Volunteering is a great thing to do during your job search. It’s an opportunity to do good while building valuable skills and putting yourself to work doing something (which is always better than nothing when you’re job searching). Obviously volunteering isn’t only for people who have time on their hands, yet many non-profit organizations treat it like it is. Why would you have a top notch software developer running around picking up trash when he or she could be fixing a few bugs on the organization’s website? Why have a brilliant investment banker building a house when he or she could be managing the organization’s endowment? If the volunteers want time away from work and would prefer to do something different, that’s totally cool. But what if they want to offer pro bono services? Where do they find organizations who can make the best use of their time? Catchafire is a New York, NY based B-Corp (a for-profit company with a social mission–we actually featured jobs with B Corporation) that aims to fix this problem. They want to “make it easy for every professional to use their skills for good, and to make it easy for every nonprofit and social enterprise to access and effectively use pro bono as a way to build capacity within their organization.”

Catchajob

So far non-profits have received $2,217,500 worth of volunteered services through Catchafire. It would take hundreds of thousands of hours of typical volunteering to deliver that kind of value, but because Catchafire posts specific volunteer projects with well defined needs, they’re able to capture way more value with way less time. It’s a really cool model, and it’s cool that it’s actually a business and not just a non-profit. Catchafire charges organizations a membership fee on a sliding scale based on size and budget. It seems to be working, as there are quite a few success stories. You can learn more about how Catchafire came to be by reading their story, and you can learn more about how they work by checking out their About page and FAQs. If you like what you see and the B-Corp style, then you should check out jobs at Catchafire. Right now they’re looking for a Product & Marketing Summer Associate, a Software Engineer, and a Social Good Organization Consultant. These look like great jobs, so look them over and consider applying.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

• Catchafire.org
• Jobs at Catchafire
• About Catchafire
• Catchafire’s Team
• Catchafire’s FAQ

How often do you volunteer?

We've identified Catchafire as having career opportunities in the following categories:

• all employers
• business development
• consulting
• design
• marketing
• New York
• product development
• product management
• sales
• social entrepreneurship
• social venture
• software development
• user experience
• web development

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