To Recruit Younger Workers, Charities Must Call Attention to Values, Report Says

Charities should call more attention to their missions and their values to attract and retain the next generation of employees, according to a new report.

Nonprofit groups should sell not just the job to potential employees but also the “context of the job,” says the report from the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies, in Baltimore. Charities, for example, ought to emphasize that the nonprofit workplace can offer a greater sense of personal fulfillment and flexibility than many jobs in the business world.

“There needs to be a recognition of the enormous asset that nonprofits enjoy — that they can offer a life of meaning to people,” says Lester M. Salamon, director of the Johns Hopkins University center and one of the report’s authors. “This will be especially appealing to the millennials, a generation of young people who are looking for work experience that is full of meaning.”

The report summarizes a daylong discussion among 25 charity officials, recruiters, and experts in personnel issues. Their discussion was based on a 2007 survey conducted by the Johns Hopkins center’s Nonprofit Listening Post Project, which focused on recruiting charity workers and keeping them on the job.

The survey found that although charity officials described the task of recruiting as very challenging, most of them were satisfied with the results.

The discussion and subsequent report were assembled, says Mr. Salamon, because “we wanted to look more deeply at how nonprofits are managing so well in the face of so many obstacles — like the inability to offer competitive salaries — and to share the ways they are creatively coping.”

Offer Flexible Hours

Selling the context of the nonprofit job is one of five key approaches identified in the report. The others are:

• Don’t abandon tried and true recruitment methods, like word-of-mouth, employee referrals, and ads in local newspapers.

• Do more to attract young people, such as setting up internship programs and maintaining a presence at job fairs and in online job postings.

• Redefine work and the working environment by, for example, offering flexible work hours and benefit packages that adjust to nontraditional family structures.

• Professionalize the organization’s human-resources unit, providing personnel departments with the same resources development, marketing, and program staff members receive.

For smaller groups, the report says, this could mean forming partnerships with similar charities or looking to professional associations or other organizations that focus on personnel issues.

“Explicit concern about human resources in the nonprofit sector is relatively new and is being stimulated by the realization that we just can’t take for granted that people will take jobs and stay in them just because they love to work for nonprofits,” Mr. Salamon says.

Susan Medak, managing director of the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, in California, participated in the discussion about employment issues. She says that her organization takes nothing for granted, seeking regularly to ensure that employees understand and feel connected to the theater’s mission and values.

“If we are mounting a season of seven plays, it’s important to talk about each play, but equally important to talk about why we committed to these plays and how they feed who we are as an organization,” Ms. Medak says. She says at least part of each of the theater’s staff meetings — which are held every six to eight weeks — are dedicated to talking about the organization’s goals and values and whether the theater is living up to them.

The report from Johns Hopkins discusses how to handle practical matters about recruitment, too, like the salary considerations that may discourage young people from taking nonprofit jobs. It says that student-debt burdens often make it challenging for college graduates to pursue careers at charities when they typically can make more money at for-profit organizations.

The report suggests that nonprofit officials push to expand federal legislation to help students pay back their loans if they choose a nonprofit career.

The full text of the report, “A Nonprofit Workforce Action Agenda: Report on the Listening Post Project Roundtable on Nonprofit Recruitment and Retention,” is available online.