Not for Profit organisations compete for the same people as everyone else, on a budget set by funders. Mission genuinely helps, and it is why many candidates are in the sector at all, but it does not close a twenty percent pay gap on its own and it is unfair to ask it to.

The lever most often left on the table is salary packaging. Public benevolent institutions, health promotion charities and other FBT exempt employers can offer packaging arrangements that materially lift take home pay without lifting the salary line in a grant acquittal. Many organisations offer it and almost none use it properly in recruitment. If packaging is not built into how the role is presented, priced and explained to a candidate, you are competing with one hand behind your back.

Grant funding creates the other structural problem. Roles tied to funding cycles have to be offered as fixed term, which narrows the field to candidates who can absorb that risk, and the best of them will leave the moment a permanent role appears. Then the funding is renewed and the role has to be filled again.

And governance is its own recruitment discipline. Boards are largely voluntary, skills-based recruitment is uneven, and the organisations most in need of financial or risk expertise on the board are often the least equipped to go and find it.