Social Enterprises (read time: 14 min)
What types of jobs exist in Social Enterprise?
Social Enterprise by the numbers (pay and hours)
A note on starting your own Social Enterprise
How to get a job at a Social Enterprise
Where to find jobs + resources
So you want to work in Social Enterprise?
Working for a social enterprise is one of the most underrated career opportunities for graduating seniors. More than most roles, getting a job at a social enterprise requires extensive research, networking, and ‘hustle,’ but these positions can also offer far greater responsibilities and exposure than more traditional entry-level jobs. The term ‘social enterprise’ has no standardized meaning--these organizations can range from a small nonprofit with a very clear social mission to a large business where you have to squint pretty hard to interpret their work as ‘impactful.’ For the purposes of this guide, we will focus on social enterprises with less than 50 people, where there are typically less formal hiring structures and more growth opportunities.
The type of person who would likely thrive in these roles is someone who embraces both opportunity and lack of structure. If you thrive with the freedom to figure out a problem independently, then social enterprise could be great for you. If you want assurance you will receive clear training, stable growth trajectories, and general consistency in your day to day, these jobs may be less appealing for you.
If this career path sounds exciting, this guide will take you through everything you need to know about working at social enterprises. To inform our work, Second Day has spoken to experts in the field and gathered the best information out there for upcoming and recent graduates. First, the guide will take you through the different entry-level positions to look out for in this field. Then, we’ll provide tips on actually getting those jobs. We’ll finish with our next three steps: actionable items you can take to make progress towards finding your first job at a social enterprise. Let’s get started!
This guide was written by Phil Dearing in partnership with the Second Day team.
Many thanks to experts in the field who supported this work:
Cherie Chung, MBA Fellow, Learn Capital
Bill Cromie, Managing Director, Blue Ridge Labs
Caroline Cotto, Co-Founder, Renewal Mill
Elle Kang, Former Head of Growth, Altar Global
Phil Wong, Co-Founder, Misfit Foods
What types of jobs exist in Social Enterprise?
In general, a social enterprise will fit into one of four categories:
A typical for-profit that frames its work around social impact, often with ‘give back’ initiatives (e.g., TOMS, Warby Parker)
A for-profit that is entirely focused on a difficult social issue (e.g., Propel, Upsolve)
A nonprofit with a core income-generating product (e.g., Goodwill, Grameen Bank)
A nonprofit that earns some of its revenue but also relies significantly on donations (e.g., Acumen, charity: water)
The day-to-day work at a social enterprise can vary quite a lot. In general, roles at a social enterprise are more likely to shift, grow, and evolve based on your skill sets and what is needed at the organization. For example, a role in marketing could encompass posting on social media and writing an email newsletter, but then also evolve into working with the sales team or product team. Since the work can be so variable, we think the easiest way to give you some insight is to share examples of a few folks who have been employees at startups right out of school.
Career Snapshot: Part-timer to Business Operations Manager
Tony started interning at a startup selling veggie-driven foods to reduce meat demand in the fall of his junior year, doing paid, part-time accounting and finance for ~10 hours per week. He enjoyed it and kept interning all the way through graduation, receiving an offer to come on full-time in April. The role expanded to include operations work--data, procurement, production management, and in-store sampling of products. The starting salary was $48K with a bit of equity and since has increased with a promotion from Business Operations Associate to Business Operations Manager. In this role, he now handles more of the forward-looking strategy for the organization's operations.
Career Snapshot: Business Associate to Co-Founder
Mary participated in a Techstars accelerator as a Business Associate for 3 months about 3 years after graduating from college, making $2k/month to provide support to companies participating in the accelerator program. One of those companies (focused on selling upcycled baked goods) brought her on as the COO and second employee of the organization, making $85K and living in the Bay Area with a significant amount of equity. After four months, she received the title of Co-Founder, and she has been working on everything from fundraising, to production, to customer research ever since.
Career Snapshot: Business Operations to Business Team Lead
Yolanda started her career at a startup in Cleveland through a Venture for America placement. She was pretty unhappy, feeling like the startup didn’t have a clear mission or vision and her deliverables were undefined. However, she invested in teaching herself SQL and Python and got to meet a ton of other people at data conferences. After a year, she decided to quit. Over the next 4 months, she talked to everyone she could in the financial inclusion space, applying for roles as they merged. She landed as the first business operations hire at Propel, a startup at the time focused on helping individuals get the most out of their SNAP benefits. She made $70K there to start in New York City and has gotten several promotions over the following 3 years, now leading a business team and making $110K.
