When James Weinberg worked for a Dorchester nonprofit that tutored and mentored low-income students, the organization could barely keep up with its growth. In three years, it expanded to 150 full-time employees, from 30, but its human resources team remained "skeletal," he recalled.
"Recruiting and hiring were killing us," said Weinberg, who juggled the tasks of screening job applicants and overseeing fund-raising. "It's very frustrating when you have a fast-growing, entrepreneurial organization, but you don't have the resources or leads to hire the right people in the timeline you need."
Traditional job-search firms were unaffordable to groups like his. They also had no interest in helping to fill entry-level jobs, preferring to conduct high-priced searches for executive positions. So Weinberg, recognizing a need and an opportunity, created a search firm of his own.
Now two years old, his Boston-based national firm, Commongood Careers, helps nonprofit organizations recruit, screen, and hire for jobs ranging from support staff to senior managers. It also provides career advice to job seekers, keeps a database of about 20,000 job candidates, and maintains online listings of job postings across the country.
Those services are filling a gap that has long hindered the nonprofit sector, which often struggles to fill vacant positions. Commongood specializes in working with rapidly expanding, high-impact, socially entrepreneurial organizations. And its low-cost, flat-fee search model is designed to make it affordable to even the smallest nonprofits, whether they need to fill a $20,000-a-year job or a six-figure executive position.
"We want to see organizations that are having big community impact have the resources they need to fulfill their missions," said Weinberg, a graduate of Tufts University and Carnegie Mellon University whose cofounder, Cassie Scarano, has degrees from Boston University and Northwestern University. "We're taking the heavy lifting off their shoulders by letting them outsource their hiring to us."
Commongood aims to help nonprofits level the playing field with for-profit companies, which frequently have large, sophisticated personnel offices.
Commongood will assist at every stage of the hiring process, including writing job descriptions, placing ads, recruiting candidates, managing applications, and interviewing applicants. For job seekers, its services range from refining cover letters to conducting practice interviews to negotiating job offers.
Commongood has 15 employees and handles 200 to 300 job searches a year for about 60 nonprofit groups. About 60 percent of the jobs it fills are in the Boston and New York areas and pay $60,000 to $70,000 a year, although Commongood has recruited for positions with annual salaries ranging from $20,000 to $200,000, Weinberg said.
Its pool of 20,000 job candidates was developed in part by partnering with career development offices at colleges and universities. Commongood also posts all its positions on idealist.org, a website for nonprofit job listings whose applicants are also typically added to Commongood's talent database.
"I think of Commongood as an extension of our own organization," said Gerald Chertavian, founder and chief executive of Year Up, a Boston nonprofit that trains young urban adults for full-time jobs and has hired Commongood to fill about 20 positions. "They think creatively about where they're going to find talented individuals, and they understand the types of people we're looking for. In my mind, they're a partner in our business."
Commongood keeps its fees lower than most of its competitors do by using a streamlined search model that eschews cold-calling, a labor-intensive method aimed at luring employees from one organization to another that Weinberg considers cost-ineffective. To keep prices down, Commongood also interviews candidates only by telephone. It then gives detailed interview notes, as well as an analysis of the candidate's strengths and weaknesses, to the hiring client, which would conduct the in-person interview.
On average, Weinberg said, Commongood charges $10,000 to $15,000 per candidate search, a fee paid by the hiring organization. Many other search firms charge 30 percent of a candidate's first-year annual salary, which can reach nearly six figures for senior positions. And while Commongood will conduct searches for entry-level jobs, most other firms recruit only for positions that yield hefty search fees.
Bridgestar, for example, another young Boston-based national search firm for nonprofit groups, also keeps its fees relatively low - but it operates as a nonprofit entity itself and it conducts only senior-level searches. Commongood has a for-profit tax status but adopts a nonprofit business model; it operates on a break-even basis, charging flat fees intended simply to cover the cost of its searches, Weinberg said.
"They understand the particular challenges that a nonprofit organization faces in recruiting people, and they have a network of folks who really have the passion to work in a mission-driven organization," said Phil Buchanan, president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, a Cambridge nonprofit that has filled two positions with Commongood's help. "By connecting up with them, we get access to a much larger pool of qualified candidates than we could get on our own."
Sacha Pfeiffer can be reached at pfeiffer@globe.com.
