From what I’ve seen, it’s partly job-market driven, partly from feedback we get from placed candidates and hiring organisations, and partly from talking to people in impactful roles outside the nonprofit sector.
There’s simply a natural ceiling on the number of truly high-impact jobs within nonprofits. The more top talent we attract, the more competitive those roles become, and the harder it is to find placements where the marginal hire is making a significant difference. My best estimate is that globally there may be fewer than 20 such roles per year (some might argue up to 50), which is far less than we’d like.
One response could be to start more high-impact charities. That can work, but only to a point. Funding is only available for a small number of ideas, and many new organisations end up having little impact while still diverting talent and funding from stronger opportunities.
This is why I think we need to move the conversation away from concentrating talent inside a relatively small number of NGOs, and towards distributing it wherever it can have the most systemic leverage. There is a huge range of opportunities in areas like retailers, food companies, government, media, and policy, where skilled, mission-aligned people can have a transformative effect for animals. These routes are much less well mapped out, but the more I look into them, the more convinced I am that some of the most significant wins for animals are happening in these spaces. Often, the people making them happen are the only mission-aligned person in the room, and without them nothing would have moved forward at all.
This links to the idea of community capital. Our community’s value is not limited to who works for NGOs, although I think for most people that is not the case and that’s a narrative i would like to challenge.
That said, there is still a strong case for getting more talented people into nonprofit roles that are consistently hard to fill, where the marginal hire can have an outsized impact. If an organisation cannot fill a role, it may end up hiring someone who is not ready for the responsibility or having to run another lengthy recruitment process, both of which carry real costs.
Finally, a more uncomfortable point. Simply putting a talented person into a high-impact NGO role does not guarantee meaningful change. The reality is that there is a lot of variation. Some people genuinely transform the organisations they join. Others are absorbed into bureaucratic systems and find it difficult to make any major shifts. We tend to assume the first outcome will be the norm, but in practice the variation is greater than we like to admit.
So yes, part of the problem is a ceiling in nonprofit opportunities. But an equally important factor is that high-impact work is not confined to the nonprofit sector at all. We should be thinking about where our skills, networks, and influence can be deployed for the greatest possible effect, wherever those opportunities might be :)
Thanks for your detailed response! These arguments make sense to me and are valuable to hear, since my background isn’t in animal advocacy or HR. If this does become a full post, it sounds like the results of your research will be valuable to have out there, and I think being explicit about what specific bottlenecks you’ve identified in NGO work will be important part of that.
Thank you, this is really useful.
From what I’ve seen, it’s partly job-market driven, partly from feedback we get from placed candidates and hiring organisations, and partly from talking to people in impactful roles outside the nonprofit sector.
There’s simply a natural ceiling on the number of truly high-impact jobs within nonprofits. The more top talent we attract, the more competitive those roles become, and the harder it is to find placements where the marginal hire is making a significant difference. My best estimate is that globally there may be fewer than 20 such roles per year (some might argue up to 50), which is far less than we’d like.
One response could be to start more high-impact charities. That can work, but only to a point. Funding is only available for a small number of ideas, and many new organisations end up having little impact while still diverting talent and funding from stronger opportunities.
This is why I think we need to move the conversation away from concentrating talent inside a relatively small number of NGOs, and towards distributing it wherever it can have the most systemic leverage. There is a huge range of opportunities in areas like retailers, food companies, government, media, and policy, where skilled, mission-aligned people can have a transformative effect for animals. These routes are much less well mapped out, but the more I look into them, the more convinced I am that some of the most significant wins for animals are happening in these spaces. Often, the people making them happen are the only mission-aligned person in the room, and without them nothing would have moved forward at all.
This links to the idea of community capital. Our community’s value is not limited to who works for NGOs, although I think for most people that is not the case and that’s a narrative i would like to challenge.
That said, there is still a strong case for getting more talented people into nonprofit roles that are consistently hard to fill, where the marginal hire can have an outsized impact. If an organisation cannot fill a role, it may end up hiring someone who is not ready for the responsibility or having to run another lengthy recruitment process, both of which carry real costs.
Finally, a more uncomfortable point. Simply putting a talented person into a high-impact NGO role does not guarantee meaningful change. The reality is that there is a lot of variation. Some people genuinely transform the organisations they join. Others are absorbed into bureaucratic systems and find it difficult to make any major shifts. We tend to assume the first outcome will be the norm, but in practice the variation is greater than we like to admit.
So yes, part of the problem is a ceiling in nonprofit opportunities. But an equally important factor is that high-impact work is not confined to the nonprofit sector at all. We should be thinking about where our skills, networks, and influence can be deployed for the greatest possible effect, wherever those opportunities might be :)
Thanks for your detailed response! These arguments make sense to me and are valuable to hear, since my background isn’t in animal advocacy or HR. If this does become a full post, it sounds like the results of your research will be valuable to have out there, and I think being explicit about what specific bottlenecks you’ve identified in NGO work will be important part of that.
Thank you!!
We have already published the NGO bottlenecks for 2024 here: https://​​animaladvocacycareers.org/​​talent-survey-2024/​​
https://​​animaladvocacycareers.org/​​post/​​animal-advocacy-bottleneck-survey-2022/​​
https://​​animaladvocacycareers.org/​​post/​​animal-advocacy-bottleneck-survey-2021/​​
https://​​animaladvocacycareers.org/​​post/​​animal-advocacy-bottleneck-survey-2020/​​