Report documents nonprofit workforce issues

The Johns Hopkins University's Nonprofit Listening Post Project recently released a report on recruitment and retention of professional and support workers at nonprofit organizations. The study found overwhelming majorities of nonprofit human service, arts, and community development organizations face real challenges recruiting and retaining quality workers. It also found, however, that most organizations were able to overcome these challenges and attract the qualified workers on which they rely to fulfill their missions.

The report is based on an all-day roundtable on March 5, 2008, which included nonprofit recruiters, workforce experts and nonprofit practitioners representing organizations of wide-ranging sizes working in a range of fields. The nonprofits participating in the session agreed that recruitment and retention are challenging processes, but that there are numerous strategies that nonprofits can use to attract and retain quality staff. Five overarching lessons emerged from this conversation:

1)     The importance of selling “the context” of nonprofit jobs;

2)     The realization that new, costly methods do not always have better results;

3)     The importance of thinking creatively about bringing people into the sector;

4)     The need to re-define work and the working environment;

5)     The importance of professionalizing the human resource function.

Click here for the full text of the report.