Why Your Nonprofit Keeps Hiring the Wrong People: How Structured Interviews & Culture Add Can Change the Game
I have interviewed for a fair number of nonprofit jobs over the years, and I honestly cannot recall a single one that used a structured interview. Not one.
Every interview was casual. Some interviewers came prepared, with specific questions or comments about my background, history, and experience, while others very clearly did not. In many of those interviews, I was never asked about the specific skill sets the job required, how I would actually do the work, or whether I had done a similar role before. Instead, many questions focused on whether my personality matched theirs. It was a bit of a hodgepodge of questions and people, and the conversation went wherever it happened to go that day.
Here's the unfortunate part: many of those interviews felt like they went really well.
As someone trained in organizational psychology, I know what a good interview looks like, and I walked out of nearly every one of these wondering the same thing: how are they going to get the right candidate here? My interview almost certainly looked very different from every other candidate's interview. Different questions, a different conversation, a different vibe. There was simply no consistent way to compare us.
Strip it down: the whole process was about charming the interviewers, about being charismatic enough to get through to them in 45 minutes or so. Charm is a skill, sure. It just isn't the skill most nonprofit jobs actually require.
So, if you run a nonprofit or small organization and keep hiring people who seemed like a great fit, only to watch them struggle to do the job or flame out within six months, I'll be direct: your interview process is very likely why that's happening. The good news is that it's fixable, and fixing it doesn't require an HR department or a big budget.
Why your "great fit" hires keep flopping
Interviews feel like the most trustworthy part of the hiring process. You get to meet the person, get a sense of who they are, and trust your gut. Research, however, suggests your gut is far less reliable than it feels.
In 2022, Sackett and colleagues re-analyzed decades of research on how well common hiring methods predict actual job performance. Structured interviews came out on top of every selection method they examined, with a validity of .42, while unstructured interviews, the casual, conversational kind most of us are used to, came in at just .19 (Sackett et al., 2022). Put plainly, a structured interview gives you roughly twice the information about who will actually do the job well. Even more concerning, in the worst cases, unstructured interviews predicted essentially nothing
.
Another number is worth sitting with. Leadership IQ, a leadership training firm, tracked new hires alongside more than 5,000 hiring managers, and when those hires failed, 82% of the managers admitted that, in hindsight, the interview had shown signs of trouble (Leadership IQ, n.d.). While this comes from a consulting firm rather than peer-reviewed research, the takeaway is hard to ignore: the signals were there. Nobody was scoring for them.
That is the core problem with conversation-style interviews. You walk away remembering how the person made you feel, not the evidence of whether they can actually do the work.
What a structured interview actually is
Let's clear something up first: a structured interview isn't a cold interrogation. It's a consistent one. Four elements make an interview structured:
The questions come from the job. Before meeting a single candidate, you identify what the role actually requires and write questions that test for those specific things.
Every candidate gets the same core questions, in the same order. You can still be warm, and you can still ask follow-up questions; the core simply stays the same for everyone.
Answers are scored against an anchored rubric. Anchored means you define, in advance, what a weak, solid, and strong answer looks like. A 1 to 5 scale without those descriptions is really just vibes with numbers attached.
Interviewers score independently. Everyone records their own scores before discussing the candidate with anyone else.
To make this more concrete, here is what a single anchored rubric item might look like for a client-facing program role:
Score | "Tell me about a time a client was upset or in crisis, and you had to help them." |
1 | No relevant example, or the answer focuses mostly on their own frustration with the client |
3 | A relevant example; they handled it, but are vague about what they actually did |
5 | A specific example with clear steps to calm the situation, connect the client to help, and follow up afterward |
That's really all it is. It isn't complicated; it just requires you to decide what you're looking for before you start looking.
Structured vs. Unstructured Interviews: How They Compare for Nonprofits & Small Businesses
When you line the two approaches up side by side across the measures that matter most for hiring the right person, structure wins on nearly every one.
