How to Attract New Employees — and Keep the Ones You Already Have

Increase pay. Funds are always tight for nonprofits, but many groups are finding ways to offer signing or other bonuses. To advance equity, some organizations are restructuring pay so that their lowest-paid workers get the largest percentage increases.

• Offer perks. Gas cards and free meals can show employees that their work is valued. Some nonprofits are getting creative, offering employees low-interest loans and, in one case, below-market housing.
• Cut hours. A rape-crisis center in Salt Lake City, unable to compete on salary, reduced the workweek to 32 hours for some hard-to-fill positions.
• Be flexible. Many employees worked from home over the past two years, and they now expect more autonomy in their jobs. Let as many workers as possible work remotely, at least part of the time.
• Cross-train employees. Some nonprofits are training staff to cover for one another. That way even people with jobs that must be done in person can work from home once in a while.
• Create career ladders. Many employees want to know they can advance in their careers. An organization that advocates for children who have been abused changed its entire structure to create more levels of management to offer new opportunities for promotions. The nonprofit also provided additional training to help staff build skills.
• Promote wellness. The rape-crisis center educated employees on how to recognize burnout and encourages staff to ask for help if they see signs of overwork.

Bernardi raised social workers’ salaries by about $5,000 to $7,000. She also raised compensation for hourly employees by $2 to $5 an hour. The group offers a signing bonus and another bonus after six months to encourage people to stay. Some employees receive funds to compensate for increased gas prices. But nothing has helped her to maintain her staffing levels. The result: Hearts and Homes is serving fewer people. Though it hasn’t cut programs, some group homes are only at 50 percent capacity. That comes at a time when cases are more complex, in part because of the pandemic. Young people are facing more mental-health problems, which has required more staff training to help them meet those needs After so much remote learning, they are behind academically, too.

“It’s a constant juggling act of figuring out where to put the money, how to keep morale up, how to keep people feeling safe, wanting to come to work,” she says. “There are so many other options for our employees right now to choose something else.”

Therapists have been the hardest group of professionals for Sonya Martinez-Ortiz to hire at the Rape Recovery Center in Salt Lake City. The group provides services to rape survivors: accompanying them to the hospital for a forensic exam, teaching them about their rights, and providing case-management services and therapy. The organization also does community outreach about the issue and advocacy with lawmakers.

This past year the Rape Recovery Center lost funding because the government cut 10 percent from victims’ services spending. Next year it may cut another 15 percent, further affecting the group’s budget. At the same time, the organization is trying to make its pay more competitive. Its lowest paid staff now earn about $18.75 an hour, up from $17 before the pandemic. “I’ve been trying to slowly address pay equity, looking at the market, looking at our budget,” Martinez-Ortiz says.

But those increases can’t come close to meeting the prevailing salaries for early-career therapists. The group pays them about $45,000 a year. But many other employers start them out at $60,000 to $80,000.

“Early-career social workers are making almost as much as I’m making as executive director of a $1.6 million organization,” she says.

To try to make the jobs more appealing, Martinez-Ortiz reduced their schedules to 32 hours a week. That way they might be paid less, but it’s for a shorter week. The group has made positions as flexible as possible, allowing as many employees as it can to work from home three days a week. The organization encourages workers to take time off. No one needs to prove why they need a sick day.

That supportive work environment is a big reason Stephanie Nolasco, who helps rape survivors obtain services, does crisis intervention, and supports help-line volunteers, is so happy with her job. She received training from the center on how to recognize when she was overworked so she could look for things like irritability, a loss of appetite, or anxiety and a loss of enjoyment. “I can communicate if I’m experiencing burnout. I can set boundaries and people respect that,” she says. “I haven’t always had those experiences in other nonprofit jobs.”

Half of the therapist positions — including the clinical-director position — are open at Child Advocates of Fort Bend, an organization that provides services to abused and neglected children, including mental-health care. It’s been that way for months.

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Several therapists left to start their own private practices because demand for services is so high. Later, some of those former employees tried to recruit some remaining staff members to join them.

Demand for services keeps growing — about 20 percent a year over the past two years. The organization now has a waitlist for therapy and has to refer people to outside providers, where they will have to pay for services that the group would have offered for free. Some staff members in other departments are taking on a higher caseload to make up for open positions.

“It has been extraordinarily difficult to recruit therapists. That’s been our toughest one,” says Ruthanne Mefford, the group’s CEO. “The demand is so high, and there’s just such a shortage of qualified therapists.”

Listening Sessions

Faced with impossible situations, nonprofit leaders are doing their best to appeal to prospective employees. Nonprofits do have one advantage over other types of employers — the work can be meaningful and important, says Lisa Brown Alexander, CEO of Nonprofit HR. With so many workers re-evaluating their priorities in life, that can help make a nonprofit career appealing, despite the financial difficulties.

But an appealing mission is not enough, she says. Groups need to make their employees a higher priority. “When leaders focus on creating positive, nontoxic workplace cultures, they tend to win in periods like this where the work force is reshaping and demands for talent are tight,” she says.

Nonprofits need to care not only for the people they serve but for the staff and volunteers who do the work. Alexander urges leaders to be flexible and give staff some autonomy. “Some rules don’t apply in this very unusual dynamic environment,” she says. “It’s agility, it’s empathy, it’s engagement, it’s equity, it’s understanding. Those are the things that help organizations get through difficult times, and humans will rise to the occasion.”

Some leaders struggling to hire and keep staff are already taking this approach.

At Child Advocates of Fort Bend, Mefford hired a consultant to help her assess the organization, and she conducted listening sessions with employees to learn more about their thoughts and concerns. One issue that came up was the group’s structure. It was too flat. There were executives and frontline workers — and not a lot in between. That meant that workers did not have much opportunity to get promoted and grow professionally.

