Hiring for Major Gifts: What Predicts Success

Estimated read time: 5 minutes

Picture two candidates for a gift officer role.

Candidate A has a decade of fundraising experience and interviews with total confidence.

Candidate B has less traditional fundraising experience, but spent a decade building long-term relationships in a completely different field such as sales, education, or ministry.

Most hiring processes are built to find Candidate A, but it’s not always the best or most straightforward solution.

Sure, prior fundraising experience is genuinely useful. It means someone understands moves management, knows how to structure an ask, and won’t need training on the basics. That’s real value.

But it’s also the easiest thing to screen for, which means most job descriptions and interview processes optimize for it.

This is often at the expense of a trait that matters deeply: the ability to build authentic relationships with people who have real wealth and real discretion about where it goes.

But it’s only part of the equation. Here’s the part that gets missed just as often, in the other direction: relationship building isn’t the finish line.

We’ve seen officers who are wonderful with people and still don’t raise money, because they treat every touch as a chance for a nice conversation rather than a deliberate step toward a gift. They build real trust and then don’t know what to do with it. The relationship becomes the whole job instead of the vehicle for the work.

The officers who actually succeed do both.

They build the kind of trust that makes a donor comfortable talking about their values and their family, AND they understand moves management well enough to know when a relationship is ready to advance, and how to advance it without rushing or stalling it.

One without the other shows up in the numbers. 

Pure relationship-builders often produce warm donor sentiment and flat revenue. Pure process-followers often produce efficient pipelines and donors who feel handled rather than known.

It’s about listening well enough, over enough time, that a donor comes to trust you with their values, their family dynamics, and eventually their money: and then knowing how to translate that trust into a structured next step.

Some people are naturally good at the relational half regardless of their job history.

Some people have run development shops for a decade and still haven’t developed it.

And some people are so good at the relational half that no one questions why their portfolios never move toward asks.

What Predicts Success

Across the leaders we’ve worked with, a few traits show up again and again in the ones who thrive, regardless of their resume:

1. Genuine curiosity about people
This is the top trait that separates good process-followers from good gift officers.

Not performed interest. Curiosity about what makes someone tick, what they care about, what keeps them up at night. Donors can tell the difference between an officer who’s asking questions to get to the ask, and one who’s genuinely interested in them as a person. Only one of those builds trust that lasts.

2. Comfort with silence and slow timelines
Major gift cultivation isn’t fast. It can take months or years to move a relationship to the point of a significant gift. Officers who need quick wins or get anxious in the absence of immediate progress tend to rush the relationship, and rushed relationships produce smaller gifts or no gift at all.

3. Emotional steadiness
Rejection, awkward silences, donors who go quiet for months- these are normal parts of the work. Officers who take them personally burn out fast or start avoiding the hardest, most important conversations.

4. The ability to represent the mission with credibility
This one’s less about personality and more about fit: does this person actually believe in what the organization does, deeply enough that they can talk about it with real conviction? Donors can tell when someone is reciting talking points versus speaking from genuine belief.

5. Willingness to work a structured process
This is the trait that separates good relationship-builders from good gift officers. It means treating every coffee, every visit, every conversation as a deliberate move in a cultivation plan, not just time well spent with a nice person. It means being able to say, specifically, where a prospect sits in the pipeline and what the next step is. Relational instinct without this discipline produces donors who adore the organization and never get asked.

What This Means for Your Hiring Process

If your interview process is mostly about resume review and past performance metrics, you’re screening for execution skill and missing relational skill almost entirely. And if you’re screening only for warmth and likability, you may be missing whether a candidate can actually move a prospect toward a gift. A few adjustments help:

• Ask behavioral questions about how a candidate has built trust with someone over time, not just how they’ve closed asks
• Pay attention to how they talk about past donors or clients: as people, or as targets
• Ask a candidate to walk through a real prospect relationship, start to eventual ask, and listen for whether they can name the stages and the moves, not just the rapport
• Consider candidates from outside traditional fundraising if they’ve demonstrated real relationship-building in another field
• Don’t assume years of experience equals relational skill. Ask what they actually did in those years.
• Don’t assume a warm, well-liked officer is a productive one. Check the pipeline movement, not just the donor sentiment.

A Quick Gut Check

Before your next major gift hire, ask:

• Does our job posting and interview process actually screen for relational skill, or just fundraising process knowledge?
• Have we talked to references about how this person builds trust, not just how they perform against a number?
• Are we open to a candidate who doesn’t look like a traditional fundraiser on paper, but shows the traits that actually predict success?
• Can this person point to specific prospects they moved from one stage to the next, or only to relationships they enjoyed?

The best gift officer isn’t always the one with the most fundraising experience. It’s the one who can build the kind of relationship a donor trusts enough to be transformational, and who knows how to turn that trust into forward motion.