Is there a job listing site for free market, conservative and libertarian organizations?
My favorite job posting page may be found here and has listings from numerous conservative, libertarian and free market think tanks and other policy research organizations. Most, but not all of the jobs listed are with 501(c)3 nonprofits.
There are job sites hosted by Washington DC–based organizations as well. America’s Future Foundation has a job board here, Institute for Humane Studies hosts a job site here, and, Atlas Economic Research Foundation has jobs posted here.
How do I get recruiters to look at my resume?
In order to attract the attention of recruiters you must first: contribute as much as possible to the success of your employer, accept responsibility, and put the interests of your employer and customers first.
Recruiters earn their fees finding exceptional individuals, so the first step is excellent on-the-job performance. If you are not an above-average employee, getting your resume in front of recruiters is probably futile. On the other hand, excellent performance by itself may attract the attention of a recruiter. Recruiters frequently ask the question: “who are the top performers in your field?” and those top performers then become recruiting targets.
Is it a good idea to contact recruiters directly? Yes, this is the best way to get your resume seen. Forward your resume to the recruiter as an email attachment. In the email message, briefly state: why you are looking, what career goals you would like to meet in your next position, where you wish to work (are you willing to relocate?), and what general compensation requirements you have. Keep it brief, or it won’t be read. Include a cell number so you can be reached during the day.
The recruiter may or may not respond to your emailed resume. Recruiters are busy trying to fill jobs that are open now and don’t usually have time to respond to each unsolicited resume received. Rest assured, however, the recruiter will enter your resume into his or her database so any search matching your experience will prompt a review of your resume.
As you may be aware, recruiters tend to focus on one or more specialized business sectors. There are sectors in which many recruiters are active, and others in which you will not find even one recruiter. It is a complete waste of time to contact recruiters who do not work in your industry.
There are two ways to learn about recruiters working in your field: 1) a recruiter seeking candidates in your industry contacts you; 2) search the web for recruiter lists, websites and job postings using keywords to narrow the results to your area of interest (for example, Google: recruiting jobs “free market” organization).
If called by a recruiter, ask about the areas in which they work and get a phone number and email address for future use. When the future arrives, it will be too late to get contact information from the recruiter who called two years ago.
When searching for recruiters in your field, don’t stop when you’ve found one or two. Some industries have hundreds of recruiters and each one works with just a small number of firms. Build a list of potential recruiters, then narrow the list by evaluating each one. Keep those who have been in the business the longest, whose positions and client companies are the most desirable, and whose specialty is the closest to your field. Drop those whose positions are consistently lower paying or much higher paying than your current level, whose clients are not well-regarded in the industry, or who seem overly aggressive about getting information without providing any in return.
There are other strategies to attract recruiters who work in your field. Make use of networking sites such as LinkedIn, where you can provide information about experience, qualifications and interests, that a recruiter will need. Recruiters often use LinkedIn to find candidates, and to learn more about candidates. (See “What is the most common mistake job seekers make“.)
Place your resume online at Monster and CareerBuilder; don’t wait until you need a new job, as months may pass before a recruiter with the right job finds your resume.
Finally, keep in mind that recruiters you’ve contacted will call more often if you are helpful to them. When starting a search, my first calls go to contacts whose past candidate recommendations have been valuable. Not only do these contacts get first crack at any opening, more frequent conversations enable me to become better acquainted with them and their career goals.
Do some schools impress hiring managers more than others?
The school of hard knocks–really. Next to that, any school run by the military–especially special forces training, Naval Aviation, or ROTC. Former soldiers make good employees as they understand teamwork, commitment to a higher principle and the importance of individual achievement.
Next on the list, education in the “hard” sciences, such as chemistry, math, physics, or even economics. I am more interested in the curriculum selected by a student than by the school attended.
Small colleges, or universities which do not emphasize post-graduate work, often provide a better education, and greater opportunity for outside the classroom learning. Classes tend to be smaller and generally taught by professors, rather than grad students. Consequently, students are more likely to develop relationships with professors, facilitating opportunities to get additional help, learn more about the field, and become involved in research (learn “standing up”, not just sitting).
I see many resumes from individuals in the nonprofit sector with advanced degrees in areas such as political science, international relations, and public policy. However, most nonprofits have an overabundance of employees with academic knowledge of subject matter and a shortage of those with operational and business expertise. I’m impressed when I see an MBA on the resume.
In my experience, one is better off acquiring an MBA at a business school which primarily employs teachers who work days and teach in the evening. In subjects such as finance, production management, accounting, and IT, professors who work outside of the classroom provide a superior education.
How do I find a management job after being self-employed for 20 years?
