5 Common Difficulties of Job Hunting in CSR & Social Enterprise

Anyone who has been a chronic job seeker like me will tell you that job hunting can in itself be a full-time job.

The jobs were out there and I found quite a few.

But it was an incredibly tedious task to find them. To make matters worse, the roadblocks varied by job type, i.e., corporate social responsibility (CSR) vs. social enterprise, partly because of industry-wide definitional diversity. Here's the most common roadblocks I faced in my job search:

Job hunting in CSR:

1. CSR departments are not streamlined and department titles vary from company to company.
2. Given the mid-level natural of CSR teams, searching on the company's website itself is difficult. Is it considered marketing or communications? What about global affairs? Supply chain, perhaps?
3. Some departments work closely with the CSR/sustainability departments without using the same title. For example, marketing positions that spend a lot of time pushing social good campaigns. It's difficult to know what those jobs involve and how closely involved they are with furthering the company's social mission.

Job hunting in social enterprise:

1. Social enterprises exist in every sector. Just take a look at the B Corporation Directory to see how diverse this space really is.
2. New legal entities are cropping up including the L3C, Flexible Purpose Corporation, and Benefit Corporation. While the social enterprise movement is taking off and expanding rapidly, it takes a long time to go through all these directories to locate companies that are hiring.

--By Stacy McCoy, CEO, Give To Get Jobs