The Climate Initiative

A nonprofit climate change organization needed to scale quickly to achieve its goal of empowering 10 million youth voices for climate action. With over a dozen crucial roles to hire for — and quickly — the organization’s executive director turned to Indeed to make it happen.

Background: A nonprofit catalyzing climate action with youth

Founded in a small coastal Maine town, The Climate Initiative (TCI) is a non-partisan, grassroots climate movement that encourages youth to get involved in advancing climate action. Through online learning programs, workshops, town halls and competitions, TCI inspires the next generation of leaders to take action on policies and climate solutions in their local area.

Challenge: Filling a variety of roles quickly and on a budget

With the goal to educate 10 million young people with their climate science programs by 2025, TCI needed to build a strong team to help get there — and it needed to happen fast.

As Jono, Executive Director at The Climate Initiative, explains: “The climate crisis isn’t something that we can afford a five, ten, fifty year solution on. It takes bold action today which is why we needed to scale quickly.”

Since fighting climate change is so urgent, Jono was faced with the challenge of hiring for what he calls a “cornucopia” of positions as quickly as possible, including administrative, strategic and youth services roles. Not only that, but he needed to find and hire the best candidates for each open job while staying within his hiring budget.

“All of the other [hiring] platforms that we looked at were either cost prohibitive, they were clunky, they required a user fee that was just outrageous,” says Jono.

That’s when Jono found Indeed. His goal? Quickly build a team of people passionate about addressing climate change and start inspiring young people to take action on climate issues as soon as possible. “[Indeed] was the best platform for a scaling organization,” he says.

Solution: Screening tools that make a difference

By using Indeed, Jono was able to attract a wide variety of candidates to his open positions. But his team was then faced with a whole new challenge: narrowing down a big pool of applicants to find the right hire. “Our hiring managers were faced with looking at this incredible funnel of human talent,” he explains.

To solve this challenge, Jono and team looked beyond resumes and cover letters and leveraged Indeed Assessments to help screen and evaluate potential job candidates. Indeed Assessments are ready-made skills tests designed by experts that can help you learn more about a candidate’s skills and experience on 135 topics (e.g., Project Timeline Management, Analyzing Data, Work Motivation). Using Indeed Assessments reduces an employer’s time to hire by 17% on average.¹

"Indeed’s been a transformative tool for us to be able to screen applicants and find those that we feel and are very proud of being the best applicants that are out there."

Jono Anzalone, Executive Director
The Climate Initiative

For example, when it came time to decide between two equally amazing candidates for an assistant program officer role, the TCI team compared each candidate’s project management test results to break the tie and help them make a more objective decision.

Results: From a team of 1 to 17 in less than a year

Indeed’s screening and evaluation tools helped Jono speed up the hiring process without sacrificing candidate quality or experience.

In fact, the candidate that Jono hired as Assistant Program Officer has exactly the project management expertise his team was looking for. Not only that, but Indeed also provided a positive candidate experience. “Indeed made it very easy for me to know what was going on throughout my whole process,” TCI’s new hire explains.

Overall, Indeed has helped The Climate Initiative grow exponentially in a short amount of time. “Indeed really rose to the top as a platform that would allow us to grow from a team of one to a team of 17 within less than a year.”

Indeed helps businesses like The Climate Initiative find the right candidates by providing tools that help employers manage hiring from start to finish — post your job, interview candidates and make offers all on Indeed.

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Location courtesy of River Bend Farm, Home of The Ecology School
¹Indeed data (CA, FR, IN, UK, US)