Our Ethical Commitments to Clients and Candidates

Our team is proud to partner with national and global organizations working to make the world better for others—from advancing equity in higher education to revolutionizing patient-centered healthcare. We recognize our nonprofit and association clients’ challenges: operating with limited staff and tight budgets while aiming to make a substantial impact.

Our goal is to bridge this gap by connecting these organizations with top-performing, mission-driven professionals. With each new hire, we help build more diverse and effective teams. We are dedicated to serving both our client organizations and the candidates eager to join them.

We uphold these commitments in every area of our work. Here’s how.

We Use Smart Tech and Smarter Processes

• Project management you can count on. Our 11-person team works together on every search, reducing the time to hire without sacrificing quality or service. We provide an accurate project timeline, handle all scheduling and administrative tasks, and ensure clients know exactly what we are managing and when we’ll need their time. We keep detailed records of every conversation, so you only need to provide information once.
• No fluffy deliverables. Our deliverables aren’t just pretty documents. They are designed to support decision-making. We provide weekly status updates to show how the search is progressing, supplemental information from candidates describing their skills in key areas, interview questions with an evaluation matrix, a comprehensive dashboard with all candidate data at your fingertips, and more.
• Human expertise backed by AI. We use generative AI and process automation to improve workflows and save time on repetitive tasks while prioritizing human judgment and personal interaction at every decision point. While we love the efficiency of emerging technology, humans are always in the loop. We never use AI to evaluate candidates. Ever.

We Give You Data, Not Opinions

• Putting the research into practice. Our approach is based on the latest hiring research, designed to emphasize factors proven to predict job performance while reducing the impact of factors that do not.
• Skills-first, always. Many hiring practices unintentionally favor candidates with familiar backgrounds regardless of whether they are best for the job. Our approach focuses on the skills required for success by using an interview sequence that reveals each candidate’s abilities in different settings. This includes a written assessment as a “blind” first interview, structured interviews, and work sample testing. These evaluations result in objective data to support the hiring decision, greatly reducing the risk of a bad hire.

We Walk the Walk on Inclusive Hiring

• Diversity drives success. Extensive research shows that teams perform better when they include people with different perspectives. We guide clients to consider candidates with different cognitive styles, industry or sector experiences, educational backgrounds, political affiliations, or factors like race, gender, and socio-economic status. Our approach invites qualified candidates in rather than ruling them out for reasons unrelated to job success.
• Not your typical sourcing strategy. We don’t rely on the “who do you know” approach because it overlooks a vast number of candidates and often results in a less diverse group. We have developed an intensive research process to surface hundreds of passive candidates (those not actively looking but who may be interested in new opportunities) for every search. We seek out professionals with the right job-relevant competencies who can bring varying perspectives to our client organizations.
• Bringing forward the best of the best. We don’t broaden the range of candidates considered for a role just to drive up numbers. We take an inclusive approach so clients can choose the best out of a larger, more diverse pool: think best in the nation vs. best in your town. Through rigorous evaluation, the most talented people always rise to the top, including those with less conventional career paths that traditional hiring methods might overlook.

We Elevate the Candidate Experience

• Candidates deserve transparency. We take the utmost care to ensure candidates have a positive experience with us. We are completely transparent about what to expect in the interview sequence, including timing, who will be involved, and how any information we’ve collected will be used and evaluated. We are as responsive as possible and make sure everyone knows where they stand.
• Tips from the recruiting pros. Although we don’t offer resume writing or career coaching services, we develop and share practical resources to help candidates navigate their job search and career changes.

We’re Always Innovating

• Ever learning, ever evolving. As our clients navigate the evolution of work, our team is right there, learning and growing too. We’re not just keeping up with the latest research, we’re putting it into practice ourselves. Our guidance is shaped by our own experiences with AI, hybrid and remote work, and the increasing trend toward salary transparency.
• No gatekeeping here. We share what we learn in our blog, monthly newsletter, and the how-to guides on our website. We want to equip our clients—and any organization—with the tools to improve hiring practices and create teams where everyone can do their best work.

Living Our Commitments

Our ethical commitments are more than words on a page—they are the foundation of our service and the compass guiding our daily actions. Living these principles drives us to innovate, improve, and deliver hiring results that propel mission-driven organizations forward. We don’t see our work as just filling positions; we’re here to elevate teams and amplify the impact of the people we serve.

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Don’t Stop Here

• People often say hiring and retaining top performers is unpredictable. But it doesn’t have to be. Read our guide to Results-Based Hiring® for an overview of the approach that has helped hundreds of mission-driven organizations hire leaders who deliver results.
• Dig into the research behind our approach with the Case for Competency-Driven Hiring. You’ll learn the reasons why commonplace hiring practices so often fail us and, importantly, what you can do instead.
• Check out more practical guides that can help you apply elements of our approach on your own and start hiring better with a skills-based approach.