Stuck in a Staffing Crisis? 3 Reasons Your Recruiting Might Not Be Working

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Imagine this: your nonprofit is busier than ever with fundraising events and field work to help make your community a better place. So busy, in fact, it’s time to hire a few new employees. But despite your job postings, you’re not recruiting as many candidates as you hoped.

If this sounds like your organization, it might be time to analyze why your recruiting efforts aren’t paying off. Hiring new employees–and retaining your existing ones–is a challenge for nonprofits and for-profit businesses alike. In this article, we’ll look at three reasons you’re not recruiting the talent you need and how to fix it.

3 Reasons Your Nonprofit is Failing to Recruit

Noncompetitive Compensation and Benefits

It’s no secret that most nonprofits have limited budgets for employee payroll. A constrained compensation budget might be the main reason you’re not attracting talent to your organization.

Many people who work in the nonprofit sector join an organization because they have a passion for the cause. While passionate employees are essential for driving your mission forward, passion can’t pay their bills.

In addition, most workers place high value on jobs with comprehensive benefits in addition to reasonable wages. A good health insurance plan and paid time off are requirements for a lot of great employees.

Compensation and benefits that are significantly below industry standards can deter employees from joining your organization. Likewise, if an employee’s salary cannot keep up with the cost of living in your area, they will likely look for a different job.

Solution: Review Your Compensation Package

There’s really only one solution to fixing low wages: adjusting wages and benefits packages to meet industry and local cost of living standards. You’ll need to assess and adjust your payroll budget to stay competitive in the job market.

While you can’t make money appear out of nowhere, your nonprofit accountant can likely help you determine how to make compensation more competitive. They’ll go over comparable salaries from other organizations and review your budget. Working together, you should be able to find a solution that compensates employees fairly without wrecking your budget.

Lack of Visibility and Brand Recognition

Marketing and branding your nonprofit isn’t just great for bringing in new volunteers or raising funds. Brand recognition is a huge part of attracting great employees to fill open roles.

For example, a person follows a nonprofit closely on social media. They enjoy the mission and support the work the organization does in the community. When a new job comes up within the organization, the job seeker already knows it’s at an organization they respect.

Job seekers tend to avoid applying for jobs with companies or organizations they don’t know. Skipping unknown organizations helps job seekers avoid scams. In addition, a lack of employee reviews can put job seekers off and have them scroll past your job ads.

Solution: Build a Strong Employer Brand

If you’re having problems even getting applicants, you may need to take a look at your marketing. Effective marketing efforts should include a strong online presence, such as a website and active social media pages. You also want to be sure your organization has a compelling mission narrative and recognition within your community or industry sector.

Some ideas for marketing and recruitment campaigns include:

• Social media campaigns highlighting the work of your organization
• A portion of your website dedicated to your mission, values, and how you achieve your nonprofit goals
• Encouraging volunteers and employees to leave positive reviews on job boards like Glassdoor or Indeed
• Attending in-person recruiting events like job fairs to increase visibility

Unclear Career Development and Advancement

Like any sector, nonprofit employees seek opportunities for career advancement, growth, and professional development. Nonprofits that fail to communicate career paths or advancement opportunities will likely deter candidates from applying or joining the organization.

Without a clear advancement path, job seekers may worry that the job is a dead-end role or has limited advancement opportunities. Worse, some job seekers may assume the organization is intentionally hiding career paths.

Qualified, ambitious candidates are much more likely to apply and take a job with an organization that will invest in their growth and offer paths for advancement.

Solution: Communicate Clear Career Paths

This is one of the easiest recruiting issues to solve–you simply need to be transparent and clear about a role’s future opportunities. Additionally, you should highlight professional development opportunities for employees. Even if a role doesn’t have a direct advancement path, cross-training and professional development resources can help prepare employees for new roles within the organization.

You should also highlight the success stories of employees in your organization. Maybe a volunteer or intern came to work for you full-time and now works as a manager. Or, you might have someone who started in one department and used the provided resources to move into a more impactful role.

Dig Deep to Find the Root of Your Staffing Struggles

The three reasons above are only some of the issues you might have when recruiting employees. There are plenty of other potential problems that could be hurting your recruitment efforts.

To find the root of your recruitment problems, dig deep and engage current employees, potential candidates, and volunteers to find out:

• Why interviewees went a different route
• What employees like and dislike about working for the organization
• Whether volunteers or community members would consider working at the organization–and why or why not

In addition to asking others, it’s important to self-evaluate your hiring process. With a little introspection, you might find something that’s deterring candidates. Then, you can create a solution to the problem and start attracting the talent you need.

If you find your recruiting efforts hindered by financial issues, reach out to The Charity CFO today.

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