The ongoing labor shortage afflicting the broader U.S. economy is being felt acutely in the campaign industry where hiring managers are nervously eyeing the calendar as the start of the 2022 primary season looms.
“It’s still a struggle because the need is so high,” said Maria Diaz, director of campaign sales at Grassroots Analytics, a fundraising shop.
On both sides of the aisle, hiring managers have traditionally relied on their networks and those of their friends and business contacts to generate talent leads. That’s not as effective in an environment where fewer candidates are willing to relocate for a position and remote work isn’t always an option.
“We are in-office, so getting people to move is definitely not easy or equitable for most of the talent that we’d like to recruit,” Diaz told C&E. “So we do offer competitive living stipends and sign-on bonuses, but even then moving is such a big life change [and] not always easy. That’s definitely an issue.”
In the case of Grassroots Analytics, some media coverage has positioned the shop in the aggressive-tactics camp of the ongoing ethical fundraising debate on the left. Still, Diaz said the company’s “previous reputation” hasn’t been a hinderance as much as the larger structural issues impacting hiring.
“We are in the same position as everyone,” she said. “We don’t have the allure that the DNC or the big establishment organizations do, but I think the flexibility that we give people and the startup environment that we’re in that allows for so much growth has helped.”
One thing Grassroots Analytics is trying to help with filling its open positions and the campaign roles of its clients is hiring a dedicated campaign talent recruiter responsible for outreach to universities and other potential sources of talent.
“I think Democrats in general just need to do a better job of getting the word out there,” she said. “We know a lot of the jobs in politics can be learned on the job and a lot of the issues with people breaking into it are people not giving them a chance if they don’t have two-to-three cycles of experience.”
Republicans, meanwhile, face a similar challenge in needing to reach beyond the traditional hiring networks to get their positions filled.
“We hire campaign staff the same way your dad hired a mechanic in the 1970s — you know someone,” Nathan Calvert, founder of the political HR startup REVERED, said during a panel hosted by Startup Caucus earlier this week. “Most people still like hiring that way and that’s why it’s been so hard for our industry to change. Every other industry has shifted. We are lagging behind greatly.”
He noted remote work was one area where the campaign industry — particularly the right side of the aisle — was lagging. “Normal roles that I have moved for on campaigns are going to have to adapt to become remote in the future if you want to retain a certain level of talent,” he said.
Calvert said another issue that’s turning talent off from the campaign industry is the lack of a professionalized HR process — something his startup hopes to provide a solution for when it launches in January 2022.
“There is no HR department in these campaigns. There is no onboarding paperwork, there is no standardized1099 issued. A lot of this falls to a deputy campaign manager or someone at the consulting firm who doesn’t have a background in any of this,” he said. “It’s really a mixed bag of goods right now and that’s hurting the next generation of people.
“How are you going to recruit this diverse group, if you’re treating these people slightly better than the volunteers you bring in to eat pizza and make calls? It goes across every race and every level.”
A lack of public job boards on the right is also an issue. Majority Hunter was a source for hiring managers, but practitioners say it’s not as widely used going into 2022. To wit, its Twitter account is no longer active.
With that in mind, Jonathan Gallegos founded the website gopjobs.com to “widen the funnel and allow people who aren’t that campaign donor or friend of a friend” to get hired.
“That’s such an inefficient way to find talent, especially when we have tools at our disposal, like the internet,” he said on the Startup Caucus panel.
He noted that not disclosing salary ranges for a position could also be hurting an employer’s chances at hiring quality talent.
“That is something we’re actually compiling as a data point for employers and for talent to ensure that a market rate exists,” he said.
