The highest level of resident engagement occurs when organizations hire from the communities they serve.

Most hiring managers use a corporate strategic process to hire potential candidates. The nonprofit sector needs to change the human resource strategy it is currently using to achieve authentic, long lasting impact in the community.
In this talk, Kanoelani Nāone, CEO of INPEACE, discusses using community and cultural IQ as the first measures for job requirement and placing academic IQ and credentials next. INPEACE has successfully implemented this process and created proven results that can be embedded in any organization culture.
Hiring from the community is a built-in process for authentically engaging residents and, as a result, developing programs that work. INPEACE developed a philosophy of empowering community externally and internally in 2007, and the organization went from a 37 percent annual employee turnover to 3 percent in 2013.