Hiring and getting hired at Jewish non-profits

It has been six years since the economy crashed in 2008, and while finding employment has been a challenge, the tide may be taking a turn for the better — particularly in the non-profit sector. But where do Jewish non-profits fall within the current landscape, from the perspective of both job-seekers and employers?

Broadly speaking, employment continues to be “a buyer’s market,” says Linda Wolfe, director of career development and placement at JVS Chicago, an affiliate agency of the International Association of Jewish Vocational Services (IAJVS). “Employers are like kids in a candy store,” she tells JNS.org. “They have their choice [among] hundreds and hundreds of candidates.”

Yet when it comes to non-profits, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows a clear upward trend in “industries in the Religious, Grantmaking, Civic, Professional, and Similar Organizations subsector group establishments” since about 2011.

The economy has an effect on decisions to transition to a career in the Jewish non-profit sector, but many job-seekers also simply decide to do something they are more passionate about.

“From 2008 to now, there has been an increase in the number of jobs available to job-seekers. But the numbers of candidates are increasing as well,” said William Hochman, CEO and owner of the Joel Paul Group.

Hochman also points to a fallout that resulted from the recession, which forced for-profit workers like lawyers or accountants whose jobs got downsized to rebrand their skills for jobs at non-profit organizations.

“One thing the recession did that might not be evident… is that while the non-profit [organizations] got decimated because donors weren’t giving as much due to recession issues, new candidates [came] into the non-profits who in the past would have gone to accounting, finance, [or] Wall Street,” he says.

“Let’s say that [before the recession] there were 20 applicants for a certain job, now there can be 35, because there are transitional candidates added to the pool,” Hochman adds. And non-Jewish candidates are also applying for, and getting, jobs at Jewish non-profits.

The Joel Paul Group has helped its Jewish organizational clients hire non-Jewish candidates. “If the organization is monikered as Jewish,” says Hochman, people such as the CEO or the fundraiser will most likely be Jewish. But if someone is performing strictly internal job functions such as the head of accounting, the CFO, or the head of IT, their religion is not relevant, Hochman explains.

“You want diversity,” he says. “You’re hiring people for their skill sets, except in the cases [like the CEO or fundraiser] I described.”

According to Meryl Kanner, the supervisor of career counseling and placement services at JVS in New Jersey, another affiliate of IAJVS, at “Jewish [non-profit] organizations, as at non-Jewish organizations, the most popular job that gets posted is ‘development/fundraising.’”

Candidates for fundraising jobs at federations “are the ones in greatest demand,” says Rea Kurzweil, the managing director of talent acquisition services at JFNA’s Mandel Center for Leadership Excellence.

“It’s all about bringing in dollars and helping non-profits survive, and the Jewish federations are no different than any other non-profit,” she says. “What we’ve learned at JVS is that a lot of senior and mid-level people that come from the corporate world really want to give back at a certain point in their lives.”

Many employers, however, fear hiring candidates who are often considered “overqualified.” JVS Chicago’s Wolfe believes that if a candidate “comes from the corporate world and is willing and able and has the skills to take a job in a smaller non-profit,” then it is “foolish for an employer to pass that person up.”

At the same time, she says, job-seekers are realizing “that you can’t always assume that you’re going to get the exact position that you came from, so there’s a scaling down of expectations.”

“There’s a tremendous move in the federations towards bringing in people who are risk-takers, who are innovators,” she says.

Wolfe says candidates need to take initiative to show potential employers that they understand the organization, and to explain how they intend to solve the organization’s problems. But along with that, she says they need to be prepared for a reality in which 50-year-old candidates are often being interviewed—and subsequently managed—by much younger supervisors.

“Jewish communal service is obviously a little different, there’s more of a heart involved in it, but it’s still a business,” says Wolfe.