Measure | Structured interview | Unstructured interview |
Accuracy | Predicts job performance at .42, the highest of any selection method studied | Predicts at .19, and close to zero in the worst cases |
Consistency | Everyone answers the same questions, so you are comparing like with like | Every candidate gets a different interview, so you are comparing different conversations |
Fairness | Scores are tied to job-related evidence, which limits similarity bias | Interviewers drift toward candidates who remind them of themselves |
Legal defensibility | Documented, job-related scores show why you made the decision | "They weren't a good fit" is hard to defend if a decision is ever challenged |
Accessibility | Clear questions that can be shared in advance; scores what people actually say | Rewards reading social cues and performing confidence |
The one area where unstructured interviews come out ahead is comfort. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (n.d.) notes that both interviewers and candidates tend to prefer looser, more conversational formats. But feeling natural isn't the goal, right? Hiring the right person is.
Are you mistaking personality fit for culture fit?
I once interviewed with a nonprofit health clinic that treated underserved women. It was a great organization doing genuinely important work. It also became clear pretty quickly that they were trying to hire a carbon copy of the person who was leaving.
That person had a very specific personality: soft-spoken, gentle, light, a bit ethereal. As far as I could tell, everyone else on the team was like that, too. I'm not that person. I'm direct, I base what I do on evidence, and I don't speak in a soothing whisper. I'm not unapproachable either, but what feels approachable depends a lot on who you are. I didn't match, and everyone in the room could feel it.
What stuck with me afterward was this: they were hiring for the image they wanted to project and, in the process, forgetting about the patients they actually served. If I were a patient walking into that clinic, being greeted by an all-soft, everything-is-perfect energy would actually make me feel less safe, not more. Some patients need gentle. Others need straight talk. A team where everyone shares the same personality can only truly reach patients who share it, too.
This is one of the most common hiring mistakes I see, and the research has a name for it. Rivera (2012) studied hiring at elite professional service firms and found that interviewers looked for similarity in hobbies, experiences, and self-presentation, often intentionally using themselves as the model for the ideal candidate. Similarly, Stein et al. (2018) found that cultural matching sorts job applicants on attributes that are both relevant and potentially irrelevant to on-the-job success. Notably, of the forms of fit they measured, fit based on work preferences held up most consistently, not fit based on lifestyle or ideology.
Culture is how people work, not who they are
Personality is one aspect of organizational culture; it is not the whole puzzle. Culture is how people show up at work. Do they help their colleagues? Do they leave things better than they found them? How do they handle disagreement, give feedback, and follow through on commitments?
In organizational psychology, much of this falls under organizational citizenship behavior (OCB): the voluntary, often invisible behaviors that make a workplace actually function, such as helping a coworker work through a problem or going out of your way to make a new hire feel welcome. Those behaviors are what you want to hire for, and the good news is that you can ask about them directly with behavioral questions.
To be fair, personality does matter in some roles. If you are hiring an executive assistant who will work one-on-one with you every day, working-style compatibility is a legitimate consideration. However, it should be one scored criterion, defined in advance, not the invisible filter that ends up deciding everything. When we lean too heavily on personality, or let it sway us, we miss the bigger picture: whether this person can actually do the job.
Hire for culture add, not culture fit
Instead of asking, "Will this person fit in?" try asking, "What will this person add that we don't already have?"
This matters most in public-facing roles. Your clients come with a whole range of personalities, so your team should too. You obviously don't want someone who is harsh or dismissive with clients, but you do want someone for everybody, because not everybody is going to vibe with you specifically.
An interview is a performance, and some of your best candidates can't perform it
We have to remember that an interview is, at its core, a performance. Candidates are judged on eye contact, confidence, small talk, enthusiasm, and how smoothly they read the room. For a handful of roles, that performance is genuinely relevant. If you are hiring a major gifts officer, or anyone whose job is pitching donors and funders, how they handle a high-stakes conversation does tell you something real about how they will do the job.
For most roles, though, it tells you nothing. Your bookkeeper, data analyst, operations manager, and grant writer don't need to perform charisma under pressure in order to do excellent work. If you judge them on it anyway, you are measuring a skill the job will never use.
