Employers of choice?
According to Martin Birchall, this year’s race to be number one in the rankings of the Times Top 100 Graduate Employers ‘has been the closest since the league table was first published in 1999’.
With PwC and Deloitte occupying gold and silver medal positions, it was encouraging to see Cancer Research UK and Oxfam in this revealing list.Few charities offer any kind of ‘graduate training scheme’ and those that do are highly competitive, attracting at least 100 applications for every single vacancy – CRUK received 1,500 applicants for its 14 places last year.
Times have changed from the early 1960s when a charity career was – often wrongly – associated with being a ‘do gooder’ or ‘churchy’, as one career NGO development consultant put it. Larger charities have moved a long way towards being employers of choice, but they are in a minority when it comes to deliberately targeting graduates. Of the 800 members of the Association of Graduate Recruiters, you can count the charities on one hand, despite a new category of membership for organisations with 250 employees or fewer.But does it really matter? Across the voluntary sector as a whole, there is, according to the UK Labour Force Survey 2005, a higher percentage of employees with degrees than in both the public and private sectors, possibly because the sector employs more women and others who have encountered glass ceilings elsewhere.
The sector attracts talented individuals with valuable experience from outside the sector. However, charities face the challenge of enabling professional development without compromising the drive to achieve their cause. Prospective employees considering the third sector want to know they can make a difference with their future employers (see Dominic Rudd's interview) and that they are joining a well-run organisation that knows where it is going. They also want their employer to make a difference to them in terms of personal development. Although good recruitment (see Bob Jack article, The right people) processes help get the right people in the right jobs, ongoing training and development support is vital (see Bridget Warr article, Leadership challenges). And with over half of the sector’s employees being in workplaces of fewer than 25 people, these softer areas of the organisation’s operations receive little attention (see Simon Jones article, Yielding results).
Many donors want their gifts earmarked for programmatic work while ratios of administration costs to overall annual expenditure are measures that governing boards and donors watch closely. Training expenditure is not seen as business critical. But as the sector moves more towards public sector commissioning and increased professionalisation, it needs to be in a position to attract talent at all points of an individual’s career path.
Author: Clarissa Dann
Clarissa Dann was the editor of Caritas as well as an HR and management online service,he People Bulletin until July 2011.
She is now the editor of the specialist trade finance magazine, Trade and Forfaiting Review which can be viewed at www.tfreview.com but does write on charity finance and investment from time to time.
Clarissa has a background in legal and professional publishing, as well as business journalism and holds an MBA from
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