[dfansteel]

I've worked for non-profits before and have loved the experience. A couple of things stand out for me:

1) Remote Work & Flex Schedule - Quality of life is a major concern. Working in startups 100 hour weeks have happened. It's kind of a rush actually. But everyone needs to take some time off that. Allowing people the opportunity to work from wherever they want, whenever they want makes all the difference. A common miss of non-profit managers is adopting the idea that you need to be on the job from 9-5 and be seen being productive. Don't treat your devs like they're cashiers.

2) Community Engagement - Mid-sized companies and startups tend to be wildly jealous about their employees time, often requiring employees to work in a vacuum. Let your devs publish open source software that's derivative of your core business. Support their desire to establish development blogs. Encourage their extra curricular activities. I've often taken second jobs teaching software development just because I enjoy it. A lot of for profit companies don't like that.

3) Intrinsic Benefits - Be willing to hire off platform. Look for people interested in expanding their skill set. The mobile developer looking to learn web development. The web developer looking to learn API development. The boot camp graduate looking for their first job in the field. Find people who can figure out how to do the job. Have the practical experience make up for the lost direct income.

[karmajunkie]

All of these are great points of advice. I would add that remote work is not simply about quality of life—its also about broadening your pool of candidates from those who live near you to those who are living, full stop. If it costs too much to hire developers near you, go where cheaper developers are (but have someone on your team, if not you yourself, who is able to filter good developers from the merely adequate.)

[francamps]

Thanks a lot, these are really great suggestions to look into. I think 1 (the flex schedule part at least) and 3 are already there, but I hadn't thought about highlighting them as properties of the job that people might be interested in. And we need to consider remote work more seriously.

I've been planning to encourage 2 more in the tech side of things, considering it is already happening in relation to the social impact of our work, which we do share and communicate. I think sharing more of what we do technically would be great.

Thanks a lot, great advice.

[ffggvv]

What's the name of the non-profit? So maybe people from here could apply.

[partisan]

I've considered such a role in the past and for all of these reasons. Good recap.