This is where unstructured interviews become genuinely inaccessible, and they hit neurodivergent candidates the hardest. I'm neurodivergent myself, and I have lived this: navigating the unspoken rules, picking up on social cues, matching the interviewer's energy, and trying to guess what an open-ended question is really asking. It's exhausting, and none of it reflects how well I actually do the work.
The research supports this:
Qualified autistic candidates get passed over. Whelpley and May (2023) found that evaluators watching mock interviews rated autistic candidates less favorably on social traits like awkwardness and likeability, and those impressions weighed heavily on hiring decisions. Even when autistic candidates were seen as highly qualified, they were significantly less likely to be hired.
Delivery is being judged, not content. In that same line of research, when raters evaluated written transcripts of the interviews rather than the videos, autistic candidates' qualifications came through, and they were more likely to be hired (Whelpley & May, 2023, as cited in Mosaic of Minds, n.d.).
Vague questions are a barrier. Open-ended, indirect questions are particularly challenging for autistic candidates. When Maras et al. (2021) adapted interview questions to be clearer and more specific, autistic candidates performed better, and clearer questions can benefit everyone.
Most people won't tell you. In a 2023 Birkbeck survey of 990 neurodivergent employees, only 11.3% reported facing no barriers to disclosing (Metaview, n.d.).
The interview-specific research focuses largely on autistic candidates, mostly because that is where the work has been done. That said, Davies et al. (2023) found that autistic and otherwise neurodivergent adults alike were frustrated by how much of the hiring process hinges on social skills, and they called for more practical approaches, like work trials, and greater clarity about what to expect.
Your neurodivergent candidate might be the person who would excel beyond every other candidate in your pool. In an unstructured interview, you'll never know that, because you'll read their communication style as a bad culture fit and move on.
What helps (and helps everyone)
Ask clear, direct questions. "Tell me about a time you managed a project with a hard deadline" will get you far more useful information than "So, tell me about yourself."
Share the questions in advance. Jobs rarely require answering surprise questions on the spot, so interviews shouldn't either.
Score the content, not the delivery. Write your rubric anchors around what the person did, not how confidently they said it.
Offer accommodations to everyone. Nobody should have to ask or disclose in order to get a fair shot.
Use work samples where they fit. Let people show you instead of telling you (more on that below).
Neuroinclusivity starts with the job description
A structured interview can only ever be as good as the job description it's built on. If you don't know what the role actually requires, you can't write questions that test for it, and you certainly can't build a rubric around it.
This is where many organizations go wrong, and AI has made it worse. If you're using ChatGPT to write your job descriptions, I hate to tell you, but you're likely failing at this step. Ask a chatbot for a job description, and you'll get a polished wish list: every skill that could conceivably be useful, a degree no one actually needs, a "fast-paced environment," and the ever-popular "other duties as assigned." It reads beautifully. It also describes a person who doesn't exist.
Wish-list job descriptions hurt you in three ways:
They scare off qualified people. Many candidates won't apply unless they meet every single line, including many neurodivergent candidates who take listed requirements at face value.
They give you nothing to score against. You can't build a rubric out of "strong communication skills."
They set your new hire up to fail. The job they were sold isn't the job they end up doing.
Instead, write the description from the actual work. What will this person do every week? What does doing it well look like at six months? Which skills are truly necessary on day one, and which can reasonably be learned on the job? Cut everything else, and please, post the salary range.
Your interview questions and rubric should come directly out of this document. If the job description is vague, everything downstream will be vague, too.
Add a skills test, and run it ethically
Most small organizations can't afford formal psychometric testing, and frankly, much of what gets sold as personality testing for hiring is questionable in practice anyway. The good news is that you don't need it. A short skills test is one of the easiest and most effective upgrades you can make to your hiring process.
In the same analysis mentioned earlier, work sample tests, in which candidates complete a small version of the actual job, predicted performance at .33, and job knowledge tests at .40 (Sackett et al., 2022). Both outperform the casual interview's .19 by a wide margin. Pair one with a structured interview, and you gather real evidence from two directions rather than relying on a single impression.
A few examples:
Grant writer: edit a short, messy paragraph from a fictional proposal.
