The world of human resources is constantly evolving. Companies are getting better at identifying top talent and turning prospects into employees. If your nonprofit HR team isn’t keeping up with big-budget enterprises of the private sector, then you could have a hard time filling positions and retaining the employees you currently have.
Keep reading to understand the current HR challenges in Nonprofit that foundations and charity organizations face so you can better evolve your operations and stay competitive.
4 Top HR Challenges Facing Nonprofits
Before you can understand why your team needs to follow various trends or best practices, it helps to know what they are. These are a few themes that our experts have seen within the human resource field which could impact your company:
- Skills acquisition and development. More teams will look to hire based on a person’s skill set as opposed to their experience or education. Additionally, companies will work to upskill existing employees to turn them into leaders.
- Increased remote and contract work. The best employees might not be in your backyard. HR teams are looking to hire all across the world.
- Greater inclusion and reduced bias in hiring. Companies are developing processes to remove unconscious bias in hiring and taking steps to make the workplace more diverse and equitable.
- More employee flexibility. Employees expect their companies to give them flexible hours and work opportunities or the employer risks having a high turnover rate.
As you can see, these are big picture themes that can’t be solved with a quick hiring tool or training seminar. Nonprofit HR teams will need to put in real work to keep up with these trends.
You May Grow Out of Your Current Best Practices
One of the best reasons to focus on upcoming trends is so you can prepare for the future. Your hiring practices may work for your nonprofit now, but you may grow out of them if you start to scale your efforts.
As you raise your profile within your community, you may be able to create more positions and do more fantastic work. With this, you may need to set up more infrastructure and best practices for both management and HR.
If you’re not on top of what other nonprofits and companies are doing, then you risk adopting outdated practices that limit your growth.
The Modern Workforce is Constantly Changing
Another reason why nonprofit HR teams need to stay on top of trends and threats is so they can keep up with the demands of future workers.
For example, many nonprofits rely on unpaid intern labor to provide an extra set of hands — especially to help with administrative tasks like marketing and accounting. However, some economic experts have noticed that unpaid internships are increasingly unpopular and disproportionately favor wealthy applicants who can afford to work for free. With this information, your nonprofit HR team may consider offering a stipend to interns or paying them to keep their hiring practices both competitive and equitable.
There are other examples of the workforce creating HR challenges in Nonprofit. The rise of the gig economy has made contractors more popular, changing how companies view contract work and seasonal labor.
You Need to Prioritize Based on Your Budget and Bandwidth
With all of these trends and changes, it may be hard for small nonprofit HR teams to determine which aspects they need to focus on. There are a few strategies that your team can follow:
- Look at which changes you can make relatively quickly and for a minimal cost. This is your low-hanging fruit.
- Identify the trends that stand to have the biggest impact on your company. How can you maximize their impact? This will make your time and financial investment worth it.
- Decide what types of projects your team can handle. Maybe you could take on one major project this year but instead, opt for several small projects. It’s up to your team.
Planning for the future can help you adapt to changes as they happen and embrace new trends as they grow.
Find a Partner to Help You with Today’s HR challenges in Nonprofit
Changes to your policies and practices can be intimidating, but there’s also help out there for nonprofit organizations. Consider outsourcing your human resource efforts to better scale your work and streamline your operations. You can tap into the expertise of a company that keeps up with trends and applies them on a regular basis. Stay focused on your mission, not your paperwork.
Get a free HR workflow analysis and learn how our services can help you. Corban OneSource helps Organizations with 75-6,000 Employees.
