Staff Recruitment Process for Public Health Intervention—A Case Study of the Stepping Stones Project

The recruitment and selection process are two of the most important human resource functions having a great impact on the growth and success of an organization as compared to other tasks such as retention, onboarding, leadership development, and managing talent. Stepping Stones is a project for scaling the early childhood development of children younger than 5, implemented by Datta Meghe Institute of Medical Sciences in two districts of Central India through a generous seed grant from Grand Challenges, Canada. The project demanded a variety of human resources, including pre-primary teachers, pedagogy experts, social workers, and child psychologists. In particular, the field staff required essentially a blend of all these skills. A rigorous recruitment process was followed for this project. This article shares the authors’ strategy for identifying the productive workforce needed, specifically for a public health intervention project, and provides evidence of the effectiveness of their strategy, which may be useful for people working in the public health or development sector.