Program coordinator: review a sample week with three conflicting priorities and walk the panel through how you would plan it.
Finance or data role: spot the problems in a small sample spreadsheet.
Client-facing role: a short role-play based on a fictional client situation.
Doing it ethically
This part matters, so please don't skip it.
Keep it short, and keep it in the interview. Twenty to forty-five minutes is plenty for most roles. A two-day take-home project isn't a skills test; it's unpaid labor.
Make it hypothetical. Never hand candidates a real problem your organization is trying to solve and then keep their ideas. Using applicants as free consultants is exploitative, full stop.
Pay for anything longer. The Management Center (n.d.), which trains nonprofit managers, recommends compensating candidates for any assignment that takes more than two hours. Paying someone for their time is completely reasonable.
Be upfront. Tell candidates what the test involves, how long it will take, and how it will be scored.
Offer accommodations. Extra time or a different format, no justification required.
Stop relying on glowing references
Small organizations tend to lean heavily on reference checks because they feel like due diligence. In practice, though, peer references are one of your weakest tools.
To be clear, I'm not talking about employment verification, where you confirm that someone actually worked where they said they did. That is legitimate and worth doing. I'm talking about the reference list: the two or three people the candidate hand-picked because they'll say wonderful things.
Of course those references are glowing; the candidate chose them. Most job seekers can find at least one colleague who will speak positively about them, and references generally want to help. What you receive isn't an unbiased assessment. It's a curated testimonial.
Traditional, unstructured reference checks predict job performance at around .26 (Hunter & Hunter, 1984). Interestingly, that is still higher than the unstructured interview's .19, which means the two tools small organizations rely on most, the friendly interview and the friendly reference call, both sit near the bottom of the list.
And no, former employers aren't legally limited to confirming dates of employment. No federal law restricts what a former employer can say as long as it's truthful; many companies adopt dates-only policies out of fear of defamation claims, but also check your state laws (Nakase Law Firm, n.d.).
If you do check references, structure them the same way you structure your interview:
Ask every reference the same job-related questions, tied to your rubric.
Ask for specific examples, not adjectives. "Tell me about a time she handled a missed deadline" will tell you far more than "Is she reliable?"
Use references to confirm what your interview and skills test already showed, not to make the decision for you.
Structured reference checks do perform better than the casual kind (Taylor et al., 2004). Still, they belong at the end of a good process, not in place of one.
Train everyone who interviews
Nonprofits often build interview panels out of whoever happens to be available: a board member, a longtime volunteer, a program director, the founder. These people are relevant to your organization and bring real value to the process. Board members understand the strategy and the bigger picture, while volunteers and frontline staff know what the work actually takes day to day. Some organizations also include clients or community members, which can be incredibly powerful when it's done with intention.
However, untrained interviewers are the fastest way to turn a structured interview right back into an unstructured one. A board member who goes off-script to chat about the candidate's weekend plans, or who scores everyone a 4 because they don't like being harsh, can undo all of your work in a single afternoon.
Before anyone sits on an interview panel, they need training on:
The job. What the role actually requires, straight from the job description.
The questions. Ask core questions as written, in order, for every candidate.
The rubric, with practice. Have everyone score the same sample answer and then compare. If two people give the same answer a 2 and a 5, the problem is your rubric, not the candidate.
The off-limits list. No questions about family plans, age, health, religion, or similar topics, and many states protect even more categories than federal law does.
The scoring rules. Score during or immediately after the interview, and don't discuss candidates until everyone has submitted their scores.
It's also worth including some basic neurodiversity training. May et al. (2025) found that when evaluators completed neurodiversity training and knew a candidate's diagnosis, autistic candidates were just as likely to be hired as neurotypical candidates, and that benefit held for at least two months after the training.
All of this takes roughly an hour or two per hiring round, and it's the cheapest quality control you'll ever invest in.
Run the panel like you mean it
Group and panel interviews are a good idea, and you should be using them. They are also where otherwise solid processes quietly fall apart.