Child Advocates hired a leadership coach to help it find ways to do more training and to help employees grow in their jobs. It created a top-level group of managers to receive leadership training. Some frontline workers became first-time managers and are receiving management training. Another group of direct-service workers is reviewing the various functions of the organization to see whether they are in line with the group’s culture in areas like recruitment, diversity, and self-care. The group of workers will make recommendations for changes to the leaders. The nonprofit also focused more on trauma-related care for its clients. And it created a new department that does community outreach and education.

Mefford says she wants employees to be engaged and have a sense of ownership over the organization and its direction. And she wants them to see that the group has changed. “There’s going to be many more career opportunities here,” she says. “This is a place you can stay in. You can build your career.”

A nonprofit, unable to compete for therapists on salary, cut their work week to 32 hours.

Some of those approaches resonate with Casey Davis, the organization’s community-engagement director. She appreciates the group’s focus on values and its diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts over the past two years. She aims to pass on the autonomy and flexibility that she now feels to the people she manages. She can let people decide to work different hours or work from home. “If your team is not happy, nothing’s going to get done,” she says.

She also really appreciated that staff got raises at the end of 2020 — a time when many were not sure they would even have a job. “I love this organization. I feel like it makes for happier employees because at the end of the day, people feel appreciated for the work that they do.”

After two years of taking on new tasks, keeping their organizations afloat, serving their communities, and in some cases working remotely, many nonprofit workers have a stronger sense of their own autonomy. They expect their employers to listen and feel more confident in expressing their needs to their bosses.

Employees at the Rape Recovery Center feels more comfortable questioning management decisions, says CEO Martinez-Ortiz. They want to know why decisions are being made, not just what the decision is.

Employees are looking for transparency in decision making, says Nonoko Sato, executive director of the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits. Increasingly, frontline workers want to know that upper management is listening to them. And mental health is being more openly discussed. “To have conversations around what does it mean to holistically support employees,” she says. “Those are really good conversations for organizations to have.”

Danger of Two Cultures

With so many people seeking greater flexibility in their jobs, organizations that must provide services in person are finding themselves at a disadvantage. Many of those groups are trying to build in as much flexibility as they can — but there is only so much they can do. And there can be risks.

Nonprofits that have some employees in the office and others working remotely — either part or all of the time — can end up with employees who resent each other and sometimes two separate work cultures, says Libbie Landles-Cobb, a partner at the consulting firm Bridgespan. Because direct-service work is often done by people of color, those different groups sometimes break down along racial lines. That can add another layer of racial inequity at a time when many nonprofits are trying to eliminate it. Some organizations are requiring everyone to come in at least a few days a week to make things more fair for all employees, she says.

“My sense is that we are headed back to a hybrid workplace,” she says.

At the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club in Chicago, which provides child care and youth programs, much of the work has to be done in person. When the group allowed administrative staff to work remotely, that created resentment, says Angela Habr, the group’s executive director. It lost one staff member because the employee couldn’t work from home.

Habr has created some flexibility for more of its senior managers and has done cross-training between positions so people can cover for one another to make some work more flexible. Now employees must come in at least three days a week. Most, she says, come in every day.

After the tumult of the pandemic, workers have a stronger sense of autonomy and expect employers to listen to their needs.

But that flexibility doesn’t filter down to everyone. Chanquel Jones, the group’s director of programs, says that she has to be at the organization’s offices every day. That means she has to put her son in an aftercare program after school, incurring a cost she didn’t have at her previous job, which was mostly remote. She has to work later than usual one day a week and has to have someone else pick him up from aftercare. On the other hand, she’s happy about the flexibility she has been granted. She has been able to take more time off than she had accrued to take vacations planned before she accepted the position. If emergencies come up at home, she can take time to deal with them.

Jones is trying to hire six to eight summer-camp counselors — jobs that must be done in person. The group recently increased wages, but that hasn’t helped. Jones recently scheduled 20 phone interviews, and no one called in. After revamping the hiring process in late April, she spoke with a candidate she hoped would take the job. But if all the positions are not filled, the group may only be able to offer half as many summer-camp sessions as it expected to, affecting both the fees it earns from these programs and the families in the neighborhood that rely on it.

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“We’re here to provide a service to families,” Habr says. “We just can’t provide the service if we don’t have the people to do it.”

Theresa Mangapora, executive director of the Brazos Valley Food Bank, in Bryan, Tex., doesn’t see a quick end to staff shortages. What she does see is rising costs and a continued struggle to find workers.

Over the last six months, the food bank has had 70 percent turnover among its warehouse and trucking staff. The organization takes in bulk food donations and then delivers them to other charities that distribute the food to people in need. At one point, board members were driving trucks to help deliver food. At times when the food bank required warehouse workers to wear masks, some employees refused and left.

Mangapora raised wages and is working with her board to develop a hybrid work policy for some positions, but food can’t be transported over Zoom. Costs are also increasing. Because food donations have slowed, the group is purchasing more. The cost of both that food and the gas needed to deliver it is surging. On top of that, Mangapora expects demand for food to surge again, with more pandemic safety-net programs ending and people’s budgets being stretched by inflation.

The higher wages the food bank is offering have been costly but necessary — yet they haven’t been enough to attract new drivers and warehouse workers — or to hold on to existing workers. A lot of those employees are now coming from temp agencies. She worries that any number of better-paying jobs will lure away the people she still has.

“Any day someone could see something better come up — there are better opportunities in just about in any field that you’re looking at right now,” she says. “It’s a continuing struggle to find people.”