Many believe it is difficult to find a job after a long period of self-employment. Yet, I have reviewed thousands of resumes which often show that individuals find desirable work after a long period of self-employment. Therefore, I have concluded that it’s probably no more difficult for the self-employed to find career opportunities than those who have not been self-employed.
That’s not to say there are no challenges, but 20 years of self-employment confers significant and unique advantages on a job seeker.
First of all, most job seekers today have resumes characterized by job instability: too many jobs that lasted for two years or less, and too few jobs that last for more than four years. Aside from not meeting the position requirements, job instability is the chief reason candidates are rejected, and the more senior the position to be filled, the more heavily it weighs. So twenty years in any job–self-employed or otherwise–is a strong asset.
Next up for consideration is the match between work experience and the particular position you may be seeking. Every employer has certain qualifications in mind when filling a position and these may be categorized as: 1. industry experience, 2. work experience, and 3. responsibility experience.
Industry experience refers to the knowledge and familiarity with normal expectations one acquires from working in a particular field or industry. I still recall much of what I learned in the first few years I spent in the printing business, but I would be quite lost in a modern graphic arts facility due to technological advance.
Work experience is “on-the-job-training” from which we learn to perform a range of tasks and projects appropriate to a specific job and industry. Up to a point, greater work experience increases efficiency and decreases “spoilage” or bad outcomes.
Responsibility experience refers primarily to experience in management, including the management of staff, budgets, facilities, resources and, in some cases, profit and loss. When filling management positions, employers typically consider both the scope and extent of experience in each of these categories.
Do you see where this is leading? You must inventory your work experience in each of these three areas; list everything, not just the big stuff. For example, experience using Quickbooks accounting software is a marketable skill and should be on your list. Order the list based on the amount and recentness of your experience, since the passage of time depreciates its value, particularly in the case of industry experience.
This list will serve as your guide for three purposes. First, you can use it to brainstorm the types of employers and positions to which your experience and skills may be applicable. Second, it is a checklist of essential assets that should be mentioned on your resume. Third, it will aid in marketing your experience to potential employers.
The first and third points require further explanation. The applicability of your experience to certain fields or types of work will be immediately obvious, but with some reflection and creative insight, you may recognize that your experience is quite applicable to other fields as well. The logic supporting the applicability of your experience in a seemingly unrelated field must be thought through and internalized so you can easily demonstrate the connection to a potential employer.
Now you should see that several key factors (job stability; industry, work and responsibility experience; and applicability of experience and skills to the open position) constitute the basis for hiring decisions. These factors have little or nothing to do with whether one is currently self-employed.
If you understand the depth and breadth of your experience, and can quantify and communicate an accurate description to a prospective employer, you are ready to go job hunting. If you pursue jobs that fit your experience, you will actually have a competitive advantage in the job market.
What is the most common mistake job seekers make?
The most common mistake, surprisingly, is job seekers don’t anticipate that hiring managers will perform an internet search to find out more about them. This oversight can result in two different problems: 1. negative information is discovered; and, 2. positive information, though available, is not found by the searcher.
It is always prudent to consider the potential career consequences of our actions, but with an increasing amount of real-time and historical information available on the Web, 
the likelihood is now much greater that missteps will be discovered by potential employers, even many years after the fact.
Some sources of information are obvious: photo posting sites, forums, blogs, and social networking sites. But less obvious sources are just as important. Google, for example, keeps Web pages cached and available to searchers. So even if a page has been taken down, it will come up in a Google search and can be accessed by clicking on the “Cached” link in Google’s results. ZoomInfo.com permanently stores Web pages that mention individuals by name and can be retrieved from their cache at any time.
In addition to your name, employers will Google your phone number, email address, former employers, and anything else on your resume that might produce a “hit” when combined with your first or last name, city or state. Before you send out a resume, perform each of these searches so you know what potential problems await you.
There are sources other than Google that employers may check; the most intimidating, perhaps, is Lexis-Nexis, which can search and retrieve nearly every newspaper, magazine, radio or TV story from the last twenty years, or more. Though not as extensive as Lexis-Nexis, public and university libraries offer full text access for written and transmitted stories.
There are many ways in which records can be retrieved at little or no cost from online databases. If you have a corporation registered in your name, marriage, divorce, bankruptcy, tax delinquency, civil or criminal court proceeding, or any type of state professional license, the records are generally available. Even traffic and parking tickets can sometimes be retrieved.
