Exciting/Flexible/Highly Paid — pick two and build a great nonprofit team (and keep them)
This article is based off a previous piece Good/Cheap/Fast — pick two (and
how NGOs can play the triangle like a pro) which outlined how nonprofits can work within one of the central constraints of technology development, the Iron Triangle.
Bad news: if you’re hiring for a team in the nonprofit sector (particularly a tech team) there are some hard choices you need to make.
Good news: there’s a smart and simple system you can use to think about the main constraints that will shape how you build your team. It’s called the Hiring Trade-Offs Triangle.
This triangle has been developed from our experiences of building a top-class nonprofit tech team and the experiences we regularly see across the third sector.
The triangle works like this. There are three key points: exciting, flexible, and high salary. You can attract brilliant people to your team for any role you’re hiring for as long as you cover two of these. Of course in a perfect world, you would be able to offer all three but in reality that’s just not realistic for the vast majority of nonprofits. And thankfully, it’s not necessary to get great people and keep that team together.
That means that for 99.9% of nonprofit hiring there will always be a trade off. However, as long as you can avoid your role landing in the middle of the diagram above, you can still attract brilliant people to your org. Here’s how to do it: pick two of the following:
- Exciting: Make it a brilliant job to do. Either the role is clearly connected to the mission and your team will have a really tangible sense everyday of how they’re changing the world, the person will get to work on really interesting challenges, or it’s a great career move and a very positive way to grow their career. This is all about the kind of job that people go to bed on a Sunday night looking forward to the week ahead.
- Flexible: Make the position one that fits with any lifestyle. Can the role be remote? Can the hours be flexible? 9–5 in the centre of a big city works well for lots of people but there are tons of really talented people who are living (or want to live) a life free from a commute or fit their work around childcare or other commitments. Being flexible is all about shaping a role so you can tap into the pool of talent that doesn’t want to or can’t fit a traditional working shape.
- High salary: This one is pretty self-explanatory. The more you pay, the more people are willing to overlook other things. However, if the number on the paycheque is too high up in the list of motivations for a hire you may end up struggling to hold on to that person longer term. Still, pushing a salary up is a tried and tested way to attract more people to your team.
What do the combinations of the above look like?
I can do all three!
Congrats! But really, why are you reading an article about hiring then? Go out there and get on with it, you’re in the dream position. Now if you’re not one of the tiny group of nonprofits who can tick all the boxes, you’re looking at picking your priorities.
Exciting and flexible = a fix for bad pay
This combination is a really common fix for the situation that most nonprofits find themselves in: not being able to pay market rates. This is particularly common when hiring for technical or digital roles and can be a tough hurdle to overcome. However, we have seen lots of examples of great teams built with less than stellar salaries but you need to have a truly great position and be able to offer some perks such as remote working that other organisations don’t typically do.
Exciting and high salary = a fix for a rigid structure
Lacking flexibility? Need to have your team all be present in the one place at the same time? Perhaps that’s in the centre of a big city and people will have huge commutes or the cost of living is going to be really high. In this case, you can still build a brilliant team by taking the hit on salaries and making sure people are really motivated by what they do.
Flexible and high salary = a fix for a boring role
Sometimes, jobs are just that…a job. Does the phrase ‘it’s called work not fun’ feel like it applies to the position you need to fill? It happens and it can be tough to deal with but this is where being flexible and paying well come in. If you can offer a good salary to someone who wants to live in a small village somewhere, then you’re in a position to start competing for brilliant people even with a, shall we say, slightly duller job description.
I can only do one
That’s a tough position to be in but it can be done. However, in our experience, relying on just one of these criteria isn’t going to set you up for long term success. You might be able to get people to apply and you may even be able to get great people hired but in the long run, you’re going to find it very hard to keep a team together if you can’t offer at least two of excitement, flexibility, or a competitive salary.
What if I can’t offer any of the above?
This is where hiring in the social sector often falls down. Lots of really great organisations put out roles that are inflexible, bureaucratic, and not well paid and hope to attract candidates based on reputation or a sense of contributing to a greater mission (one that’s often not really felt in the day to day grind of the role). If you’re in this position, this is a great time to start thinking about what you can change in your organisation because without at least two of the above, you are going to struggle to build and retain a great nonprofit team.
For more details on how we used the above system at The Developer Society to hire a great team, check out How we put our values first when building our team.
John Dunford is the CEO at The Developer Society, a not-for-profit digital agency, working with NGOs and groups with a progressive mission to help make the world we live in a better place.
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