Nonprofits should keep AI out of hiring decisions. Screening tools can quietly replicate bias and screen out qualified candidates, which undermines the equity that most nonprofits work hard to protect. AI can still help with the logistics of hiring, like scheduling interviews or drafting a job post, but the decision about who to hire should stay with people.
One of the things I have come to appreciate about working in the nonprofit sector is that we get to make choices that other industries often don’t. Not just about programs and services, but about how we choose to operate as organizations and what we are willing to stand behind.
Where and how we choose to use AI is one of those choices.
A recent national survey of 1,000 hiring managers found that 73% of employers now use AI in recruitment and hiring. That number alone is worth paying attention to. However, the specifics behind that number are even more concerning and highlight why AI should not be part of your hiring process.
AI Is Deciding Who Gets Seen, and Who Does Not
Sixty-five percent of hiring managers say AI automatically rejects applicants before a human ever reviews them. In 14% of cases, more than half of all applicants are filtered out before anyone looks at a single resume.
Let me put that in concrete terms. Someone with years of direct service experience. Someone who took time away from work to care for a parent or a child. Someone whose resume reflects a career spent following the mission rather than building a tidy employment history. Someone who took time off due to health issues or simply because they were burned out. An algorithm is making a decision about those people, and you never find out they applied.
The survey backs this up. Nearly half of employers, 47%, said AI filtered out candidates they would have moved forward if they had seen them. Not weak candidates. Not people who were underqualified. People they would have called for an interview.
The Bias Is Built In
The same survey found that 51% of employers use AI to flag candidates it considers risky. That category includes people with career gaps or a pattern of frequent job changes.
In nonprofit work, those things mean something different. A career gap often means someone was a caregiver, was doing community work, or was navigating a personal challenge that now informs everything they bring to the job. Frequent moves often mean grant cycles ended, organizations lost funding, or a person kept saying yes to the work wherever it was needed.
AI does not know any of that. It was built on data that reflects a very different kind of workforce. When it flags a nonprofit professional as risky, it is applying a standard that was never designed for this sector.
When I think about the strongest hires I have made in this work over the years, very few of them had conventional resumes. What they had was heart and commitment to the mission, the ability to connect with people facing difficult circumstances, and a kind of judgment you can only assess through conversation.
Those qualities do not show up in a keyword match. They do not register in a scoring algorithm. You find them by talking to people, asking the right questions, and giving someone the chance to show you who they are.
AI cannot do that part of the job. In nonprofit hiring, that part is most of the job.
Being Intentional Means Knowing When to Say No
People-First AI is not just a framework for deciding when and where to use technology. It is also a useful framework for deciding when and where not to. Part of operating with intention is being clear about the decisions that should not be handed off to a computer.
Nonprofit organizations exist to serve people. That value should extend to how you treat candidates. If nearly half of employers are already admitting they lost good people to AI screening, that is a signal worth taking seriously.
There are places where AI can support your hiring process without getting in the way of your judgment. Use it to draft and refine a job description. Use it to research a competitive salary range. Use it to help organize your notes after a round of interviews. Those are instances where you are in control of the information and what decisions are made.
Where you draw the line is at the door. Every person who took the time to apply deserves to have a human being decide whether they are worth a conversation. That is not a high bar. For a mission-driven organization, it should be a basic one.
Curious about how NonprofitNext can help your organization think through AI with clarity and intention? Visit us at www.nonprofitnext.ai or reach out to start the conversation.