Searching for The Perfect Job With a Side of Conscience

I am your typical Millennial. I want it all.

Go ahead, call it an undeserved sense of entitlement, but millennials, including me, truly believe that we can have our cake and eat it too.

We don't see the point in spending a significant portion of our life working in a meaningless job. And that's not just me. Cone's 2006 Millennial Cause Study discovered that 79 percent of millennials want a job that gives back.

We Hunt for Jobs with a Conscience

But it's not like we're all running to the nonprofit world. Besides the stigma of surviving for the rest of our lives on ramen noodles, the nonprofit world isn't for everyone.

What many young professionals are looking for today is the intersection between the nonprofit and for-profit worlds. They want a for-profit job that has a social and/or environmental mission.

[VIDEO: The Challenges of Recruiting Millennials]

However, while social enterprise and CSR are rapidly expanding, most job candidates continue to struggle to define how they fit into this intersection of the two worlds.

And, more importantly, how to find that perfect job.

Which leads me to my own career path: I graduated with a degree in international development.

After, spending four years prepping myself for a career traveling the world while trying to save it, life held other plans. I got engaged and in my senior year and committed to spending at least five years in Los Angeles while my husband worked toward his PhD.

Los Angeles, to say the least, is not a hub for international development with its social justice movement very much rooted in the domestic nonprofit sector.

I needed to change directions.

Career Planning: We're Willing to Take Risks

As a result I worked in the nonprofit and academic sectors alternatively.

[READ: Generation i: Responsible. Social. Entitled?]

While I enjoyed my time, I quickly grew frustrated with the bureaucratic red tape and reliance on donors. This frustration led to a moment of weakness and six months in a corporate law firm. The firm proved way too stifling and felt like we were back in the 1950s.

Clearly, not my cup of tea.

Throughout this time I grew more and more interested in the gray area between these two worlds.

While I could never be satisfied with a job that didn’t have a positive impact on society, I also love a solid business plan. So, I started searching for jobs in social enterprise and corporate social responsibility.

Finding a Job in CSR

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., CSR vs. social enterprise, partly because of industry-wide definitional diversity.

[See: 5 Most Common Difficulties in 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 difficulties I outline above make it even more time consuming.

I found myself starting to complain about the arduous task of finding jobs in this space. My solution: Fix it.

We're Entrepreneurial: Give To Get Jobs

So, with the help of my business partner, I created Give To Get Jobs: For-profit jobs that give back.

Give To Get Jobs is a job board for jobs in the for-profit sector with a social and/or environmental mission, or jobs in CSR and social enterprise. But we're not just your run of the mill job board.

We also have a social mission.

We're committed to supporting job creation through job training and education programs as a tool for economic development both domestically and internationally. That's why a portion of the proceeds from each and every job posting is donated to support these programs via our nonprofit partner See Your Impact.

You post a job and have significant impact, where else can you do that?

Give To Get Jobs aims to make things easier for everyone.

We want to make it easier for job seekers to find the jobs that they want, jobs that give back. We also want to make it easier for companies to connect with passionate job seekers who care about their mission.

At the end of the day, all we want to do is make the world a better place and help you do the same.

Join us millennials in believing we can change the world of business.

--By Stacy McCoy

Stacy McCoy is the co-founder and CEO of Give To Get Jobs: For-profit jobs that give back. She strongly believes and is committed to proving to people that you can have a job you love with a steady and stable paycheck that also makes the world a better place. She refuses to settle for anything less!

Related:
Don't Let Your Job Search Define You
How to Pursue a Responsible Career in 2011
5 Tips for Jobseekers in CSR
Job Hunting: Time for Millennials to Get Off the Fence?
Millennial Unemployment: A Middle East-style Revolution in the U.S.?
CSR & Worklife Balance: Are Millennials Asking for Too Much?