The non-profit graduate job scheme Charityworks has been awarded £95,000 from the Cabinet Office to scale up its recruitment programme across the country.

The announcement coincides with a report released today commissioned by Charityworks which suggests that two-thirds of recruitment and training budgets in the sector are stagnating in 2014.

The study, which compiled responses from 54 charity leaders and chief executives, concluded that talent development is the sector’s “Achilles heel”.

The report showed that while one in three organisations asked believe talent to be the most important ingredient for success, 81 per cent don’t prioritise it highly enough.

The Cabinet Office has released the grant to Charityworks to enable more charities and civil society organisations to work with the graduate-recruitment charity and in acknowledgement of a need for greater talent development in the sector.

Charityworks is primarily a self-sustaining organisation, funded by the organisations it works with to run its graduate placement service.

Rachel Whale, founder of Charityworks, told civilsociety.co.uk: “Our business model is great in that sense but what we didn’t have was the resource to scale at pace, so the Cabinet Office has come in and they can see the potential. They can see the opportunity to have something like a Teach First equivalent, so they have given us the £95,000 to help us to get to the next point.”

Charityworks has recruited a professional advisory body, led by Dame Mary Marsh, which it hopes will help to spread the word about talent development. Last September Dame Mary, founder of the Clore Social Leadership programme, said she was concerned that some graduates working in larger charities are underemployed and not used to their full potential.

MP Nick Hurd, minister for civil society, said: “Following Dame Mary Marsh’s review into skills and leadership in the social sector last year, it was clear that the sector was missing the type of strategic graduate offer so common in other sectors.

“Ensuring non-profits have a workforce that is capable of tackling the social issues of the future is extremely important and we want to support them to have that. With a proven track record in sourcing effective talent, while saving organisations money, Charityworks is a model that is well placed to begin to solve the sector’s ongoing challenges.”

Whale launched Charityworks five years ago. Last year over 3,000 students applied to the programme yet Charityworks only had placements for 36 of them.

The government grant will help the organisation to expand its programme across the country and increase the number of graduates employed from 36 to 100 by September 2014.

Commenting on the grant, Whale said: “We are absolutely thrilled about the support we are getting from the Cabinet Office. Nick had a vision for the sector and he could clearly see the role a graduate programme could play.

She added: “If you think about the size of the sector and the hundreds of thousands of jobs in it and if you think about the size of the workforce, right now we have 36 graduate trainees on the Charityworks programme and it is not even the tip of the iceberg.”

‘No sector plan for recruiting talent’

Whale founded the charity after falling into a career in the sector as a postgraduate student. She said that she realised that nobody was pushing the non-profit sector as a viable career option at the time.

“I just didn’t understand why we weren’t more confident as a sector to grow our own people and grow our own talent and get a bit more strategic about it. We just seem to have this sense that people would helicopter their skills in from another sector, when they were retiring, and that is fantastic but I just thought it shouldn’t be our only strategy in terms of attracting talented people to the sector.”

Results from market research that she undertook at the time confirmed that graduates were interested in working for the sector but not enough was being done to attract them. She added that there was too much emphasis in the sector on experience and not enough on new and developing talent.

The results from the survey released today show that that is still an issue in the sector, yet talent was cited as the most important ingredient in delivering organisational aims by one in three respondents.

Whale said: “What we are trying to do here is not just about setting up and running a graduate programme but it is a call to action to the sector to be part of something bigger, and the something bigger is creating a movement for change and a movement for talent. We want to change the sector so that it is known for innovation, impact and leadership talent.”

'Sector should de-prioritise experience'

She said that recruiting graduates is a double-win for charities.

“You get them from the beginning, you get them on to a career path and then they grow within an organisation and within the sector, so they get the cultural DNA within the sector and organisation that they are working in.

“And we can make the most of that talent because their potential is huge. So we are asking the sector to de-prioritise experience.”

Charityworks is calling for more organisations to take part in its 2014/15 programme and diversify their workforces. It is open to any charity or housing association regardless of size, turnover or cause.