Today's Race for Top Talent: How to Keep Who You Have and Hire Who You Need
Today's workforce is on the move.
Economic headwinds, shifting federal priorities, residual impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic, and the explosion of generative artificial intelligence are all shaping how we think about work and careers.
They're also revolutionizing how we acquire and retain top talent.
A May 2025 report from McKinsey & Company lends the credence of hard evidence to what we intuitively already know. Americans are not only changing jobs in record numbers, they’re also changing occupations. According to data sampled in August 2024, 17% of employed U.S. respondents have switched to a different occupation since March 2020. In separate McKinsey reporting from 2020 and 2024, 50% and 44% of respondents respectively expressed interest in a career change. All of this reporting predates the upheaval of recent months. Chief reasons McKinsey respondents cited for their career changes: more pay and more skills.
As nonprofit leaders, we know these issues track slightly differently in our world.
Salaries and skill acquisition certainly matter. But mission, values, and organizational culture contribute in equal measure to attract the types of values-led individuals we want on our teams.
When it comes to money, we also know that fundraisers are breed apart. One of the few uplifting findings in an otherwise blistering survey on fundraising retention commissioned by the Chronicle of Philanthropy is this: over 90% of fundraising professionals said they could only work for a nonprofit when they have a strong belief in its mission. Fundraisers are competitive types whose primary goal is to fuel our missions by generating the revenue we need to do our work. We rely on their drive and the tremendous discretionary effort they bring to everything they do.
But year after year, studies show that fundraisers have astronomically high turnover rates. The average tenure of a development director is generally cited as 18 months. The Chronicle survey revealed that half of all fundraisers surveyed planned to leave their organization within two years. Fully one third said they had already left or planned to leave fundraising as a profession altogether within 24 months. Eighty-four percent cited “tremendous pressure to succeed” in their role, while over 25% cited “unreasonable goals.” (While the Chronicle survey commissioned from Harris Insights & Analytics in 2019 may seem old by today’s standards, my ongoing work with nonprofits and fundraisers indicates that the report’s themes and results hold true now as before.)
If you’re a nonprofit executive, all of this should keep you up at night. What can be done to attract and retain the right talent, especially fundraising talent, in today’s dynamic marketplace?
Three high-level recommendations can be addressed now to improve your recruitment-to-retention continuum, especially when it comes to fundraising talent. While they don’t rise to the level of a comprehensive strategy or formal survey, they reflect decades of experience with fundraising team management, hiring, and quiet listening to learn what staff value most.
1. Upskilling Opportunities
Professional development and leadership training remain perennially high on the list for much of the workforce. (In the Harris study, 61% of people who left fundraising said they were dissatisfied with leadership training in particular.) But in today's world, AI tops the list.
McKinsey found that 9 in 10 employees used generative AI for their work, and 21% were heavy users in a July 2025 report on technology adoption. But while staff were enthusiastic about AI, training and formal adoption of AI practices at the institutional level lagged far behind. In other words, staff members, predominantly younger members, were using AI on a tactical level, in their daily work, but it was not being approached strategically.
For better or worse, we’re all techies now. Preparing “fit for the future” teams should be a strategic priority for all nonprofit leaders. Forward-focused nonprofits are having regular discussions about AI with staff at every level. They’re inviting teams to view these technologies through a critical lens—to build skill sets, improve efficiencies, and add value—while demonstrating care and intent in terms of when and how to use them. They're safeguarding professional development lines in their annual budget. And they're building professional development into their performance management systems.
Strategic questions for all nonprofits to ask include the following. How can AI make our work better? Where does AI add real value? How can integrating AI make us more productive, allowing us to focus on higher-level tasks and problems? Where is it useful to create greater efficiency? Where, on the other hand, is it more important to focus on effectiveness? Where and how do we draw this line? How do we test this to validate our assumptions and ensure any benefits are worth the costs? And now do we manage any risks?
2. Collaborative Culture
Beyond upskilling and professional development, today’s staff members want input and transparency in terms of where your organization is going. They’re not doing a job, they’re investing their careers and living their values through their work. They’re seeing things on the ground that leaders at higher levels and from different generations may not see. They want a voice in where all of this is going, and more importantly, a real say on how to solve some of the problems your organization is addressing.
Healthy nonprofits develop collaborative ways to manage these discussions from top to bottom, bottom to top, and side to side. They’re also transparent and communicate regularly about decision-making processes. Many decisions by nature belong at the highest levels. And not all decisions deserve full disclosure, which can be hard for some of today’s staff to accept. But like our donors, today's nonprofit staff members want to know that they're part of the solution. They want to see how they fit into the whole. And they want to feel connected to a community that is making a real difference.
3. Accountability Systems
Like AI, accountability is top-of-mind in society today. It’s a growing concern for donors, staff members, and job seekers alike. It affects morale and organizational culture in tangible ways. Contemporary job seekers in particular have a highly evolved “spidey sense” when it comes to issues of workplace culture. They look for clues and ask probing questions to understand the sort of environment you offer.
Building accountability into your culture requires specific, intentional measures. The foundation for all of this is decidedly low tech: job descriptions and performance evaluations. Good old-fashioned job descriptions that are current in terms of role expectations and priorities, and regular, honest feedback via formal performance evaluations are universal for a culture of accountability.
Many nonprofit leaders underinvest in HR as an organizational function. They also underestimate the power of job descriptions and performance evaluations when it comes to staff retention and the creation of a healthy culture. A 2024 talent retention report from Nonprofit HR indicated that only 40% of responding organizations updated job descriptions during performance management season. And barely 60% offered merit pay increases.
Real-time feedback on performance issues is essential. But so, too, is a regular, structured performance evaluation process that allows staff members and their managers to step back and reflect on what’s gone well, what hasn’t, and how to address challenges in a collaborative, supportive way. In a task-shifting culture, it should also clarify (and document) new or extra efforts being required. And it can include salary opportunities that incentivize productive performance.
References
The upskilling imperative: Required at scale for the future of work | McKinsey & Company (May 2025)
The learning organization: How to accelerate AI adoption | McKinsey & Company (July 2025)
Why Fundraisers Leave, and How to Keep Them | Chronicle of Philanthropy (August 2019)
How to navigate hard conversations at work, with Brené Brown (September 2025)
