Why screen volunteers at all?

Summary:

The approach to recruiting volunteers should be as careful as the process used for adding any new staff.

Nan Hawthorne said on CYBERVPM on Wednesday, Jan 15, 1997
Found a fantastically useful website for volunteer programs, the
Volunteer's Legal Handbook --- go take a look at it:
http://www.iciclesoftware.com/VLH7/index.html

For example, a brief quote:

Volunteer screening and placement

If, as some authorities suggest, a volunteer is a worker serving without consideration, then a nonprofit corporation utilizing volunteer services should put substantially the same amount of work into locating and placing volunteers that it would put into locating and placing paid employees. Volunteers frequently have a highly public role on behalf of a nonprofit corporation; they are the persons that individuals dealing with the nonprofit corporation see first and most often. You can manage several risks by effectively screening, evaluating and placing volunteers.