Episode Details

A nonprofit hired a grant writer who aced the interview, and couldn’t do the job. This episode digs into a hiring crisis moving faster than most nonprofit leaders realize: candidates using AI to fabricate qualifications, feed live answers during interviews, and in some documented cases, misrepresent who’s actually behind the screen entirely.

Sean shares real numbers on how fast this has escalated, plus a conversation from this past week with an executive search firm that’s seeing something even stranger, candidates whose answers are too polished, too fast, too confident, to the point where fluency itself has become a red flag.

The episode closes with the honest flip side: if verifying real qualifications is now the hard part of hiring, what does that mean for candidates who have nothing to hide?

Sean is the founder of Magnolia Philanthropic Services, advising nonprofits nationwide on development strategy, with 25+ years in the field.