Attracting top graduate talent to the charity sector
When I think of the charity sector, I often think of the "marginal gains" made famous by British Cycling’s performance director Dave Brailsford. Just like Brailsford seems obsessed with making the many small things count, in the charity sector it is very rare to find a charity not trying to squeeze every last drop of value and performance from the resources it has - whether that’s money, awareness, space, political capital, or people.
I want to focus on the last of those: people. I believe we can do more to make the most of the people working for us, and in particular, I think we can think more strategically about how we attract and develop the talented people capable of becoming charities' future managers and leaders.
Everyone who has worked in a number of teams will know the impact of both good and bad management on performance at work. I would suggest that nothing has more impact on the day to day operation of a charity than the quality of line management at all levels of the organisation. This is why I find the variance in quality and practice of line management I see in the sector so worrying, and why I am so passionate about doing something about it.
Producing brilliant managers
Fortunately it is completely within our gift to produce brilliant managers, and we should be excited at how much more impact we could achieve if we can improve the baseline level of line management which people are receiving in charities. I believe the key to this is to find people with the capability and attitude to be the agile, emotionally intelligent managers needed to underpin a brilliant workforce, and then give them the support and space to become the leaders of charities.
The concept of "talent" hasn’t been a feature of the conversation during my time in the non-profit sector. Inherently exclusive, it seems to clash so clearly with the values of accessibility and inclusion which run so deep in this sector, so maybe it is understandable that the sector has long shied away from tackling it head on. It is however hard to reconcile this caginess with the very real responsibility to provide the best possible service to the people one works with.
Last year I was involved in the Cabinet Office’s review into Skills and Leadership in the social sector, led by Dame Mary Marsh, which you can read online. It was a piece of work that looked at the sector with a wide-angle lens, and identified some of the most acute talent and leadership issues facing individual organisations, and the sector as a whole.
On the particular theme of "routes into and through the sector", we found that not only have we made it extremely difficult for people to find a way into the sector, but also that if you do find your way in it is easy to get stuck, or to have your perspective confined to a particular role, department or organisation.
Thinking more strategically
My point here isn’t that the charity sector doesn’t attract and develop brilliant people already. Yes there are some high-performing charities with extremely talented people. But what I’m trying to articulate is the huge opportunity there is if we think more strategically about talent attraction and development at all levels. If we’ve achieved so much without any coherent approach, imagine what we could do if we had one!
The charity sector knows better than any other that talent comes in many different forms, and excellent managers and leaders can come from any number of sources. I think the sector needs a better approach to talent at all levels, from apprentice right up to senior management, but my particular focus at the moment is on graduate talent. This is because I think the sector’s offer to graduates is hugely underdeveloped, and until relatively recently charities just haven’t competed with other sectors in terms of speaking to this demographic.
Consider this, the perspective of a recent graduate: “When I was at university, I was bombarded with opportunities to work in the private and public sectors. A career in the non-profit sector had always been a possibility, I had had an interest in charity from an early age and had always enjoyed my experiences of volunteering, but the graduate opportunities I found in the sector were extremely limited. There seemed to be very rigid requirements around experience, with little or no value put on potential.”
A Demos report has suggested we are currently seeing the emergence of "Generation Citizen", a generation of young people maturing into socially conscious and responsible adults interested in “bottom-up social action and enterprise over top-down politics”.
An exciting opportunity
This attitude and potential resource represent an exciting opportunity for organisations with a social mission, and the causes those organisations are working for. If we can translate those values into a generation of people willing and able to dedicate their careers to social change, it could be truly transformative.
This rise in social awareness among young people certainly hasn’t gone unnoticed by graduate recruiters in other sectors, many of whom will stress their values and social responsibility when starting a conversation with students and graduates. But how can they compete with organisations which so clearly put their values into practice day after day?
The charity sector has an offer to graduates that the private sector in particular would kill for: the opportunity to tackle the most complex and ingrained social challenges of their time. For the kind of talent charities really want to attract, that opportunity will stack up against anything else on offer, including high remuneration, on the condition that charities make it tangible and enable people to have the impact of which they are capable.
Making that opportunity tangible is often seen as the difficult bit, particularly for the smaller charities which make up the bulk of the sector, and it is true that individual charities rarely have the resources to run their own graduate programme year after year. But while the majority of charities individually might lack the brand awareness to attract students from campus, or the resources to commit to strategic graduate development, together as a sector charities have both of those things and should use them shrewdly.
A collective responsibility
I believe charities have a collective responsibility to develop a non-profit sector capable of solving increasingly complex social problems. In a recent piece of research carried out with leaders in the sector, it was found that almost 80% agreed with that statement.
The sector is by no means immune to the competition that defines the private sector, but charities do have a common interest in making sure that they develop a workforce full of people capable of contributing to multiple organisations with similar aims in the course of a career dedicated to social impact.
By capitalising on their collective power as employers, and by making the most of what they can offer to graduates among other types of talent, charities can make the "marginal gains" that when put together will allow them to compete with any other set of employers, and ultimately provide this sector with the managers and leaders capable of taking their organisations into the future.
