Interviewing and Screening

By Mikey

I am a 13-pound Shih Tzu with long silky black and white fur. I am very, very friendly and I enjoy people and like to make them happy. My pet person is married to a nationally known trainer. He and I have helped with view graphs, talks and books on how to manage volunteers, so we knew what to look for as we headed out to volunteer. I am the one writing about our experiences while sitting on my person's lap to protect both the guilty and the innocent. See what you think of the things that happened to us.

Getting Started, Sort Of

Our volunteer adventures began a few months after my pet person retired. My person and I decided that we would like to visit the elderly and sick, particularly Alzheimer's patients, so I could play with them and bring a little cheer into their day. At the same time my person decided to help out at a Science Education Center in the area. Since he is a Ph.D. scientist, he thought that his skills could be useful teaching science to children and the public. That has proven more frustrating than our experiences together, but more on that later.

Once in a while, a volunteer is injured, or injures someone else, in the course of his or her work. Sometimes, it is just an allegation that the volunteer injured someone else; whether or not the allegation is true, a legal defense still is required. In many cases, the cost of the incident is greater than the volunteer's own ability to pay, which is why insurance protection for volunteers should be part of every nonprofit organization's risk strategy. Even so, prevention is better than cure, and there is a lot you can do to prevent accidents from happening in the first place.

In this article, we will describe the circumstances involved in the claims we see in our Volunteers Insurance Service (VIS ® ) program, and offer guidance to help you minimize the chance that such claims might happen to your own volunteers.

Injuries caused by volunteers to themselves or to others tend to fall into a few common claims scenarios which we'll cover in this article by the three types of volunteer insurance coverage that respond:

• accident medical reimbursement
• personal liability
• excess automobile liability
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  • Read more about Volunteers' Most Common Accidents - and How to Avoid Them

Interviewing is a lot like archery. The athletes who participate in that sport have their mind on one thing: hitting the bull’s-eye. Their strategy is to develop the skills to hit the bull’s-eye portion of the target every time. Your target when you interview is the kind of volunteer you want to place. And you need to develop the skills to hit that target as often as possible. Group interviewing, which is showcased in this article, will enable you to hit the bull’s-eye every time.

Traditionally, most volunteer interviews take place in a one-on-one situation between the candidate and a member of the volunteer program staff...The group interviewing process recommended here involves interviewing five volunteers simultaneously with two trained volunteer placement counselors conducting the interview. The philosophy of group interviewing, designing the group interview process, selecting and training volunteer placement counselors, the logistics of this system, and evaluation of interview efficacy are each be explored in this article.

Volunteering and volunteer work have changed dramatically in the last few years. So too have management practices in the not-for-profit sector as shrinking resources combined with increasing demands for service press administrators to search for new ways of doing business. One of the consequences of these changes has been an increase in the responsibilities assigned to volunteers and paid staff. These new responsibilities have increased the burden on organizations to manage all the paid and unpaid human resources they have mobilized.