For these, we turn to a wonderful article from energizeinc.com entitled “Helping Volunteers to Market Their Experience on Their Resumes” by Mary Agnes Williams. Here are some of the highlights:

• When applicable, rely on volunteer work to fill in time gaps between jobs.
• Use generalized headings, such as “Professional Experience,” as opposed to “Employment History.” This allows an individual to list his or her skills without limiting them to paid positions.
• When specifying work that was unpaid, do not feel the need to label it as volunteer. Instead, focus on the position’s title.
• Clarify if the volunteer work is full-time or ongoing. Most employers assume volunteerism is intermittent.

Williams suggests that organizations may want to go the extra mile as an appreciation of their volunteers and host a resume workshop for them. Because, in addition to those who are volunteering specifically to gain new skills, she also points out that you may have another group of people who don’t even realize it’s acceptable to put volunteer experience on their resume. A great way to jog a volunteer’s memory to all the duties s/he performs — and to assist him or her with resume writing — is to hand out a new copy of his or her volunteer job description. Of course, managers at your agency can also offer letters of recommendation to outstanding volunteers to accompany the newly-honed resumes.

Ms. Williams shines a light on a third group of volunteers: those who have come to your organization motivated by things other than cultivating job skills. She argues, however, that resume writing can be a positive experience for this demographic as well. “Even if volunteers have no intention of seeking paid employment, directors and coordinators may want to consider resume writing as a group activity,” advises Williams. “This can be a win-win situation: volunteer leaders will learn more about the talents and experience of volunteers…. Whether used in job searches or not, resumes can be empowering for people of all ages and backgrounds.”

For further reading:

Mary Agnes Williams is an employment and administrative services consultant based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Read her article in its entirety.

VolunteerHub is the latest version of a system first conceived in 1996 to facilitate volunteer registration for the University of Michigan’s campus chapter of Habitat for Humanity. Since its humble beginnings, the service has grown to offer a wide range of features for event registration and volunteer workforce management. Today VolunteerHub connects people and purposes for a variety of non-profit, educational, and commercial organizations. Visit VolunteerHub’s website at www.volunteerhub.com.

Author

Shawn Kendrick, VolunteerHub.com

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In developing initial and then ongoing goals and objectives, bigger is not always better. Having “more” volunteers this year than last year does not self-evidently mean better service delivery or greater impact. Some organizations would actually be better off cutting their volunteer corps in half and holding those remaining to higher standards! The number of volunteers needed is a strategy determined by expectations of productivity….

Recognize, too, that the body count of how many people are in your volunteer corps does not translate into a standard number of hours contributed. Fifty volunteers each giving two hours a month provide the same output as five volunteers who can give twenty hours. The amount of effort necessary to recruit and support the larger number of volunteers is clearly much more intense, without the payback of more service. On the other hand, if your programmatic goal is community education, you may feel that getting fifty people to participate is more beneficial than just five. See? It depends.

Focus instead on the outcome and impact of volunteer activity. What results do you want volunteers to produce? As with employees, it is possible to monitor and measure the accomplishments of volunteers by stating goals and objectives at the beginning of a period—and then assessing whether these were achieved….

Outcome measures set for the volunteer component should correlate with the overall goals and objectives of the agency. I once conducted a management retreat with the department heads of a large hospital system, in preparation for which the CEO sent me an impressive eighty-page “Five-Year Strategic Plan” for the institution. I dutifully read the entire document, and when I arrived at the retreat, asked why—despite the current participation of almost six hundred volunteers—there was not one word about volunteers in the strategic plan. After much consternation, it became clear that neither the administrators nor their outside consultant had considered it possible to “plan” for volunteers!

As with every other aspect of organizational life, the amount of time you spend determining what you want volunteer involvement to be will directly affect the quality and creativity of what you get. Ignore this aspect of your organization, and maybe you’ll get lucky. But, if you incorporate planning for volunteers into overall agency planning, you will naturally take the steps necessary to assure that you reach those goals.

Author Info

Excerpted from From the Top Down: The Executive Role in Successful Volunteer Involvement, 3^rd edition, by Susan J. Ellis, © 2010, Energize, Inc. Found in the Energize, Inc. Online Bookstore at http://www.energizeinc.com/store/1-102-E-3.

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