Hiring Is Your Culture with Crystal FitzSimons [Episode 450]

Why can't we keep good people?

I get this question almost every week. Different words, same question.

And almost every time, the leader is looking in the wrong place. They are looking at benefits, pay rates, and engagement surveys. They are worried that leaving their staff in chronic overwhelm is causing people to quit.

Those things are all potentially great to look at, but they are downstream.

By the time someone is one foot out the door, the design decisions that produced their exit were made months earlier. At the hire. In the process you rushed. In the culture check you skipped because you were tired.

Retention is not a mystery. It is often the outcome of your hiring process. Or your core leadership and operating processes. Probably both. Probably your core leadership and operating processes caused you to have a hiring process that wasn't really set up to bring in the right people in the first place. You actually ended up hiring the wrong person, and that's why they're leaving.

Most of that design happens before someone signs.

I recently talked with Crystal FitzSimons, the new president of the Food Research and Action Center.

Crystal has been at FRAC for twenty-four years. Her chief government affairs officer just celebrated forty. Chief of staff, more than a decade. Development director, more than a decade.

FRAC is forty people. That kind of staying power is not luck.

When I asked Crystal what actually produces it, her answer was one sentence:

"Hiring is the most important thing that we do at FRAC."

That sentence is doing a lot of work.

Most leaders treat hiring like procurement. Need. Pool. Pick the best available. Move on.

That framing adds risk.

Every hire is a cultural transmission. Full stop.

Rush the process, and you have already told the new hire something about how this place treats people. Make the process thoughtful, and you have told them something else.

They feel which one is real inside the first two interviews.

I teach a hiring process that runs multiple long interviews. Almost every time I teach, clients have a moment where they push back:

• Do we really need all these interviews?

• Even for a lower-paid seat?

• What about a mid-level role?

Yes. Every time. Here is why.

Add salary, benefits, onboarding, manager time, and the seat sitting empty during the search, and you are easily looking at:

• A wrong hire at a lower level: a $30,000 mistake.

• A wrong hire at a senior level: $100,000, minimum, once you count the lost year of momentum.

Three thoughtful interviews for a thirty-thousand-dollar decision is not overkill. It is basic financial hygiene.

And here is the other thing.

The person you are hiring for a "small" seat today might be your president in fifteen years.

Crystal started at FRAC as a field organizer. She is now running the place.

If you want the person to stay, the hiring process has to be worthy of them staying.

Crystal meets with every candidate before an offer goes out. Every one.

Not to override her team. She has never told a manager they could not hire the person they wanted. But she is in the room.

The excuse for skipping this is always the same:

• I do not have time.

• It does not scale.

• We are past that stage.

It scales further than you think.

Barbara Corcoran hired every single person at her company personally until she had five hundred employees. If she could sit in five hundred interviews while running one of the biggest brokerages in New York, you can sit in yours.

Here is what your presence in that final interview actually does:

• Signals to the candidate that this place takes hiring seriously enough that the top person shows up

• Gives you a felt sense of who is entering the culture, which no résumé provides

• Sets the tone for their relationship with senior leadership from day one

• Catches the one or two hires per year where the manager's enthusiasm has outrun the actual fit

The CEO is the culture holder. Skipping the culture holder at the moment of cultural transmission is a design flaw.

Even at forty people. Especially at forty people.

Nonprofit leaders love to say people stay because of the mission.

It is true. And it is not enough.

If the mission were sufficient, fundraising staff turnover would not have been the number-one problem in nonprofit development for more than forty years. Every one of those people came in passionate about the mission.

Mission passion is the price of admission. It is not the retention mechanism.

What actually holds people is structural:

• A role that is doable in the hours you are paying for

• A manager who was trained to manage, not just promoted for producing

• A paycheck that respects the market

• A hiring process that told them, from the start, that this place thinks carefully about the humans in it

Charity Fain named the version of this most people will not say out loud: underfunding is a design choice. Paying well reduces turnover. It attracts stronger candidates. It keeps the person who would otherwise do the math and leave.

That starts at the offer letter.

This is not about being harder to hire into.

It is about being worth staying with.

Nonprofits can keep their people.

They can build teams that compound.

They can stop bleeding institutional knowledge every eighteen months.

Not by trying harder to retain people after the fact, but by treating the hire itself as the most important decision the organization makes.