How charities can attract more graduates to the voluntary sector
During the 20 years I have spent working in the non-profit sector, I have seen first-hand the complicated relationship we have with "talent".
There is something about "talent" that always feels exclusive, so it is understandable a sector which ranks inclusivity, diversity and accessibility among its most important values, finds it hard to talk about, let alone prioritise. Yet we also have a duty to the people using our services to make them as effective as possible, and a responsibility to our supporters to make the most of their money and time. This means making sure we find brilliant people to work for us, and find a way to help them to make the most of their potential.
You may have read Judith Davey's interesting piece last week, which painted a grim picture of the challenges employers and employees in all sectors will face over the next 10 years. It was a reminder, if one was needed, that organisations and workforces are in constant flux, and that talent cannot be taken for granted.
I believe the non-profit sector needs a more strategic approach to talent at all levels, from school-leavers all the way up to senior leadership. As charities and housing associations know better than anyone, talent comes in many forms and from many sources, and a range of approaches are necessary to find and nurture those who can contribute to healthy, effective organisations now and in the future. A better approach to graduate talent should be part of that conversation – but until relatively recently it is one that the sector has been reluctant to engage in.
For that reason, graduates looking at our sector would struggle to see anything resembling a typical career path. Career paths in the non-profit sector are fluid and non-linear. That often leads to fascinating careers, but it also means that even when talented people do find a way into the sector they often get stuck, quickly becoming under-utilised and de-motivated. It means we often rely on talent coming to us fully-formed from the private or public sectors at a later stage in their career, rather than developing our own managers and leaders. In the future, our sector will develop leaders with a social DNA, who can move confidently into other sectors, taking our missions and values with them. That doesn't happen enough at the moment.
There is often a feeling in the sector that competing with large corporate and public employers in the graduate market is a fool's errand, and when you go to a campus recruitment fair and see exhibition stands with high salaries on offer, it is easy to start feeling like the little guy. But that ignores the fact that as a sector we have an offer to graduates that the private sector would kill for: the opportunity to work at the cutting edge of society to solve, or at least confront, some of the most pressing social issues of our time.
That offer carries a huge appeal for graduates but it is an offer that we rarely articulate or make tangible. How many individual charities or housing associations can go out to campuses to promote themselves? How many can afford to offer specific graduate development opportunities year after year?
Someone asked me recently how the sector needed to change to attract more and better graduate talent – and my honest answer is that it doesn't. The opportunity this sector offers for a rewarding and challenging career is unsurpassed, even if we no longer have the monopoly on "good" that we might once have had.
What we do need to do is to work together as a sector to make the most of our offer to graduates – and to start defining our brand as an employer of choice for talented people of all types. If we can do that, a comparative lack of resources and individual brand strength will barely register on our ability to attract and develop the people capable of leading our organisations into the future. We can compete, and we must.
Rachel Whale is the programme director of Charityworks, the UK's not-for-profit graduate programme.
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