Board members are often the decision-makers in executive searches — and for good reason. They set strategic direction, hold fiduciary responsibility, and ultimately own the outcome of a leadership hire. But in our two decades of working with nonprofit boards, we’ve seen the same well-intentioned mistakes made again and again.

Mistake 1: Treating the Search Like a Volunteer Recruitment

Many nonprofit board members come from backgrounds in philanthropy or community leadership. That’s a tremendous asset in governance. But it can create a blind spot: the assumption that mission alignment is enough to attract top candidates, and that the organization’s reputation will do most of the outreach work.

The most qualified senior candidates — particularly those currently in strong roles — need to be actively recruited, not just discovered. They’re not browsing job boards. They need to be found, contacted directly, and persuaded that the opportunity is worth exploring. That requires a different muscle than the one most boards are used to using.

Mistake 2: Defining the Role Based on the Last Person Who Held It

When a long-tenured executive leaves, the board’s instinct is often to describe the role in terms of what that person did. This leads to a role specification that’s really a description of one individual’s strengths, rather than what the organization actually needs going forward.

The right question isn’t “who can do what our last Executive Director did?” It’s “given where our organization is today and where we need to go, what does leadership need to look like over the next five years?”

Mistake 3: Underestimating Compensation

Boards are stewards of donor dollars, and salary conservatism is often a reflection of genuine fiscal responsibility. But in a competitive talent market, compensation significantly below market rate doesn’t save money — it just narrows the candidate pool to people who can afford to take a pay cut.

Mistake 4: Moving Too Slowly Out of Caution

Board governance moves deliberately. But in executive search, deliberateness can become a liability. Top candidates at the finalist stage are almost always interviewing elsewhere. When a search committee takes three weeks to schedule a second interview, they risk losing their preferred candidate to a faster-moving organization.

Mistake 5: Searching in Public Too Early

There’s a temptation to post the role broadly as soon as the search is launched. But publicizing a leadership vacancy too early can create internal anxiety, prompt donor questions before the board is ready, and signal sector transition before a story has been crafted. The strongest searches often begin quietly, with targeted direct outreach before any public posting.

None of these mistakes are signs of a failing board. They’re signs of a board doing its best in unfamiliar territory — and all of them are avoidable with the right search partner and honest process.

In our experience working with nonprofits across the country, temporary staffing is almost always reactive. An unexpected departure, a leave of absence, a grant-funded project that launches faster than hiring can keep up with. The call comes in because something has already gone wrong.

There’s nothing wrong with that. But the nonprofits that get the most from temporary staffing treat it differently. They build it into their thinking before the need becomes urgent.

Using Temporary Staff to Cover Searches

A good executive search takes 60 to 120 days for senior roles. During that window, the work doesn’t stop. Organizations that plan for this bring in a temporary professional to hold down the function during the search — not as a placeholder, but as a genuine contributor who keeps the organization stable while leadership focuses on finding the right permanent hire.

Using Temporary Staff to Test Before You Hire

One of the most underutilized applications of temporary staffing is the “temp-to-perm” approach — bringing someone in as a temporary professional with the explicit understanding that a strong performance could lead to a permanent offer. This works particularly well for roles where cultural fit is difficult to assess in an interview process.

Using Temporary Staff for Surge Capacity

Nonprofit work is seasonal in ways that are often predictable. Annual gala season. Year-end fundraising. Summer program ramp-ups. Organizations that recognize these patterns and plan temporary staffing around them spend less time in crisis mode and more time executing effectively.

Using Temporary Staff to Pilot New Functions

Sometimes an organization wants to add a new capability but isn’t certain enough about scope or budget to commit to a permanent hire. Bringing in a temporary professional to build and pilot the function for six months allows the organization to test the model and make a much more informed permanent hire if the function proves its value.

Temporary staffing, used strategically, isn’t a sign that something has gone wrong. It’s a sign that the organization has a mature, realistic view of how staffing actually works.

After a successful placement, our work is technically done. But over two decades of placing nonprofit professionals, we’ve watched enough of those placements unfold — and sometimes unravel — to have a clear view of what separates organizations that retain great people from those that keep searching for them.

The First 90 Days Are Disproportionately Important

Most retention failures are seeded in the first three months. Not because the hire was wrong — but because the organization wasn’t ready for them. The new leader arrives to find an unclear mandate, a team that wasn’t properly prepared for the transition, or resources that don’t match what was described in the interview process.