Information that enhances your reputation will aid your job quest. Attention must be paid, though, to assuring the information will be found. A Google search may miss something if it is associated with a less common variation of your name. I consistently use “Michael G Smith” as my name online, since anything associated with “Mike Smith” or “Michael Smith” will be listed so far down in Google’s results they won’t be seen. It’s important to decide what your name is and then stick with that exact form. “Kate Smith” is not the same, in Google’s eyes, as “Kathleen Smith,” “Bill Board” is not the same as “William Board,” and “James R Towne” is not the same as “James Towne.”
Sites where individuals create and edit their own records are of critical importance. You have no control over much of what comes up in a Google search, but the employer knows that you alone control the information on sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and so on. Content you post can be a liability if it is inconsistent or potentially embarrassing–your resume and your LinkedIn work history, for example, had better agree. On the plus side, if you anticipate that potential employers will view your profile, then you can emphasize your accomplishments and achievements in order to make a good impression.
You must decide what goal you wish to serve by having an online presence. Your profile on LinkedIn–currently, the most important business networking site–should not feature activities that detract from your “day job,” as that will give the impression your focus is not on work. If you are a fundraising professional and have a political blog that is compatible with the outlook of the organization you work for, that’s fine. But if your profile emphasizes a personal business you operate on the side, a reasonable person will conclude you are stretched too thin and your attention is divided.
Michael G Smith
Why don’t recruiters state the name of the employer in job postings?
One of the chief reasons recruiters are hired to fill job openings is that the employer lacks the time or manpower to deal with job seekers responding to ads. It makes more sense, for a number of reasons, to outsource that responsibility by hiring a recruiter.
One might assume that providing the employer’s name in a job posting would be fine, so long as interested candidates are instructed to apply through the recruiter rather than the employer. But an astounding number of people think that it is perfectly OK to ignore those instructions and contact the employer anyway. They figure that, by applying to both the recruiter and employer, they increase their odds of getting an interview. Or, if they don’t hear from the recruiter (which only happens if they are unqualified for the job), they then contact the employer directly, figuring they have nothing to lose at that point.
The large number of utterly unqualified individuals who respond to a job posting is a sight to behold. Then there are those who feel the need to apply two, three or even four times. In fact, these two categories constitute the majority of responses to most postings.
Unlike most employers–especially those lacking a human resource department–I deal with this every day; I know what to expect and have put in place automated systems to handle the avalanche of responses. From the employer’s perspective, I reduce the workload arising from job postings in two ways: pre-screening qualified candidates, and insulating the employer from unnecessary outside contacts.
What is the risk in self-employment, changing careers, going back to college, a dead end job or a lateral move?
There is not much to fear from self-employment that doesn’t work out. Your career will suffer nothing more than a delay and employers will not hold your entrepreneurial effort against you when considering you for a job. Of course, going back to your former career becomes more difficult with the passage of time as your career skills and knowledge of developments in the field become rusty.
Going back to college is not a risk if you acquire technical knowledge usable on the job–electrical engineering, for example–or general business knowledge, as with an MBA. Otherwise the value gained may be less than what is lost by taking the time off from work.
The one exception is when one becomes qualified in an unrelated, but intersecting area. An engineer, for example, who earns a degree in law can move to their employer’s legal department and likely secure a substantial increase in compensation.
Changing careers is clearly a risk vs. reward proposition with outcomes ranging from completely unknown to relatively foreseeable. If the field in which you work is in decline (say, film-based photography), the lowest risk option is to leverage your existing skills to enter another field that has long-term growth potential, even if you must take a short term cut in pay.
When changing careers, the least risky move is one that leverages your most valuable knowledge and skills. An accountant who wishes to move into the nonprofit field would be well-advised to seek employment as an accountant or financial officer with a nonprofit, but seeking a position, say, in fundraising, public relations, or management would carry a much higher risk for failure and loss of income. Career risk is mitigated by having a fallback option whereby you seek re-employment in the field where your skills and experience are most highly valued.
Staying in a dead end job is like keeping your money in a safe deposit box–there is little risk of theft, but relative to funds deposited in an interest-bearing account, your asset looses value every day. Ideally, one avoids becoming employed in a dead end job in the first place, but for younger workers, a dead end job may be the best job available at the time a choice must be made. Most people solve the dead end job problem by moving on after several years when advancement in income and responsibility become less likely.
Making a lateral move is sometimes a better option than staying put. A job change which brings no immediate gain in pay or responsibilities is worthwhile if the new employer has significantly better growth potential and opportunity for advancement than the former employer.
Are employees at nonprofits paid less?
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal argues that those who work for nonprofits, particularly libertarian advocacy organizations, earn less than those who “sell out” and work for “corporate America.” In “The Tragic Irony of Beltway Libertarianism” (May 21, 2008) Thomas Frank maintains that individuals can either work for an ideologically compatible, but low-paying, nonprofit, or “forsake, say, the Cato Institute and instead help ExxonMobil pile up the pelf”.
