Volunteer Global

After working four years in returned volunteer support, I learned it was common for a person to graduate, serve for two years, and then be unable to find a career. The few who asked the employers why they weren’t getting callbacks got the same answer: “Why didn’t you get a real job after school?”

If it was infuriating for me to hear this, I can only imagine the utter frustration the volunteer must have felt. Here’s a person who successfully created a small business, who educated others about HIV/AIDS prevention, who built an entire library to increase literacy – and who couldn’t even find a minimum-wage temp gig upon completion of service.

Why is this?

Perhaps the employer encountered some returned volunteers who had badly formatted or worded résumés, or who, in their interviews, couldn’t effectively communicate the relevance of their service background. Because of this, the employer projected the bad experience onto all long-term volunteers.

Or maybe, the employer just didn’t understand at all what long-term volunteers do during their placements. How many picture a person digging a ditch and singing around a campfire when one says “I volunteered for two years in Brazil?” Ok, many volunteers may do those things along with their project, but what do they actually DO? Well for starters, I know one person who collected thousands of books and built a library to educate a small community in Mauritania (see, I wasn’t just pulling random examples out of the air in that second paragraph). I know another who started a women’s group that focused on investing and banking in Kenya – that group recently opened a primary school named after the volunteer.

Or the employer’s just a curmudgeon and we don’t want to work there anyway.

Let’s throw out that third theory, because the other two are the ones that need to be addressed. It really comes down to communication and education. The volunteer needs to communicate what makes him or her qualified, and the employer needs to educate him or herself on what international service encompasses.

While advice for volunteers is easy (read up on and practice interview skills, have others look at your résumé, use action words, separate out hard and soft skills…), I really am at a loss as to what to tell employers. And if you’re wondering why I’m not outlining communications practices here, it’s because I just sent some ideas along to Briefcase to Backpack, who’s currently working on an article about that exact thing. It would be kinda mean of me to jump on what they’re already posting.

So what I’d like to ask you is – do you have advice for employers? Have you spoken with an employer who disregards volunteer résumés? What is their reason for doing so, and how do we get around that? If you have advice, feel free to leave a comment below.