Helping you and your organization build your team and hire talented staff!

The team at Rooted Edge Consulting (originally Sarah Bennett Consulting) has helped hire over 100 staff members for mission-based organizations across the U.S., including Waxman Strategies, Mighty Earth, CeaseFirePA, The Price Center, Virginia Conservation Network, Mothers Out Front, International Rivers, Slingshot, Fight for the Future, and more. Our team can directly support your search in one of two ways:

• Hire our team to coordinate your search or support you search in key areas

• Consulting calls with our founder, Sarah Bennett, to provide counsel and coaching while your organization runs your search in-house

Interested in working with us? Contact the Rooted Edge team:

• Starting with an intake process to learn more about the job, the types of candidates you are looking for, the details we need to know, and to start to map out an ideal interview process.

• Drafting and editing job descriptions, designed to recruit strong candidates and incorporating strong DEI best practices;

• Developing a job posting plan from our extensive list of sites, google groups, and listservs;

• Posting the role widely on job boards and listservs;

• Creating recruitment materials, including: sample social media posts, outreach email and talking points on the job; criteria docs for effectively evaluating candidates; phone screen and interview questions for all stages;

• Outreach to potential candidates through our network and through linkedin candidate searches;

• Outreach and setting up calls with like-minded organizations and contacts for candidate leads;

• Reviewing applications;

• Conducting the initial phone interviews;

• Coordinating the interview process with the hiring manager/team, including decision-making on candidates advancing; drafting interview questions; scheduling interviews;

• Implementing DEI best practices in your recruitment searches;

• Reference calls;

• Communicating with candidates throughout the process;

• Sending declines;

• Meeting as much as needed with clients to strategize around the direction of the search;

• Other tasks and strategizing as needed!

NOTE: You don’t need to go with all of these services, but we recommend utilizing as many as possible.
Also, we no longer take on projects which only involve sourcing (calls and emails for candidates). We offer this as one of our services, but find we do our best work when we are involved in a few stages of the process.

What will it cost us to hire you to coordinate a search?

We bill by the hour for each hour our team spends on the search. Generally speaking, a search will cost between $9K and $12K for a package which includes job description writing and edits, posting the job widely, application review, phone interviews, networking and outreach, communication with candidates, and other small tasks as needed. The vast majority of our searches fall in this range. The more challenging searches could fall in the range of $13K to $22K over the time it takes to make your hire. Searches that fall in that higher range tend to require higher budgets for few factors, including: if you need significant help in the final stages of the process, how challenging a role it is to fill, if the search is national or international in scope (which can results in hundreds of applications), and how senior and specialized the position is. We prefer to bill by the hour because you’ll pay for exactly how much time you get from us on the project.

We can work with you to find a plan which works within your budget after hearing more. Rooted Edge Consulting has a commitment to working with mission-driven organizations and we know many nonprofits are functioning on tight budgets and working hard to bring in funding. We do our best to keep our searches as reasonable as we can to allow us to work with a wide range of nonprofits with important missions and at varying sizes.

If you are interested in hearing more and figuring out if this is a good fit, please reach out so we can connect and talk more. We can also email you with additional details on our rates and more too. We'd love to hear from you!

A handful of our current and former clients on hiring projects include:

We provide support around the following services involved in a search:

“I also wanted to give a special shoutout to Sarah Bennett and team for their work throughout the process. They were excellent, incredibly responsive and transparent, and courteous.” Candidate, Waxman Strategies (Rooted Edge client)

"Sarah's ability to capture and relay the full measure of job candidates is unparalleled.

She has incredibly keen instincts about how a person will 'fit' within an organization.

Perhaps most valuably, she was able to help ME figure out what I needed for my open positions—she helped me articulate my 'dream hires' and then she went and found them!

I wholeheartedly recommend Sarah. She is the best recruiter with whom I've ever had the pleasure of collaborating.

Jill Beckwith
Senior Director of Philanthropy
Mothers Out Front

Partner with our team at Rooted Edge Consulting to coordinate your search and find your next hire:
When we partner with nonprofits and take on a search, your organization works closely with Sarah and a Rooted Edge Consulting staff member to bring our expertise to the project and save you time by coordinating your search. We have hired for just about every position you can think of at a mission-based organization, including operations, communications, development, grassroots organizing/ campaigning, policy, leadership roles, and more. Running a search effectively takes a lot of time and we believe partnering with us not only helps you protect your time, but also ensures your search is run effectively with strong attention to diversity, equity, and inclusion best practices.

Schedule time with Sarah Bennett for advice / counsel / coaching on your search:

It may be better organizationally for your team to run its own search, but that doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from our experience and counsel. If you want to get some insight as you launch your search, need some advice through challenges, could use some fresh ideas, consider scheduling some one-on-one consulting time with Sarah. She is available for just one or two consulting conversations when needed or to hold regular coaching calls throughout your search. We offer a 20 minute free introductory call and consulting time for your first chat with Sarah and, going forward, Sarah bills $150/ hour for recruitment coaching. We’d be excited to partner in this way if this could be a help to you on your search! Please fill out the interest form or email team@rootededgeconsulting.com to set up an introductory call or with any questions.

We also offering trainings to help your in-house recruitment staff:

• Outreach to generate candidate leads;

• Writing job descriptions

• Building Your Candidate Pool: Postings, Networking, and Conversations

• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Recruiting, Overall Best Practices

• Reviewing Applications: Best Practices & How-To

• Making Reference Calls

If you have staff on your team who could benefit from sharpening their staff recruitment skills and best practices to help make your talent searches more effective, please reach out. Training sessions pricing ranges between $75 and $100 per session and we’re happy to be in touch to provide more details.

If your organization is hiring and looking for outside help and support, I highly recommend working with Rooted Edge Consulting. We've worked with Sarah and her team on everything from senior level searches to entry level and they've helped craft a specific approach each time to find the best candidate. They have a deep understanding of how to effectively run a hiring search, bringing best practices around recruiting as well as a strong lens for diversity, equity, and inclusion. We’ve enjoyed working with the entire team, and appreciated getting Sarah’s time during key steps and decisions. Rooted Edge’s pricing is very reasonable and works well for a small non-profit, and even larger ones, but I can assure you that you get the highest quality of work for the cost. We’re thrilled with our new hires and will work with Rooted Edge again. I recommend you reach out to them for your recruiting needs.

Adam Garber
Executive Director | CeaseFirePA