Importantly, the day-to-day for an entry-level person at a startup will likely involve a wide variety of tasks. If you were hired to do operations but the startup doesn’t have a marketing team, you might be asked to help out with marketing. In a situation like this, it is critical to remember that no one on your team knows how to do X (in this example, marketing). That makes you, as an entry-level employee, on an even playing field with people many years your senior. You don’t know how to do marketing, but neither does the CEO of your company. Either she has to learn how to sell ads on Google, or you do. And if you can learn that skill quickly and efficiently, you can make yourself indispensable. Everyone at a startup is learning things they have never done before, and if you can learn faster and make their lives easier, you will be set up for success.
Social Enterprise by the numbers (pay and hours)
Pay and promotions vary widely in this industry. Pay can be as low as $30K per year for a smaller organization or nonprofit to over $60K for larger, better-capitalized organizations. The rate of pay often depends on what funding is available for the organization and what you need to be paid to accept the role一therefore, salaries can often be negotiated. Promotions and growth opportunities usually come more quickly if you perform your role well and work hard to take on more responsibilities.
Flexibility!
Because there is so much to do in a small organization, there can often be room for you to take on projects or responsibilities that you are interested in, even if they seem “outside the scope” of your original job title. Over time, this could allow you to dramatically change what your day-to-day role can look like and get promoted quite quickly.
On the other hand, many social enterprises have less formalized feedback processes and mechanisms for training and support. This leaves you more vulnerable to a toxic manager or company culture. These organizations are more likely to have growth challenges or to go under than more established entities, which might leave you job searching on short notice. It’s important as you network and interview for positions to closely examine these potential risk factors. This can be one of the advantages of interning at a social enterprise during school一it gives you the chance to suss out the culture and operational viability of the organization before committing yourself entirely to a job. Here are some questions that you should ask as you are interviewing to probe on these topics:
What is your process for feedback, development, and coaching?
What has your turnover looked like in the past? What is the reason people have left?
How could the role I’m interviewing for potentially evolve over time?
What do you think are the best things and the most challenging things about working here?
What do you think is the greatest risk to the organization, and what are you doing to mitigate that risk now?
A note on starting your own Social Enterprise
This guide focuses on working for a social enterprise because starting a social enterprise is a totally different effort. Typically, the most challenging element of launching a social enterprise is raising money. Since most Foundations want to wait until you have an established track record, new founders often need to convince a lot of wealthy individuals to take a bet on them. Launching a venture often means that you have to do everything: from the jobs you love to ones that you find tedious. We don’t want to downplay how important innovation is to social change and how amazing it can be to create a successful venture, but before committing to launching something yourself, we recommend you:
Do an objective analysis of the other players in your field. Are there other organizations you could work for or do a side-project with? That could help you validate your idea or scale more quickly
Have some initial conversations with potential donors about money. Ideally, you can have a certain amount committed before you dive in head-first
Run product tests and user interviews to see if there really is a need/fit for your work
Think about your financial situation and cost of living, estimating how much money you need to make over the next three years
How to get a job at a Social Enterprise
The hiring process for social enterprises is more networking-heavy than almost any other type of job. Because many of these organizations are relatively small, they don’t often have the time to conduct a formal hiring process and post a job publicly. They also often have pressing needs, but not enough funds to hire a full-time staff person to take on each need. This can present a unique opportunity for you to get your foot in the door. If you have a specific skill set or really want to work for a specific organization, there are many opportunities for you to carve out a role with an organization based on their needs. This allows you to demonstrate your value, become indispensable, and ideally get hired full-time upon graduation.
Often, these arrangements are unpaid, but if you aren’t in a position to take on unpaid work, there are many creative options to get your foot in the door. You can offer to support the work of a social enterprise on a very limited basis (e.g., 5 hours per week) to demonstrate your value. For a month or two, you can offer a few hours per week to the organization, still do other paid work to keep you afloat, and then have a conversation with the social enterprise to see if they would be willing to pay for you to continue working there. Another option is to make getting paid for the work a requirement for you to accept an internship with the organization. This works best if you can demonstrate that you have the skills needed to address a clear business need for the organization. If you can point to the fact that you would be taking this role in lieu of a different paid role, that can help in convincing them to pay you.
If you don’t have time to work with an organization early on, that’s ok! If you are focusing on a job post-graduation, the process is fairly similar. Most organizations have a sense of what their next six months will look like and what support they might need in terms of staff. If your skill sets align, then you can start planting the seeds about working for them full-time once you graduate several months before that graduation date. To determine if this option is available, you need to network heavily over the course of your senior year. It is critical to do this outreach rather than waiting for roles to emerge on different job sites.
Networking
While larger organizations are more likely to post positions, many small organizations never end up posting roles publicly so you will never know that they are hiring. Furthermore, smaller organizations are more likely to hire the person they know and have talked to if they think they are a good fit, so it is advantageous to get out there and know people.
If your goal is to get a job with a social enterprise, you should plan to talk to 30-50 different people/organizations over the course of your senior year in order to find the right fit.