Strong onboarding isn’t a welcome lunch and a stack of org charts. It’s a deliberate, structured introduction to the people, relationships, and unwritten rules that actually govern how the organization works.

Compensation Drift Is a Quiet Killer

Many nonprofits hire well but fail to keep pace with market compensation over time. A Director of Development hired at $95,000 in 2020 who is still earning $105,000 in 2026 is being paid significantly below market — and they know it. They may not say anything. But they’re listening when recruiters call.

Mission Fatigue Is Real and Often Invisible

Nonprofit professionals are often motivated by mission in ways that commercial sector employees aren’t. But that same passion makes them vulnerable to a particular kind of burnout: the exhaustion that comes from caring deeply about work that is chronically under-resourced and slow to show results. The organizations that retain people through mission fatigue are the ones that create genuine space to talk about it.

Growth Matters, Even in Small Organizations

The most common reason senior nonprofit professionals give for leaving is the absence of a visible path forward. They’ve plateaued. The organization, often focused on the work rather than internal development, hasn’t given them a reason to imagine their future there. This doesn’t require elaborate career ladders — it requires honest conversations about growth.

The search gets the right person in the door. Everything after is what makes them stay.

We talk to candidates every day. And one of the most consistent things we hear from senior nonprofit professionals is that they’ve quietly started to feel undervalued. Not underappreciated. Undervalued. There’s a difference. Appreciation is what an organization expresses. Value is what it pays.

How the Gap Opens

It rarely happens all at once. A Director of Finance joins at $110,000 in 2021. They receive modest annual increases of 3%. By 2026, they’re at $124,000. Meanwhile, the market for that role has moved to $140,000–$155,000. They haven’t been poorly treated. They’ve been left behind by a market that moved faster than anyone was tracking.

Why Nonprofits Struggle to Keep Pace

The structural constraints are real. Nonprofit compensation is visible — IRS Form 990 filings disclose senior salaries publicly. Boards are accountable to donors who scrutinize overhead. And there’s a cultural hesitation in some organizations to pay “commercial rates” for mission-driven work. But the math is unavoidable: if your compensation is systematically below market, you will lose people.

How to Actually Benchmark Your Salaries

Start with published surveys. The Nonprofit HR Nonprofit Salaries Survey and regional association salary surveys provide market data broken down by role, organization size, and geography. For senior roles, supplementing with data from recent job postings in your market is also valuable.

Ask your recruiter. If you’re working with a staffing partner, they have direct, current market knowledge. We speak to candidates every week about compensation. We know what Directors of Programs are being offered this month. That information is genuinely useful to organizations trying to calibrate their ranges.

What to Do When You Find a Gap

Equity adjustments — one-time salary corrections to bring people to market — are often the most efficient approach for staff who are significantly below range. Framing them clearly, and doing them proactively rather than reactively, signals to staff that the organization is paying attention. It also tends to be far less expensive than the searches that follow when those staff members leave.

When a nonprofit reaches out to TPSG, the first question we often ask is: what are you actually trying to solve? Because “we need to fill a position” is rarely the full picture — and the answer to that deeper question usually determines whether direct hire or temporary staffing is the right approach. Sometimes it’s both.

Start With the Time Horizon

The clearest signal is how long you need the role filled. If the answer is indefinite — this is a core function that needs a permanent owner — that points toward direct hire. If the answer is bounded — three months of coverage, a six-month project, a one-year grant cycle — temporary staffing is almost certainly the more efficient path.

Consider the Urgency vs. the Permanence

These two variables often pull in opposite directions. A role can be urgent but temporary, or permanent but not urgent. Most organizations conflate urgency with permanence — they need someone now, so they assume they need someone forever. When urgency is high and permanence is uncertain, temporary staffing is almost always the right first move.

Think About What You’re Actually Buying

Direct hire is an investment in institutional knowledge and long-term relationships. You’re looking for someone who will grow with the organization and ideally stay for years. Temporary staffing is a different transaction. You’re looking for someone with specific skills who can be productive quickly and works well in new environments.

The Both/And Answer

One of the most effective approaches — and one that organizations often don’t think of until a recruiter suggests it — is to run a temporary placement and a permanent search in parallel. The temporary professional stabilizes the function immediately. The permanent search proceeds without the pressure of an uncovered role distorting the decision.

When You’re Not Sure

If you genuinely don’t know whether a role should be permanent, temporary staffing is almost always the right starting point. It preserves optionality. It lets you learn what the role actually requires before committing to someone indefinitely. And it’s reversible in a way that a permanent hire is not.