Here's the classic failure. Everyone interviews the candidate together, and then the group sits down to debrief. The most senior person in the room says, "I loved her," or "I just wasn't sold," and within ten minutes, everyone's opinion has drifted toward theirs. This is anchoring, and it erases the entire point of having more than one interviewer in the first place.
The fix is simple:
Everyone works through the rubric and scores the candidate privately, before any discussion happens.
Collect those scores in writing first.
When you do discuss, have the most junior person speak first.
Talk about evidence, meaning what the candidate said and what they did in the skills test, not vibes.
If you still can't decide, bring your top candidates back for a second round, with new structured questions aimed at the specific gap you're trying to resolve.
Please stop nitpicking resumes
I once heard about a hiring team picking apart a candidate's resume over how they listed something. Two candidates had the same qualifications and the same information, and one got knocked down over formatting.
Stop doing this. That isn't rigor; it's bias dressed up as attention to detail. Honestly, when I hear stories like this, it tells me the hiring manager has no clear idea of what they're actually looking for. Formatting choices tell you nothing about job performance. If it isn't on your rubric, it doesn't count.
"But structured interviews feel so stiff"
This is the objection I hear most often: structured interviews feel rigid, less human, less like a real conversation. I get it. But here's the thing: this isn't about your feelings. The interview exists to help you hire the person who can do the job, not to make the process feel comfortable for you.
And structure doesn't have to feel cold. Open with a few minutes of genuine conversation. Let candidates know up front, "We ask everyone the same questions so the process is fair." Most people actually relax when they hear that, because now they know what to expect. Follow-up questions are still fine; the core simply stays the same.
Meanwhile, consider what hiring the wrong person actually costs you:
Money. Recruiting again, onboarding again, and paying a salary for work that didn't get done.
Time. Months spent managing a struggling employee, only to start the whole process over.
Morale. Everyone else picks up the slack, and your best people notice.
Mission. In a nonprofit, a bad hire in a client-facing role directly affects the people you exist to serve.
Legal risk. If a rejected candidate challenges your decision, "they weren't a good fit" is a weak defense, while documented, job-related scores are a strong one.
On that last point, I once came across a job application that asked whether I was a smoker. Whether that question is even legal depends on where you are. California, for instance, treats it as a prohibited health-related question (CalChamber, n.d.), and 29 states plus Washington, D.C. have some form of smoker protection law on the books (WFTV, n.d.). Yet even where it's technically allowed, ask yourself what that question is doing on your application. If it isn't related to the job, it opens the door to discriminating against people based on what they choose to do outside of work, and it tells candidates exactly what kind of employer you are.
Need help figuring this out?
If you recognized your own hiring process somewhere in this post, you're not alone. Most nonprofit leaders and small business owners were never actually taught how to hire. Instead, they tend to replicate what was done to them, which is usually the casual, charm-based interview I described at the very beginning.
This is exactly the work I do at Integrity Catalyst. I help nonprofits and small organizations build hiring systems that are fair, accessible, and evidence-based, so that you're selecting the person who can actually do the job, not just the person who interviewed best. That includes writing accurate job descriptions, developing structured interview questions and anchored rubrics, designing ethical skills tests, and training your staff, board members, and volunteers to interview consistently.
If you keep hiring the wrong people and you're ready to figure out why, I'm happy to help.
Want to find out how your hiring process holds up? Download our free hiring checklist to audit your process and identify potential leaks.
Frequently asked questions
What is a structured interview?
A structured interview asks every candidate the same job-related questions, in the same order, and scores their answers against a rubric written in advance. It is the most predictive interview format available.
Are structured interviews better than unstructured interviews?
Yes, and by a wide margin. Sackett et al. (2022) found that structured interviews predict job performance at .42, compared to .19 for unstructured interviews, which is roughly twice the predictive power.
How does a non-profit or small business create an interview scoring rubric?
Start with an accurate job description. Identify three to five competencies the role truly requires, write one behavioral question for each, and describe what a weak (1), solid (3), and strong (5) answer looks like before you interview anyone.
What's the difference between culture add and culture fit?
Culture fit often turns into hiring people who are like you. Culture add asks what a candidate brings that your team doesn't already have, which builds a team capable of serving a much wider range of clients.
