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Career Corner: Researching Organizations May Be Your Golden Ticket to Landing a Job

While there really aren’t any magic potions, silver bullets, or quick fixes for finding a nonprofit job, there is one inside secret that can make your search more effective. First, go to the Idealist.org home page (not RIGHT now, because you won’t know what to do next…finish reading first!). In the upper middle of our homepage, you’ll find a box with three tabs: Find, Post, Receive Email Alerts. Click on the “Find” tab. See the listing for “Organizations”? Click on that.


By Flickr user Nadya Peek You’ll get to a form that looks almost like the one for searching jobs: you can sort by keyword, area of focus, geography, and language. Fill in criteria that are important to you (the less you fill in, the more—and broader—results you’ll get) and hit search.

(As an aside: Be sure to play around with your search criteria. The “area of focus” criteria isn’t a scientific breakdown: there are lots of combinations of keyword and area of focus that organizations may self-select which may not match your first impression of the work they do. Be sure to try out a number of keywords and areas of focus to refine your search.)

Okay, now read through the results of your search. The majority of the organizations you see don’t have jobs posted on Idealist. How do I know this? There are 83,000+ organizations with profiles on the site and around 5,000 jobs currently posted on Idealist. This means that there are 16 organization profiles for every one job on the site; with that kind of ratio, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity by not searching both jobs AND organizations.

Once you’ve gotten your search results, there are a few ways to proceed:

1. Find the organizations that interest you and look for job posting on their own web sites. Organizations sometimes only post jobs on their own sites because in doing so, the candidates who find and apply for their jobs are not just looking for any opening, but are looking for a job at that organization.

2. Pick five to ten organizations, research the people on staff, and find someone at each organization to email about doing an informational interview with you. Don’t know what an informational interview is or how to do one? Read this.

3. Use the organization search on Idealist as a way to get a sense for the nonprofit landscape in the geographic and issue area in which you’re interested. For example, knowing that there are 73 organizations that fall into the “Environment and Ecology” issue area within 10 miles of Portland, OR will help me get a sense for the diversity of work being done around a specific issue as well as the different players in a particular nonprofit community.

This isn’t a golden ticket to finding a great nonprofit job. However in today’s economy, you’ll have to do more legwork to get the smaller number of posted jobs. For the jobs that aren’t even posted, you’ll need to work both harder and smarter. Using the organization search on Idealist is a great way to do both—efficiently.


Posted by Meg, whose last entry was titled "What the Economic Downturn Means for Nonprofits." Click here to read more in our Career Corner series.