As you think about launching a process of talking to dozens of people and organizations, it is generally most effective to focus your search one of two ways:
Anchor your search in the type of role you want. For example, if you have experience with marketing/branding, sales, data analysis, or product development, you can reach out to organizations saying that you are trying to find a role where you can use that skill set. You can ask probing questions to understand how they think about that area of their work and what they might need in the future there. Not every organization will have both a need in the area you want to work in and the funding to bring someone on, but some organizations certainly will.
Anchor your search in the cause you want to focus on. Whether it is preventing food waste, improving financial services, transforming access to education, or developing green technology, some enter their career more flexible on their role but committed to a specific mission. With this focus, networking conversations focus more on the needs of that organization. Many organizations are open to someone who is hungry to learn and open to doing whatever is needed. Note: mission alignment matters a lot to social enterprise founders, and they are sometimes ok taking on someone with less experience if they are sold on your commitment to the mission. This cause-focus outlook also makes your search easier, since your goal is to talk to a lot of organizations focused on this work.
You don’t have to focus on only one sector or one type of role, but focus will help you. Without something to anchor you, it may sound to the organization like you “want a job doing anything anywhere.” While that may be true to some extent, coming up with one of these focused lenses should help you to gain traction. If you want to focus on a couple of different roles or fields that is fine but try to keep a singular focus clear when you are talking to someone in an informational interview.
Finally, in terms of interviews, the extensiveness varies widely. In general, resumes and cover letters tend to matter less than a strong personal brand and a polished portfolio of past work. Some organizations will want you to do a work sample or share previous work to demonstrate you have the skills they need. Some might have multiple rounds of long interviews with the whole team. Others might just have a couple of conversations with you and make a quick decision. The most important thing through it all is to demonstrate that you are ready to start being helpful to the organization and your manager from day one: taking work off their plate and learning quickly.
Where to find jobs + resources
Coming out of school, there are a few fellowships or programs that you can consider:
Venture for America pairs you with a startup and provides cohort-based training before a 2-year placement. The typical salary is ~$40K. The community is quite strong, but not many of the organizations are focused on a social mission. Past applicants have described being told of the possibility of working for a social enterprise through the program only to later find out that the number of placements at social enterprises was far smaller than expected.
Another program to consider is Techstars. They run a number of 3 month-long accelerator programs for younger start-ups. For most of those programs, Techstars hires a number of staff to work on business, operations, or technical support. Typically, these staffers act as informal consultants helping out companies on whatever they need. While there is no guarantee, most of the staffers who take this role end up taking a full-time job with one of the organizations going through the accelerator after it concludes. Note that different Techstars programs have different focus areas and different locations, so make sure to participate in a program that aligns with your interests.
If you are trying to network your way into working for an organization, the best places to look are at job boards, accelerator participant lists, and the list of organizations where impact investors have invested.
Job boards一check or subscribe to these for posted roles
Accelerator programs一use the list of participants as a vetted list of generally strong and growing organizations
MassChallenge (mix of regular startups and social enterprises)
Praxis (mix of regular startups and social enterprises)
Portfolios companies of Impact Investors一look at who impact investors have invested in to find a list of strong and growing organizations as well一typically a bit later stage than those found in accelerator programs
Exit opportunities
Exit opportunities can be quite promising, but once again, vary widely. Because a small social enterprise likely has less name recognition than a larger entity and your role is likely less clear, it is more incumbent on you to explain what your role was and what responsibilities you took on. There are often four paths that someone could take following a job at a social enterprise:
Work at another social enterprise. Many people working at a social enterprise naturally build up a pretty robust network of other folks working at similar organizations. If you decide to leave, this can be a natural place to start looking, since they are more likely to understand what you did and that you can thrive in a startup environment.
Starting your own venture. After working at a startup, some people feel the drive to launch their own. This can be a great springboard since you’ve had the chance to see what it’s like, meet more people in your industry, and establish some credibility, but it is also incredibly difficult.
Pivoting to a more established organization. If you are craving a more stable role, many people can leverage the skills they built to find a similar role at a more established company. For example, if you ran the customer service at a startup, you could pivot to that role at a more established company.
Pivoting to something else entirely. Some people also go to grad school as a reset or apply to jobs totally unrelated to what they had been doing. This is totally fine but might lead to accepting roles that aren’t as senior as the ones you might be able to get at another startup or building on your existing role. But careers are about discovery and joy, not just climbing the ladder!
Next three steps
Decide on a focus area (role or topic) to guide your networking and search. You can certainly change your mind later or choose two, but make sure to stay anchored in some way!
Develop your elevator pitch and prepare your application materials. For this world, a compelling elevator pitch is often more important than spending time on cover letters.
Reach out to as many relevant people as you can find to learn about their organization and needs. This can be with the intent to work part-time with them or to learn more about emerging full-time opportunities.
Last updated: July 2021