Skip to content

History

How Hack for LA evolved from in person onboarding to remote, and the iterative approach that we have taken to arrive at the need for a dedicated interface to list volunteer opportunities.

Pre-Covid times

Hack for LA practiced in person recruiting on onboarding nights. It had its own benefits, like each volunteer felt valued and had agency

2020-mid 2021

The team later moved on to a new process where the open roles on each team were posted on the Hack For LA site. This led to:

  • Some volunteers contacted teams directly and the teams became responsible for all onboarding, which was inefficient use of time, leading to poor cohesiveness of our org (onboarding conducted differently by various people and projects). And some projects got too many volunteers but not the right skill level. Ultimately this method led to high turnover of volunteers and product managers getting burnt out.
  • Other volunteers attending a Zoom onboarding session (held weekly). In this process the project leads would show up to recruit at the end, but sometimes there would be no one who could fill the domain specific role. This process was also inefficient.

mid 2021- current

Hack for LA moved to a new model where all new volunteer attend onboarding and then join a communities of practice (CoP) and no open roles are posted on the hackforla.org site. These CoPs have volunteer opportunity boards so that when project leads recruit, they can go to a larger group of people who are more likely to be a good fit for the role available. Also CoP leads can help provide coaching if someone is unsure of if they are a good fit. Listings at CoP allow the org to determine if the project is actually ready to receive volunteers.

The Hack for LA organization team has now green lighted a project to create a dedicated job board page where volunteers can search and find volunteer opportunities that match their goal and aspirations while still maintaining the involvement of onboarding and CoPs.