Effective Interviewing & Onboarding: Successfully Engaging New Staff Talent

About this event

Hiring the right people—and helping them thrive—can make or break your nonprofit’s success. This interactive workshop series walks you through effective interviewing techniques, collaborative problem-solving around common hiring challenges, and proven onboarding strategies to set new staff up for long-term success. You’ll leave with practical tools to attract, select, and retain talent that strengthens your mission and culture. Join your peers in this hands-on learning experience to sharpen your hiring and onboarding practices from start to finish.

Workshop Design

Morning Session – Effective Interviewing

Who you hire is a direct reflection of you and your organization. During this portion of the workshop, we will explore and role-play helpful tips and tools to improve your interviewing skills and ensure you hire the right candidate that your budget can afford every time. Focus areas will include defining your ideal candidate, proper interview preparation, and proper interview execution.

Brainstorming Lunch – Recruitment Challenges

Leveraging the peer knowledge in the room, we will surface the key challenges we all face in recruiting and retaining talent in the nonprofit sector.  We will then seek to brainstorm as a group around solutions and best practices for addressing these difficulties.

Afternoon Session – Effective Onboarding

Phasing new employees into their roles with structured onboarding to set them up for success has always proven to be more effective than the very common “throw them into the frying pan,” or “figure your own job out” schools of learning. During this section of the workshop, we will examine and discuss tips and best practices to help new employees assimilate quickly and accelerate their speed to proficiency resulting in more productive, satisfied, engaged, and tenured employees.

Who Should Attend: 

Nonprofit leaders and managers charged with hiring and building high performing staff teams.  Organizations are encouraged to attend as a leadership group.

Faculty

John Jell

John Jell currently leads organizational development efforts for Dole Packaged Foods based in Westlake Village.

Previously, he led global Learning & Development under HR for energy drink leader Monster Energy. Prior to joining Monster John spent 25 years with The Coca-Cola Company and Nestlé in Sales, Marketing, and L&D capacities. He has also worked for a privately held firm, a venture capital holding, led a 501(c)3, and also had his own training company working with large organizations and nonprofits alike, including several in Ventura County.

On multiple occasions over the years, John took over teams that were underperforming and struggling.  He turned them all around quickly after realizing, regardless of organization type or industry, there were some basics and best practices to build, lead, and sustain high performing teams.

Through his own experience, combined with working under 20 different bosses and 12 different CEO’s, John identified many best practices in many leadership areas. These are the focus of his workshops to help all who attend become stronger leaders of higher performing organizations.

John has been supporting, coaching, and training leaders from front-line to C-level for over 20 years. Whether business, organization, or employee related, solving problems and making sound decisions are all in a day’s work as a leader. John has seen many good and bad decisions made, and their impact. His workshops teach leaders how to improve discipline and confidence in leading their teams and problem solving by trying to make the right decisions the first time around.