Report: Nonprofits Not Improving Talent, Culture Practices to Keep Up With For-Profit Competition

In the last few years, nonprofit organizations have been increasing their staff size by hiring more aggressively than for-profit organizations, but nonprofits are experiencing an increased competition for talent from the for-profit sector, according to Nonprofit HR’s “2017 Nonprofit Employment Practices Survey.”

In 2016, 57 percent of nonprofits were planning to hire and 36 percent of for-profits were planning hire. Nonprofits went down to 50 percent and for-profits went up to 40 percent in 2017. While nonprofits are aggressively hiring, the survey reported, “Nonprofits are not improving their talent and culture practices in order to keep up with increased competition and advance their missions.”

When asked, 64 percent of respondents said that their organization does not have a formal talent acquisition strategy and 56 percent said that their organization had no plans in 2017 to make any significant changes to the way it sources and recruits their talents.

Furthermore, nonprofits are not taking any additional steps to improve their retention strategy. Eighty-one percent of respondents said that their organization does not have a formal retention strategy. Even more surprising, 36 percent said their organization does not plan to create a formal retention strategy in 2017 and 37 percent said, “I don’t know.”

When it comes to challenges in nonprofit talent, 28 percent said that the greatest challenge is hiring qualified staff within limited budget constraints; 22 percent said maintaining salary budgets against market pressures and 18 percent said finding quality staff.

Click here to read the full report.