Nonprofit Job Market Appears to Stabilize, Study Finds

A modest sign that the nonprofit job market’s decline may have slowed: Far fewer organizations in a new survey said they intend to eliminate positions this year, compared with a similar poll taken last year.

Ten percent of nonprofit groups surveyed said they intend to cut jobs in 2010, compared with more than half of respondents to last year’s survey by Nonprofit HR Solutions, a human-resources consultant in Washington, and the Caster Family Center for Nonprofit and Philanthropic Research, at the University of San Diego.

Another sign of recovery: Thirty-six percent of respondents said they planned to hire at their organizations; of those, 43 percent said those jobs would be new, full-time positions.

Overwhelmingly, organizations plan to bolster the number of staff members who provide direct services, with 34 percent of groups that expected job growth saying that was the key area for hiring, a jump of 10 percent from the previous year’s survey. Groups that intend to expand their staffs this year also said that they were most likely to hire program managers (17 percent) and fund raisers (14 percent). The survey garnered responses from more than 500 executive directors and human-resources managers nationwide.

• Nearly three-quarters of groups surveyed said they have no formal budget for recruiting employees.
• Half of all organizations that intend to cut jobs said they did not plan to offer those workers severance benefits.
• The most common reason cited for job elimination was an overall budget shortfall (32 percent), while loss of government grants was the second most commonly cited rationale (30 percent).
• Fifty-seven percent of groups said they use current staff members to support new programs or efforts, rather than hiring new workers (which 29 percent of respondents said they did). Six percent use volunteers or interns to run new programs.
• When hiring midlevel workers, only 15 percent of groups said that the majority of those new workers came from outside the nonprofit world; when hiring executives, only 18 percent of groups said most of those employees came from business, government or other areas.

Results of “The Nonprofit Employment Trends Survey” are available for purchase on the Nonprofit HR Solutions Web site. It is free to survey participants and $49.95 to nonparticipants.