for contest entry based on the traits your ideal candidate should possess.

• Pick your tech ally. Find a contest management software that allows automating submissions, judging, and public voting.
• Create judging criteria. To find employees through a contest, you should understand how the best candidates are selected. Provide judges with crystal-clear criteria to make the process of employee selection transparent and efficient.

Conclusion

Effective recruiting contest ideas married to your cause can help you spot potential gold star employees. Whether you take it to social media, organize a contest in-house, or set up a corporate competition, aligning an awards event with a cause means adding great value to it.