I think we need to talk about why museum job descriptions are starting to look like applications for the International Space Station.
Go to any major museum job board right now and filter for an entry-level Development or Membership role.
You’ll see the usual: "Passion for the arts," "Strong communication skills," "Master’s degree preferred."
Then you get to the bottom and the "Technical Skills" section. This is where things get weird.
The candidate is expected to have advanced proficiency in a legacy database that hasn’t had a UI update since the Clinton administration. They need to know how to navigate "complex nested queries." They need to be a "power user" of a system that requires a week of specialized training just to find a donor's secondary phone number.
My take? They aren't looking for a fundraiser. They’re looking for a NASA engineer who is willing to work for a nonprofit salary and spend their life fighting the equivalent of a VCR manual.
The Survival Filter
When your technology is a walled garden of complexity, your hiring process changes. It has to. You stop hiring for the person who is best at building relationships or telling your story. Instead, you start hiring for technical tolerance.
What you’re looking for is a survivor. Someone who has already spent years in the trenches of your specific, clunky software and has lived to tell the tale. That rare person who knows exactly which three hidden menus to click to generate a simple report.
Directors often will lament to me that they have a talent shortage. But because I have seen these unicorn-seeking vacancy announcements, I don’t know if that’s the right diagnosis. I think we have a bad software surplus.
My Adventures in Sourdough
Now, I have a quick confession to make that has nothing (and everything) to do with database administration. It starts in my kitchen in April 2020.
I tried to become a sourdough expert during the pandemic. We all did. I bought the digital scales. I nurtured a starter I named "The Blob." I watched an unholy amount of YouTube videos about hydration percentages and autolyse.
I ended up with one decent loaf. It took an eon and there is a non-zero chance that eating from that loaf put me over the legal alcohol limit. So eventually…I realized I’m a much better museum technology consultant than I am a baker.
I find myself explaining this exact concept to museum execs on a weekly basis. Just because your staff can learn to navigate a difficult, non-intuitive database doesn't mean it’s the best use of their time and brainpower.
The execs I talk to can readily identify that the museum sector has normalized the idea that museum staff should be part-time IT professionals. But I think it goes even deeper than that. It’s about who museums are allowed to hire in the first place.
Why The Best Candidates Stay Away
It comes down to an uncomfortable truth: your software is effectively a hiring gatekeeper
.
By sticking to these niche, legacy systems, many museums have accidentally built an architecture that excludes almost everyone. Because if your database requires a secret language just to be productive, you’ve locked the doors to the outside world.
You can't hire that brilliant marketer from the tech sector or that organized manager from the private world because they "don't know the system."
But that’s a trap! Modern technology should be invisible. It should be intuitive enough that a smart, mission-driven person can sit down on Monday and be running their own reports by Tuesday.
And besides, hiring only from the same tiny pool of survivors creates an echo chamber. You end up passing the same few dozen professionals around from institution to institution. It’s the same people, using the same old tools, doing things the way they’ve always been done.
That’s hardly a recipe for innovation.
Imagine being able to hire someone who did something truly epic at a for-profit brand. Or a person who knows how to scale engagement or build world-class customer journeys.
Right now, you probably can’t touch them. They don’t know your nonprofit niche toolset. Odds are that if they even got past the initial screening (which is doubtful, because your HR filters are inevitably looking for proficiency in a dead language…) anyone used to modern tooling would take one look at your gray, 20-year-old database and walk out. Or, you’d spend their first six months teaching them where the "Export" button is buried.
When your toolset is interchangeable with the rest of the modern world, your hiring pool explodes. You can hire for the brain and not the software baggage. You can bring in fresh blood and new ideas because the technical barrier to entry has vanished.
Stop Testing for Technical Tolerance
The future of the field depends on bringing in new voices. But you can’t do that if your doors are guarded with a technical tolerance test.
Because of the work I do, I’ve spent more time reading museum sector vacancy announcements than is probably healthy. I see the direct line between HR struggles and bad software every day, and I try to help execs see it, too. I can't magically fix their databases on a phone call, but for those who realize that clunky tech is actively shrinking their candidate pool, the math on their hiring issues changes forever.