You’ve lost another great candidate. Another high-performing staff member just gave notice. Your team is asking tough questions: Are we paying people fairly? Is our compensation competitive?
It’s tempting to assume pay is the problem, and sometimes, it is. But when organizations leap to compensation as the fix without a full diagnosis, they risk missing the real issue entirely. At Edgility, we’ve seen it time and again: compensation is often the final straw, not the first one.
Before adjusting salary bands or rushing to publish job postings with higher salary ranges, you need to pause and ask: What’s actually going on here in your hiring process?
Let’s walk through how mission-driven organizations can diagnose the root of their hiring challenges and design recruitment strategies that go deeper than dollars.
Table of contents
1. Diagnose Before You Prescribe
2. The Five Cs of Retention and Recruitment
3. Why This Work Can’t Be an Afterthought
4. Build a People Strategy That Reflects Your Values
Diagnose Before You Prescribe
Too often, compensation conversations start with assumptions. But in reality, your ability to attract and retain top talent depends on more than just pay.
We recommend beginning with a structured diagnostic, one that combines data and voices from across your hiring team:
-
Staff surveys that assess sentiment, company culture, and surface early warning signs
-
Focus groups and listening tours, where you will hear from a diverse cross-section of the organization
-
SWOT analysis to understand your people systems in context
-
Collaborative action planning to streamline priorities and clarify next steps
This process uncovers the real story behind turnover, dissatisfaction, or slow time-to-hire. Maybe job seekers feel your application process is too complex. Maybe hiring managers lack clarity on job descriptions. Or maybe your recruitment process isn’t reaching passive candidates through social media, LinkedIn, or job boards.
Whatever it is, you can’t address what you haven’t named.
The Five Cs of Retention and Recruitment
Based on our work with nonprofits, schools, and healthcare organizations, we often see the same core issues driving staff departures or recruitment challenges. We call them the Five Cs:
1. Career Options: “How Can I Grow Here?”
When staff don’t understand how to grow, they disengage. Promotions feel sporadic. Paths feel murky. And when they can’t picture a future with your organization, they look elsewhere. The impact isn’t limited to retention. A lack of career pathways also weakens your ability to recruit. Potential candidates increasingly look for employers that can articulate how they’ll grow, not just what the job entails. If you can’t answer that question, top talent may accept offers elsewhere.
Solutions
The first step is clarity. Ask yourself: Do we know what the career pathway looks like for each role? Do we have a clear bar for success at every level? You can’t explain it to staff if you don’t understand it yourself. That means doing the hard work of sitting down, role by role, to define what growth could look like. This exercise is true no matter the size of your organization.
Just as important is honesty. Nothing frustrates staff more than being told career growth is a priority when leadership can’t explain what that means or when it might happen. It’s better to set realistic expectations—such as, “This role will likely last two to three years, and you’ll gain valuable skills before moving on”—than to promise promotions you can’t deliver.
Pathways may also look different across departments and may not always mean promotion. Growth in one area might mean moving up, while in another it could mean building breadth through a lateral move, or being given opportunities like leading a task force, taking on a stretch assignment, or contributing to a cross-departmental project. Either way, leaders must be able to answer: “What would staff need to demonstrate to be ready for the next step?”
Finally, every manager should be ready to answer the inevitable question: “How can I advance here?” If an employee, or prospective hire, asked tomorrow, would your managers know how to respond in a way that feels meaningful and motivating? If not, it’s time to build that capacity through manager training, performance systems, and transparent promotion processes.
2. Communication: “Have we listened?”
Too often, organizations fall short not because they lack a plan, but because they fail to communicate it clearly, or at all. We’ve seen leaders roll out thoughtful career models or structural changes, only to leave staff blindsided because the information wasn’t shared consistently, at the right time, or through channels people actually use.
When communication is one-way, leaders announce decisions without listening first, and staff are left feeling unheard, anxious, or even insulted. It can come across as tone deaf, like decisions were made at a distance from day-to-day realities and without any regard for real concerns for staff on the ground. Instead of reassurance, communication creates more questions and fears.
Solutions
Start with listening. Gather staff input and show how their feedback informed the decision. Even small changes can feel big to certain groups, so consider your different audiences, like executives, managers, and staff, and how each will receive the message.
Structure communication around three essentials: what we heard, what we decided, and what it means for you. Deliver it through multiple channels such as written memos, meetings, videos, and recaps so it’s timely, relevant, and digestible. Err on the side of over-communicating, since staff rarely complain about too much transparency.
And don’t avoid the tough topics. If you ignore the elephant in the room, staff will fill the silence with their own narrative, which is often worse than reality. Proactive, transparent communication not only builds trust, it keeps you in control of the story.
The same is true for potential candidates. If your communications with prospective hires feel vague or inconsistent, they may assume the internal work environment and culture are equally unclear and walk away. Transparent communication isn’t just a retention tool; it’s also a recruitment advantage that strengthens your hiring strategies and helps attract the right candidates.
3. Consistency and Fairness: “What Are the Rules?”
Nothing erodes trust faster than inconsistency. When promotions, raises, or performance ratings seem to depend more on who your manager is than on clear standards, staff are left asking “why?” Why did that person get promoted? Why did someone else receive a bigger raise? Why is one employee allowed to work flexibly while another is not? Without clear processes, decisions feel arbitrary, which can lead to gossip, resentment, and fear.
In these environments, organizations often default to what we call a “squeaky wheel” approach: those who speak up most persistently get what they want, while others are left behind. The result isn’t just in equity, it’s bitterness, fractured teams, and an erosion of trust across the board.
