February 11, 2002 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Charities in the San Francisco Bay Area spent much of the last decade competing for staff members in a vibrant local economy. But the recession that started nearly a year ago has done little to make it easier to fill vacancies, according to a new study.
The analysis, by CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, a consulting group in San Francisco, found that one in 13 jobs at nonprofit organizations remained vacant in the region last year.
The organization drew its conclusions based on interviews conducted in March and April with 425 Bay Area and Silicon Valley nonprofit groups. These groups collectively employed 13,601, or slightly more than 5 percent, of the estimated 250,049 full-time workers at nonprofit organizations in the region.
The report’s authors say they believe the conditions reported by charities last year still hold true today, although they say charities may not have vacancies for as long as they did in the earliest stage of the recession. Most groups (75 percent) believed that filling vacancies was a bigger problem the year before than in 2001.
Even so, the hiring difficulties reported by those interviewed for the report did cause problems.
Sixty-four percent of participants said that staff turnover and vacancies continued to have a high or very high negative impact on their work, while only 17 percent said it had made little or no difference. The effects of vacancies did not vary much according to the agency’s mission or budget size, the report said.
The Bay Area and Silicon Valley face unusual problems because they are located at “the epicenter of the new economy’s ups and downs and in one of the most expensive regions of the country,” the report says. Accordingly, the most-commonly cited reasons for employee turnover were money-related. Twenty-nine percent of those surveyed said their employees left because of high costs of living in the region. Twenty-nine percent also said that departing employees were unhappy with their salary or wages.
Survey respondents indicated that the quality of the job was another factor in decisions by their employees to leave. Nineteen percent said employees left because they felt burned out by the job. Thirty-four percent said that employees left because they had found a better job elsewhere.
Departing employees’ destinations were mostly outside of the nonprofit world. Only 32 percent of employees who left joined another nonprofit organization. The rest either joined a for-profit business (20 percent) or a government agency (14 percent), pursued additional education (12 percent), or undertook other activities (21 percent), including consulting, self-employment, and child rearing.
Copies of the report, “Help Wanted: Turnover and Vacancy in Nonprofits,” can be obtained free online at http://www.compasspoint.org, or by mail for $15 each from CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, 706 Mission Street, Fifth Floor, San Francisco, Calif. 94103.
To talk about your organization’s experience with vacancies and turnover, go to Career Connection’s Job Market online forum.
