Many charities do not live up to graduate employees’ expectations, do not make the most of talented young people, and are too tolerant of bad management, a charity recruitment specialist told an NCVO conference this week.
Rachel Whale (pictured), founder and programme director of Charityworks, which helps train graduates to enter the charity sector, was speaking at a session at NCVO’s Evolve conference on Monday.
The sessions addressed whether charities make good employers. But Whale said she often did not receive good feedback from young employees.
"I'd like to be able to answer that with a fundamental yes, but I'm not so sure," she said.
She said she thinks the sector “could be and should be” a really good employer, however in her experiences across the sector she has found that that there is a “risk of a disconnect between the story we go out and tell people thinking about a career in this space, and the experience people have when they come into the sector".
Whale said that the sector has the most compelling brand, meaning it will never be difficult to attract people into it, however her experience at Charityworks has shown that people "do not make the most of the talent when it lands in the organisation".
She said that the sector’s “vision and ambition is strong”, and the retention rate of 93 per cent of people staying within the sector is promising, but she is concerned by reports back from new starters that relationships with line managers are lacking.
She said she hears from some that they are "not given enough work to do, not managed closely enough nor given one-to-ones, or never receive feedback on reports that they have undertaken".
She also said that these new starters have fed back that they have experienced difficulties in the decision-making processes at the organisations, with it being unclear when and how things will move forward.
She said that it is partly because of the "vision that is sold by the sector" that people have high expectations coming into it, believing they can "make a difference". When they then experience the “pace being too slow or the management not sharp enough, then there is a level of frustration”.
Whale also said she would like the sector to be “less tolerant of management that doesn’t meet a certain standard”.
She also said that there is a “huge role for sector-wide umbrella bodies, such as NCVO and Acevo, to play" in ensuring that the sector looks after its employees and develops effective management.
She said their contribution has “not been good enough” so far.
She said that they need to show what sector careers could look like, and set a sense of “standard and ambition in social leadership”.
She also said many graduates complained that organisations do not follow the values they advocate externally when interacting with their own staff.
"The values of an organisation are often not played out by that organisation," she said.
Dame Mary Marsh, founding director of the Clore Social Leadership programme, said that charity governance was also a significant problem.
She said that she thinks “governance in the sector is a problem”, and that they are far too many charities where trustees aren’t recruited through the proper processes.
She said in many charities trustees' conduct is not reviewed or scrutinised properly, and that there are many trustee boards who do not sufficiently understand their duties.
