Nonprofits Can't Keep Ignoring Talent Development

Is your social venture losing its homegrown talent—often to other social ventures? In the past two years, only 30 percent of open C-suite positions in the nonprofit sector were filled by an internal candidate (the rate at for-profits is 60 percent of positions). And almost half of their replacements came from other nonprofits. This comes at a significant financial and productivity cost to all organizations, as demonstrated by research in corporate settings: Onboarding an external hire can cost up to twice the departing executive’s salary, and the time it takes for an external hire to become productive is twice as long as for someone hired from within.