• Planning overview
• Assessing staff needs
• Recruitment essentials
• Sourcing staff
  • Existing programmes
  • Pool
  • Surge mechanism
    • Emergency response team
    • Internal registers
    • Standby agreement
    • Secondments
    • External register
    • External recruitment
• Financial resources
• Staff turnover
• Competition and collaboration
• Accountability

• Case studies
• Resources
• Further reading

• People In Aid Code

Surge mechanism

Organisations have developed a number of strategies for recruiting and deploying the right people. 

In descending order of cost to the organisation but also in descending order of speed of response, they include:

• Emergency response teams
• Internal registers
• Standby agreements
• Secondments
• External registers
• External recruitment

Large well-funded emergency organisations may use all of these strategies, see for instance UNHCR’s Catalogue of Emergency Response Resources, while smaller organisations may only use external registers and recruitment.