Why is recruitment so challenging for UK charities?

Recruiting for the charity sector has never been straightforward. With stretched budgets, increasing demand for services and fierce competition for skilled professionals, finding the right people can feel like an uphill struggle. But there are smarter, more affordable ways to recruit, without compromising on quality or your organisation’s values.

Working in the charity sector means making a difference. Whether you’re supporting vulnerable communities, tackling homelessness, protecting the environment or campaigning for social change, the people you employ are fundamental to your mission. However, finding those people is becoming increasingly challenging.

Unlike commercial organisations, charities often have limited flexibility around salaries, recruitment budgets and staffing resources. HR teams are expected to attract talented, committed individuals while keeping expenditure under control and juggling numerous other responsibilities.

How can charities compete for talent, advertise vacancies effectively and achieve better recruitment results without spending a fortune?

The difficulties facing UK charities.

According to the Kreston UK Charities Report 2024, 54% of surveyed charities were struggling to recruit and retain employees, while 29% believed recruitment and retention had become harder over the previous year.

More recently, the Charity Commission’s 2026 Charity Sector Risk Assessment highlighted the continuing financial pressures facing the sector. Its analysis found that 41% of charities reported expenditure exceeding income in financial returns for 2024.

These findings point to a difficult balancing act: charities need capable, motivated employees to maintain essential services, but many cannot afford to recruit in the same way as larger commercial employers.

There are several connected issues that make this especially challenging.

1. Tight budgets and rising employment costs.

Every charity understands the importance of demonstrating value for money; donations, grants and fundraising income are precious resources, and expenditure must be justified against the organisation’s charitable objectives, and recruitment is no exception.

Traditional recruitment agencies will generally charge a percentage of a successful candidate’s annual salary. For charities recruiting several employees a year, those fees can quickly become a significant expense.

At the same time, the wider cost of employment continues to put pressure on budgets.

The National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) estimated that increases in employer National Insurance contributions introduced in April 2025 would create an additional £1.4 billion financial burden for the voluntary sector.

This leaves HR teams facing a familiar dilemma: how do you secure the right candidates without diverting more funding away from frontline services?

What charities can do: Look beyond the headline cost of recruitment and consider the overall return on investment. Transparent, fixed-fee recruitment services can make costs easier to forecast, particularly when compared with salary-based agency commissions.

2. Competing for talent when salaries aren’t always competitive.

People may be drawn to charity jobs because they want meaningful work, but that doesn’t mean financial considerations disappear.

At the end of the day, Charity Sector employees still have mortgages, rent, childcare costs and household bills to pay, and a talented fundraiser, marketing specialist, finance professional or HR manager may be equally attractive to private sector employers with larger salary budgets.

Research discussed in NCVO’s Road Ahead 2025 highlighted persistent skills shortages and increasing difficulties filling vacancies in the social sector.

To combat this, charities therefore need to communicate the full value of working for their organisation: Salary matters, but so does flexibility, professional development, supportive management, job satisfaction and the opportunity to contribute to something meaningful.

What charities can do: Be transparent about salary and benefits, but give equal attention to your organisational culture, social impact and employee experience. Candidates should understand not just what they’ll be doing, but why their contribution matters.

3. High staff turnover creates a recruitment cycle.

Staff turnover can be particularly disruptive for charities.

When an experienced employee leaves, they take valuable institutional knowledge, relationships and specialist skills with them.

Their responsibilities may fall to colleagues who are already working at capacity. Meanwhile, managers and HR professionals must divert time towards advertising, screening, interviewing and onboarding replacements.

The result can become a cycle: staff shortages increase workloads, increased workloads contribute to burnout, and burnout creates further retention problems.

Research from the VCSE Sector Barometer found that 35% of charities experiencing recruitment difficulties had asked existing employees to work additional hours.

This makes effective recruitment about more than filling vacancies quickly. It is also about finding people who understand the role, feel connected to the organisation and are likely to stay.

What charities can do: Review why employees leave, ensure job descriptions reflect the reality of the position, and build structured onboarding and support into the recruitment process. A successful appointment should be measured by long-term fit, not simply whether someone accepts an offer.

4. Recruitment takes time that HR teams don’t have.

For many charity HR professionals, recruitment is just one part of a much broader role.

Employee wellbeing, safeguarding, employment legislation, training, payroll queries, performance management and organisational development all compete for attention.

When vacancy arises, there are now job adverts to write, recruitment platforms to navigate, applications to review, candidates to contact and interviews to organise.

For a charity recruiting across multiple locations or departments, this workload can become overwhelming. And even when an advert attracts plenty of applications, that doesn’t necessarily make the process easier. A high volume of unsuitable candidates can create just as much work as a shortage of applicants.

What charities can do: Introduce a consistent recruitment process, use clear screening criteria and consider outsourcing the more time-consuming elements of vacancy advertising and candidate management.

Getting Clean’s Chris Sylvester talks to Lis and Marie on the No Airs & Graces podcast from Flat Fee Recruiter and Consilia Legal.

Two organisations that have worked with Flat Fee Recruiter demonstrate the importance of understanding a charity’s mission, communicating its values and accessing the right recruitment expertise.

Getting Clean: the importance of finding people who understand what you do.

For mission-driven organisations, working with people who understand and respect their purpose is particularly important. Getting Clean is a community interest company with a mission to help people in recovery from addiction. Flat Fee Recruiter worked with Getting Clean to help them recruit a Production Manager for their Leeds-based soap factory.

Getting Clean founder Chris Sylvester discussed the value of credible expertise during an appearance on Flat Fee Recruiter’s No Airs & Graces podcast.

Reflecting on advice from his father, Chris explained:

‘The best lesson that I ever got taught was from my dad… “if you want a sausage, see the butcher.” What that means is you find the people who are good at what they do. You don’t take advice from people that don’t know what they’re talking about. You invest in people who are credible.‘

HR teams are specialists in people and organisational development, but they cannot always be expected to be experts in every recruitment platform, advertising algorithm and candidate attraction technique.

Just as charities rely on professional expertise in areas such as finance, safeguarding and legal compliance, there is value in drawing on specialist recruitment knowledge. The right external support should complement an internal HR team, not replace its understanding of the organisation.

For charities with limited resources, that expertise can be especially valuable when it helps avoid wasted advertising expenditure and reduces the administrative burden of recruitment.

Simon on the Streets: turning a difficult vacancy into a successful appointment.