Frank appears to be making the claim that what might (or might not) be true of a sector of the economy (e.g. the nonprofit sector pay less than the corporate sector) is true for each employee within it. As evidence, he points out that, from time to time, individuals leave the nonprofit sector to earn a larger paycheck in the private sector. While true, this implies nothing about the relative pay in either sector, especially considering counter-examples where a private sector job is left for a higher-paying position at a nonprofit.
In fact, Frank’s evidence can be countered simply by noting the fact that an increase in salary accompanies nearly every job change, regardless of whether the employee has been hired away from one nonprofit to another, a nonprofit to a business, or a business to a nonprofit. Moreover, it is the experience gained in the employee’s current position which makes the employee attractive to the new employer. So when a business recruits an employee from a nonprofit by offering higher compensation, we should not conclude that the individual is paid more in the for-profit sector, but that the nonprofit experience has increased the value of the employee.
Workforce by employment sector
All employees have preferences about the type of employer they will work for, where they wish to live, length of commute, willingness to travel, and openness to relocation. Exercising any of these preferences potentially impacts income by reducing the number of acceptable employers.
An engineer, for example, who prefers to design automobiles, will likely earn less than an engineer who has no preference and is free to take whatever job pays the most. Does this imply that automobile engineers earn less than non-automotive engineers? No. It implies only that those who have few, or no, work preferences have more positions to choose from and sacrifice nothing by taking the most lucrative job.
Generalizations about what “someone” might make at a nonprofit compared to what they might make in the private sector are meaningless. Nonprofits, like any employer, require workers with certain skills and abilities; they pay whatever it takes to get them (or get by without employees). Characteristics such as leadership ability, self-motivation, and critical thinking skills are sought by these organizations, while corporations often seek just the opposite in their employees. A self-motivated leader with critical thinking skills might very well earn much more working for a nonprofit than working in the private sector.
Over time, the likely result of sorting employees in the marketplace according to the skills required by employers is that each worker ends up in the field that most highly values that particular worker’s innate skills, and each worker has maximized income, within the confines of their personal preferences.
Another consideration is that, for the most part, nonprofits of the libertarian type Mr. Frank discusses, are tiny compared with the average business. The Cato Institute(with annual revenue of less than $25 million)is the “ExxonMobil” of the libertarian movement; by comparison, ExxonMobil’s annual revenue exceeds $400 Billion.
There are many types of skills and employee characteristics that may be more highly compensated in one sector of the economy or another, but the private sector, since it is so much larger and complex than the nonprofit sector, simply has more different types of jobs and, therefore, more opportunities for high income. But it is a mistake to average out the incomes from each sector, compare the average, and then conclude that each individual employee earns less in one sector than another. It’s entirely possible for the nonprofit sector to have lower average wages than the private sector, yet each employee in the nonprofit sector is earning more than if they worked for “corporate America.”
Working from home; finding a work-from-home job
Considered from the employer’s point of view, e-commuting is not a viable option for many jobs and some employers are hesitant to open the door to that option. Nearly all management positions require the manager to be on site in order to mentor staff and direct activities. By the same token, less experienced employees who wish to develop management skills and eventually become managers themselves cannot expect to do so if they work off site.
From a quality of life perspective, working from home appears to offer advantages: flexibility with regard to work hours, less micro-management, and lower commuting costs. However, individuals who have worked from home or in a one-person office are aware of the disadvantages of this arrangement: loneliness (no social interaction with office peers), difficulty getting motivated, and lack of real-time information flows that may affect the direction of ongoing projects.
Taking these considerations into account, there are certain types of work where the trade-offs are worthwhile. By foregoing the requirement that an employee work on site, an organization can gain access to a larger pool of qualified candidates and possibly lower their costs as well. In fact, that’s exactly what outsourcing is, since there isn’t really much difference between having an off site employee and an off site vendor–the considerations underlying the decision-making process are much the same.
Selling the idea of working from home to your current employer may be tough, since your boss already has the preferred situation and is not likely to settle for less. From the employer’s perspective, converting an employee from onsite to off site has few advantages (your office or cubicle becomes available to another employee, yet only if you never work in the office), but many disadvantages (less accountability, and more difficult and slower communication). Unless the employer is faced with losing the employee and having to find a replacement, there is no advantage to the employer in agreeing to your proposal, so the only leverage you may have is offering to work from home instead of quitting.
On occasion, an employer will state in a job posting that the position may be performed from home. If not, you should raise the issue during the first conversation with an interested employer and see how they respond.
