The Children's Services Directorate at Warrington Borough Council uses an 'interview schedule' for initial meetings with potential volunteers.
Kindly contributed by and copyright to Warrington Borough Council
Please note: please bear in mind that this interviewing guide has been created for a specific organisation in a specific context, and should therefore be used as a guide rather than adopted wholesale. For further information, please visit our 'top tips on using the Good Practice Bank'.
Creating a prompt sheet or template like this can be a useful tool for recruiting and selecting volunteers. It could help your organisation to ensure consistency in recruitment, especially if several different people are responsible for interviewing potential volunteers.
The questions in this example cover quite a broad range of subject areas, such as motivations, relevant skills and experience, time availability and resource/support needs. If your recruitment process is designed in this way, you can find out a lot more by talking to volunteers about these topics, rather than simply asking on the application form.
This example interview schedule is divided into three distinct parts: telling, asking and follow-up. It's good to remind yourself that recruiting volunteers should be a two-way process, so that both sides learn about each other's background, motivations and needs. That will help you to decide if the volunteering opportunity is right for the individiual.
