Why Charities May Shut Out Job Seekers from the Business World

Q: I have been a highly successful, well-compensated consultant to senior managers of the world’s largest corporations. I have also advised nonprofit groups on management issues and fund raising. I am trying to make the transition to the nonprofit world because I think the things I learned in corporate America can make an incredible contribution, and because I believe I can personally gain from what the nonprofit world can teach me. And yet, when I apply for a nonprofit job, I am told I don’t have the right experience. Why are these people unable to see that the extraordinary skills and knowledge I’ve gained can be transferred to the nonprofit field?

A: From the overall tone of your letter, our respondents detect one likely problem right off the bat: your attitude, or at least your perceived attitude, about the switch you’re trying to make. The pitch of your rhetoric — “incredible contribution,” “extraordinary skills,” and so on — can mark you as a braggart. “This letter suggests a certain lack of sensitivity,” says Peter W. England, president of the Chicago Children’s Museum, and a former top executive with the Unilever and Elizabeth Arden companies. “It implies a certain arrogance and, more importantly, suggests that the nonprofit world is inferior to the for-profit world.”

Jay Berger, a recruiter in Pasadena, Calif., who works for nonprofit clients, echoes that opinion: “Obviously, this person has an ego. Not that there aren’t egos in the nonprofit world, but it sounds as if he or she expects to bring all this wonderful experience in to enable some poor struggling nonprofit to benefit from his or her worldliness.” This is not at all how most nonprofit employers will see the situation, he says.

In general, both Mr. Berger and Mr. England say, employers will not take kindly to the suggestion that your consulting background makes you specially qualified to jump into a field in which you have no previous experience. You simply cannot come off as if you’d be doing someone a favor if they hired you.

Beyond that, you haven’t mentioned possessing any direct management skills. In fact, your one-step-removed experience as a consultant may be causing you more problems with your transition than your for-profit background. Mr. England says he’s found plenty of overlap between running a company and running a museum: “You’ve still got a product to sell, and you might not talk about losses, but certainly you still talk about surpluses and deficits, cash flow and capital.”

But consultants generally don’t have to deal with those sorts of operational issues on a day-to-day basis, Mr. Berger notes, which puts them at a severe disadvantage when compiling management experience. “It’s one thing to go into a corporation and show them how to run a capital campaign and then walk away, and it’s another thing to have to do it,” he says. “It’s very different working in-house when you’ve got to be there day in and day out, and have all these accountability issues that you don’t have when you’re consulting.”

He notes that his nonprofit clients will almost never consider someone for a top management position if they haven’t had a lot of experience managing staff members. The same issues of accountability exist even for consultants trying to move to in-house positions in business, but are exacerbated in the nonprofit world, Mr. Berger says, by the field’s emphasis on consensus. Unlike business heads, charity managers simply “can’t make decisions and act on them,” he says. “They first need to get buy-in from the organizations’ various constituents.”

Your letter points to further issues that may be keeping you from making the transition you seek. For one thing, you lead with the idea that you’ve been “well-compensated” in your past positions. Mr. Berger notes that he often encounters middle-aged people who have earned a good living in business, have saved for their retirements and sent their children to college, and are now fully willing and able to take a major pay cut in order to do philanthropic work. When they say such things right off the bat, Mr. Berger says, he knows that they’ve thought through the impact of the transition. “This person didn’t say any such thing,” he says, “and I find that a little scary.”

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of your self-presentation, both Mr. Berger and Mr. England say, is the lack of clarity about your motivation. Typically, people who manage nonprofit groups are deeply passionate about the particular mission of their organization — they’re not in “nonprofits,” they’re in child advocacy, or university development, or homelessness prevention. If, after your years of business-world success, you are truly motivated to give something back to the community, Mr. Berger encourages you “to give more thought to what kind of nonprofit organization interests you most, what type of role you expect to have, and whether you have done or are willing to do some volunteer work to get some experience.”

For more ideas about the transition from for-profit to nonprofit, check out Philanthropy Career’s recent look at this topicof the subject.