How can we make interviews more accessible for neurodivergent candidates?
Ask clear, direct questions, share them in advance, score the content of answers rather than the delivery, offer accommodations to everyone, train your interviewers, and use short work samples where they fit.
Should we pay candidates for skills tests?
Keep skills tests short enough to complete during the interview. For anything longer than about two hours, pay candidates for their time, and never use their work for anything other than evaluation. If you are requiring them to produce original work that could be usable in your organization, please pay them.
Are reference checks useful?
Employment verification is useful. Candidate-chosen peer references, on the other hand, are weak predictors, because candidates choose people who will praise them. If you use them, ask structured, job-related questions and treat them as confirmation, not the deciding factor.
References
CalChamber. (n.d.). Can I ask a candidate about smoking during a job interview? https://p-hrcalifornia.calchamber.com/hr-library/qa/candidate-smoking-job-interview
Davies, J., et al. (2023). Access to employment: A comparison of autistic, neurodivergent and neurotypical adults' experiences of hiring processes in the United Kingdom. Autism. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10163039/1/13623613221145377.pdf
Hunter, J. E., & Hunter, R. F. (1984). Validity and utility of alternative predictors of job performance. Psychological Bulletin, 96, 72-98. (link)
Leadership IQ. (n.d.). Why new hires fail. https://www.leadershipiq.com/blogs/leadershipiq/35354241-why-new-hires-fail-emotional-intelligence-vs-skills
Maras, K., Norris, J. E., Nicholson, J., Heasman, B., Remington, A., & Crane, L. (2021). Ameliorating the disadvantage for autistic job seekers: An initial evaluation of adapted employment interview questions. Autism, 25(4), 1060-1075. (link)
May, C. P., Whelpley, C. E., Moyer, L., et al. (2025). How long does it last? The enduring benefits of neurodiversity training and diagnostic disclosure on hiring outcomes for adults with ASD. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-025-06751-w
Metaview. (n.d.). Neurodivergent interview accommodations. https://www.metaview.ai/resources/blog/neurodivergent-interview-accommodations
Mosaic of Minds. (n.d.). Using transcripts to judge job interviews could reverse bias against autistic job seekers. https://mosaicofmindss.substack.com/p/how-to-fix-autism-job-interviews
Nakase Law Firm. (n.d.). Can previous employers give a bad reference? https://nakaselawfirm.com/can-previous-employers-talk-bad-about-you
Rivera, L. A. (2012). Hiring as cultural matching: The case of elite professional service firms. American Sociological Review, 77(6), 999-1022. Summary: https://daily.jstor.org/hiring-cultural-fit-discrimination
Sackett, P. R., Zhang, C., Berry, C. M., & Lievens, F. (2022). Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection: Addressing systematic overcorrection for restriction of range. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(11), 2040-2068. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000994
Stein, S. K., Goldberg, A., & Srivastava, S. B. (2018). Distinguishing round from square pegs: Predicting hiring based on pre-hire language use (Working Paper No. 3627). Stanford Graduate School of Business. https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers/distinguishing-round-square-pegs-predicting-hiring-based-pre-hire
Taylor, P. J., Pajo, K., Cheung, G. W., & Stringfield, P. (2004). Dimensionality and validity of a structured telephone reference check procedure. Personnel Psychology, 57, 745-772.
The Management Center. (n.d.). Using exercises in hiring. https://managementcenter.org/?p=2625
U.S. Office of Personnel Management. (n.d.). Structured interviews. https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/assessment-and-selection/other-assessment-methods/structured-interviews/
WFTV. (n.d.). Florida lacks statewide laws protecting employees who use tobacco off-duty. https://www.wftv.com/news/local/florida-lacks-statewide-laws-protecting-employees-who-use-tobacco-off-duty/SWXO3FN4DFAP3OZ2NXEEDCDS4E/
Whelpley, C. E., & May, C. P. (2023). Seeing is disliking: Evidence of bias against individuals with autism spectrum disorder in traditional job interviews. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 53(4), 1363-1374. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-022-05432-2
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