Recruiting volunteers
Mentoring and befriending schemes recruit five recognisable types of volunteer: the retired or semi-retired person with a settled week, the employed person who can give an hour at a fixed time, the student or early-career applicant building experience, the person with lived experience of what the scheme addresses, and the person brought in by an existing volunteer.
A coordinator told to find volunteers, usually with a number attached to the instruction and a deadline attached to the number.
The people who will be matched. Recruitment is the first safeguarding decision a scheme makes, and it is made in the wording of the advert, months before anyone reaches a screening form.
The advert sells the reward and hides the ask. Forty people apply, most wanting something the scheme cannot give, and the coordinator spends two months losing thirty of them instead of training the ten who were right.
Those five stay for different lengths and need different things from a coordinator, and a scheme treating volunteers as one pool keeps the wrong ones and loses the right ones.
Where volunteers actually come from
Volunteers come, overwhelmingly, from people who already have some connection to the work. The most productive channel in almost every small scheme is an existing volunteer talking to somebody they know; the least productive is the one that looks most like recruitment.
| Channel | What it yields |
|---|---|
| An existing volunteer recommending someone | Few applicants, high conversion, longest stay, almost no coordinator time |
| Referring services, faith groups, community organisations | Steady trickle of well-briefed applicants, for ongoing relationship time |
| Volunteer centre and national volunteering listings | Moderate volume, very mixed fit, screening time mostly wasted |
| Employer-supported volunteering | Willing people, hard scheduling, matches ending when the job changes |
| Universities and colleges | Reliable numbers, short availability, re-recruiting every academic year |
| Posters, leaflets and a stall at a recruitment event | Very few usable applicants, for more effort than anybody budgets |
Recruitment ideas circulating in the wider sector are built for high-volume, low-commitment roles such as hospice shops, food banks and event stewarding, where heavy drop-out is survivable. One-to-one mentoring cannot use that model, because every applicant reaching the training room has already cost references, a criminal record check and a training place. On-call fire and rescue campaigns are worth reading for their tone, but they are recruitment to paid work rather than to volunteering, because on-call firefighters are paid.
What the advert must say, including the parts that put people off
The advert has a second job beyond attracting the right applicants: it must deter the wrong ones before they cost anything. Write it so that a person who cannot do the work reads it and quietly does not apply, which is better for everybody than a rejection eleven weeks later. State these six things in the advert itself, not in a pack sent afterwards.
- State the dose and duration as a commitment: about an hour a week, for twelve months in youth mentoring, or an hour a week or fortnight in befriending.
- State the pipeline: 6 to 12 weeks from application to first meeting, spent on references, the criminal record check and the next training date.
- State that two references and a criminal record check are required, and that the check is free of charge to volunteers meeting the Disclosure and Barring Service definition of a volunteer, which applies in England and Wales. A Scottish scheme’s volunteers join the PVG scheme through Disclosure Scotland, and a Northern Irish scheme’s are checked through AccessNI, each with its own arrangements for volunteers, so name the right body for the nation the volunteering happens in.
- State the training as compulsory, free to the volunteer and unpaid time, with the dates.
- State what the volunteer will not do: no counselling, no advocacy, no lifts, no lending money, no advice on benefits or immigration, no contact outside the scheme.
- State that expenses are reimbursed, and how, since the applicants a scheme most needs are often the ones for whom bus fares decide the question.
The deterrent effect is the point. People looking for a route to a job title, people who want to rescue somebody, and people who want a child rather than a role read an honest advert and go elsewhere. That is recruitment working.
An applicant asks to be matched with a particular child, or with children only
The volunteer is not accommodated and the request is not read as enthusiasm. The coordinator records it in the recruitment file, raises it at interview, and treats it as a matter for the screening decision rather than a preference to be logged. Named requests, insistence on a specific age or sex, and reluctance to accept supervision are the three patterns safer recruitment exists to notice.
Why recruiting to a number is the first mistake
Recruiting to a number inverts the decision. A coordinator told to find twenty volunteers by March starts measuring applications rather than fit, and the pressure lands exactly where saying no matters most. The number also encourages the second error, recruiting before there are people to match: a trained, checked volunteer left waiting three months will usually be gone before a match arrives, having taken a training place from someone who could have started.
Recruit against live and forecast referrals, in small batches, and hold a short waiting list of applicants rather than a long list of idle trained volunteers. A scheme whose target is a headcount will hit it; a scheme whose target is matches reaching twelve months will recruit fewer people and keep them.
Retention, which is decided before anyone is matched
Volunteer retention is the proportion of volunteers who stay for the commitment they agreed, and in one-to-one work it is mostly a consequence of what the advert promised. Volunteers leave for four reasons and only one of them is life.
- Leaving because the work was not what was described, which is a recruitment failure.
- Leaving because nobody supervised them and a hard hour was carried alone, which is a coordination failure.
- Leaving because a match ended badly and nobody debriefed it, which is a closing failure.
- Leaving because of a job, a move, illness or caring, which is the only category to expect.
What holds volunteers is unglamorous and cheap: a named person who answers, contact at a predictable interval rather than only in a crisis, a debrief after every match closes, and expenses paid without a fuss. What does not hold volunteers is a certificate, an annual thank-you event or a newsletter.
The applicant, and then the volunteer
- Answers honestly about time, and does not agree to a dose they cannot keep
- Consents to a criminal record check and names referees who have actually known them
- Attends the full induction before meeting anybody
- Gives notice rather than disappearing, so the ending can be planned
The person who will be supported
- Is entitled to a volunteer who was screened, trained and supervised, not simply available
- Is never told a delay is their turn coming, when the delay is a shortage of volunteers
- Is not matched with somebody the scheme has doubts about because the numbers were tight
The scheme decides who is accepted and never subcontracts that to demand. It also keeps the paperwork honestly: recruitment records for unsuccessful applicants are commonly held 6 to 12 months and then destroyed, and volunteer files commonly 6 years after the volunteer leaves. UK GDPR fixes neither period. It requires the scheme to set one, write down why, and apply it to everybody.