September 20, 2007 | Read Time: 3 minutes
While many nonprofit leaders express serious concerns about their abililty to attract talented employees, most end up pleased with the people they hire, a new survey finds.
Almost 9 in 10 nonprofit organizations that recruited employees for professional and administrative jobs during the past year found the task to be “somewhat” or “extremely” challenging, according to a survey by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies. It found that of those groups, 87 percent cited their inability to offer competitive salaries as the chief obstacle to attracting well-qualified workers, followed by a dearth of job-advancement opportunities (71 percent) and less-than-enticing benefits packages (65 percent).
Yet despite those challenges, 86 percent of organizations reported that they were “extremely” or “somewhat” satisfied with the qualifications of new employees, 83 percent with the enthusiasm that new employees showed for the organization’s charitable mission, and 70 percent with applicants’ salary requirements.
Seeking Fund Raisers
Conducted by the center’s Nonprofit Listening Post Project, the study focused on nonprofit groups’ perceived ease and success in recruiting fund raisers, program staff members, and other employees who were not senior managers, but rather what the study’s authors call “the core of the nonprofit work force.”
The study — entitled “The Nonprofit Workforce Crisis: Real or Imagined?” — was based on data from 295 officials at five types of charities: groups that focus on family services, community and economic development, housing and services for the elderly, as well as museums and theaters.
Among those organizations that sought to hire fund raisers, 84 percent said they had found it “somewhat” or “extremely” difficult, followed by 70 percent of those who recruited for information-technology positions. And while administrative positions were relatively easy to fill, 89 percent of groups said they had trouble filling program and professional staff positions, the frontline workers with expertise in a given field.
Lester Salamon, director of the Center for Civil Society Studies and the report’s main author, says he thinks that “organizations are perceiving problems, anticipating problems.” He adds: “This is one of the challenges we had, trying to interpret what they were trying to say to us. When they went out and actually did the recruiting, the ones that said, ‘Yeah, we had a problem,’ that number was much smaller.”
Mr. Salamon also said he was surprised that organizations didn’t identify more perceived problems with low pay, long hours, or generalized griping among employees, given that the survey focused on entry- and mid-level positions, rather than on senior staff members.
He cited data from the survey showing that just 9 percent of groups identified employee burnout as a “very significant” problem. “There’s some positive feature about working for nonprofits that’s keeping people fired up,” said Mr. Salamon. “Nonprofits need to be sure to make effective use of this in their recruitment.”
Failing to Achieve Diversity
One glaring exception to organizational satisfaction was the degree to which groups felt they had achieved a diverse work force: Barely more than half — 53 percent — were satisfied with their ability to recruit qualified minorities. Child- and family-service groups were most likely to feel they had done a good job, with 69 percent saying they were pleased, while theaters fared the worst, with only 21 percent reporting satisfaction.
And when it came to recruitment techniques, the vast majority of respondents reported success with three tried-and-true approaches: “word of mouth,” referrals from current employees, and ads in local newspapers.
But nonprofit groups also used numerous other methods, including soliciting recent interns (cited by 67 percent), posting the job on the organization’s Web site (64 percent), recruiting from among recent volunteers (49 percent), visiting college campuses (48 percent), advertising in nonprofit publications (46 percent), offering increased starting salaries or benefits (45 percent), using professional recruitment firms (29 percent), and advertising in national markets (24 percent).
However, despite the difficulty that groups reported in hiring minorities, only about one-third said they had used recruitment approaches specifically designed to reach out to such candidates.
The Johns Hopkins Listening Post Project receives support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Surdna Foundation. The report is available on the Johns Hopkins University Web site.