Solutions
Consistency and fairness require more than good intentions. They demand structure. Start with clear, organization-wide policies for compensation, promotions, flexibility, and performance. Train managers so they understand and apply those policies uniformly. When exceptions arise, examine them closely: if one person is allowed remote work while another is denied without explanation, the appearance of favoritism undermines equity.
A fair “no” grounded in policy builds far more trust than an unexplained “yes” decision. Staff need to know the rules, that opportunities and benefits are transparent, consistently applied, and not dependent on who advocates the loudest.
When organizations establish clear salary structures, articulate expectations for success, and communicate them openly, it shifts the burden from employees having to constantly advocate for themselves to the organization demonstrating fairness proactively. That consistency doesn’t just support equity, it fosters unity, cohesion, and a sense of shared trust.
After all, staff will always notice if someone is treated as an exception. And when they do, confidence in leadership erodes. Think of it as a transparency test: if you can’t comfortably explain a decision to your staff, it’s a signal the policy or process needs work.
For job seekers, perceived inconsistency is also a red flag. If candidates hear different stories from different interviewers, or sense favoritism in how offers are extended, they are less likely to join. Consistency reassures potential hires that fairness is more than a talking point; it’s how the organization operates.
4. Compensation: “Am I Being Paid What I’m Worth?”
If your salaries aren’t competitive, you will lose people, especially once they start testing the job market and find opportunities elsewhere that pay more. Compensation alone may not be the reason people begin disengaging, but it often becomes the final push that drives them out the door. In many cases, it adds insult to injury after frustrations with career growth, communication, or fairness.
For prospective hires, however, compensation is often the first barrier. Few people are willing to take a pay cut to join a new organization unless they’re making a major career shift. If your salaries don’t align with the market, the most qualified candidates will never make it past the application stage.
Solutions
Every organization should know where it stands on pay competitiveness; there is simply no excuse not to. Market data is widely available, and within a couple of months, you can have a clear answer to the question: “Are we paying at least at market rate?” If the answer is yes, then compensation is not the reason you’re losing people. If the answer is no, you need to fix it quickly.
The encouraging part is that compensation is one of the easier challenges to fix. With the right approach, you can resolve it in a matter of months. The cost of getting compensation wrong is much greater than the cost of addressing it. Overpaying because you’re negotiating with each hire individually, underpaying others until they leave, or creating inequities between staff quickly erodes trust and cohesion.
If you don’t know whether you’re competitive, find out quickly. Market data is readily available, and there’s little excuse for an organization not to know how it compares. Think of compensation benchmarking like preventative care: regular checkups prevent far more costly problems later.
When compensation is aligned with the market, you can rule it out as the reason you’re losing people or finding it challenging to hire the right candidate. If it isn’t aligned with the market, the fix is clear: build a pay structure that reflects fair market rates, resonates with staff, and adjusts as the market shifts. Staying vigilant is very doable and essential for retaining and attracting the people your mission depends on.
Compensation transparency also impacts recruitment directly. Candidates are more likely to apply and to accept offers when salary ranges are clear and competitive. In today’s market, withholding that information can cost you top talent before they ever step through the door.
5. Culture and Leadership: “Do My Leaders Walk the Talk?”
You can design the strongest policies and the most thoughtful systems, but if managers and leaders lack the skills to bring them to life, staff and potential candidates will feel the gap. One of the clearest predictors of employee engagement is an individual’s relationship with their manager. When that relationship breaks down, employees are far more likely to leave. In fact, research from SHRM shows that toxic culture (32%) and poor leadership (30%) are among the top reasons employees quit their jobs 【shrm.org】.
In the nonprofit and education sectors, this challenge is especially common. Many staff members are promoted directly from being high-performing individual contributors into management roles, often without training or support. Instead of being equipped to lead through people, they are left to figure it out alone and sometimes without ever having seen effective management modeled for themselves. Over time, those skipped steps become gaps that follow leaders throughout their careers.
And the impact extends beyond current staff. Even with the best recruitment strategies, an organization’s culture will determine whether top candidates accept a job offer or walk away. A strong employer brand is built not just on words but on consistent action from hiring managers and leadership.
Solutions
Screen for people skills and emotional intelligence when hiring or promoting into management roles. Provide training that helps leaders move from “getting things done” themselves to “getting things done through others.” Support them with tools to give feedback, navigate conflict, and guide change with empathy.
These aren’t “soft skills.” They are adaptive skills that make or break your culture. When organizations build the leadership capacity of managers at every level, they ensure that systems are implemented with consistency, that staff feel supported, and that the workplace reflects the values it stands for.
Strong leadership isn’t luck; it’s a discipline that attracts and retains the best candidates.
Why This Work Can’t Be an Afterthought
You wouldn’t launch a program without a plan. You wouldn’t go into the next fiscal year without a budget. So why leave your people systems to chance?
Getting this right is about building an organization where staff feel valued, job seekers see a strong employer brand, and top talent chooses you over competitors.
When that happens, your recruitment efforts become easier, your talent pool grows, and retention strengthens. Metrics like time-to-hire improve naturally.
The question isn’t whether you’ll shape your people systems. It’s whether you’ll do it intentionally or let them evolve by default.
Build a People Strategy That Reflects Your Values
At Edgility, we partner with nonprofits, schools, and mission-driven healthcare organizations to co-create equitable, transparent, and effective people systems, such as talent acquisition and recruitment strategies, compensation, and leadership development.
If you’re wondering whether compensation is the reason you’re losing talent, let’s find out together. We’ll help you identify and fix the biggest challenges in your hiring process, and strengthen your ability to attract and retain the best talent.
Do you want to take the first step? Download our free eBook, Compensation with Purpose: Designing Equity-Centered Pay Structures for Nonprofits, Education, and Healthcare.
