Getting Your First Expatriate Job in Humanitarian Aid

How do you get a job in international humanitarian aid? How do you get an expat job?

Every time I post to LinkedIn about humanitarian aid I get direct messages with those questions from multiple people. Often these people are just curious dreamers, but sometimes one or two have already done all the work needed and are actively seeking but cannot find the doorway to walk through. Unfortunately, the aid world can be very good at keeping that door hidden, and it seems to get a bit more camouflaged every year.

I want to share some thoughts on this topic both broadly and specifically, and I'm including actions you can take and ideas you can use to improve your job search. I am including in this article the standard advice I give to everyone who approaches me and has also clearly done the groundwork.

I'll add at the outset, I am speaking about one very specific type of job seeker here - an entry or junior-level professional looking for an expatriate international position in humanitarian aid. The nonprofit world has lots of entry level jobs and volunteer opportunities in every country, so anyone looking to make a career doing good usually can find a clear pathway locally, assuming enough patience and effort. Those actively looking for work internationally in disaster or conflict zones and also specifically targeting international NGOs are the ones I am speaking to with this. The UN, ICRC, IFRC, government donors, and longer-term development agencies are different and separate from this discussion. Mid-career and second-career candidates bringing experience from the private sector, mass media, or government are also different, you have your own specifics to consider (maybe a future article!) In short, while some of the advice below may help anyone looking for a career step into any segment of the aid world, it may not be relevant to you depending on who you are.

Here's what I tell people:

The multiple degrees, several languages, unpaid/lightly paid internships, volunteering, experience as a national staff member, and short-term work you’ve done internationally (or the deployments you’ve been sent on) are incredibly worthwhile and do qualify you for a job. You really have shown yourself to be dedicated and should be proud of what you have accomplished. I agree that it is frustrating that you have not found a pathway to expat work yet, despite everything you have done. You are not alone.

I understand that you feel like you are willing to do anything to get your foot in the door, and people do appreciate that drive and enthusiasm. I mean, not everyone is attracted to that level of enthusiasm, but some managers are. When I’m hiring I always look for people with drive like that. I would prefer to hire someone like you who is clearly excited about the opening and considers it to be a dream opportunity, even if you are a bit less classically qualified than some of the other candidates. Someone who is thrilled for an opportunity often excels in performance compared to those who are highly qualified but ambivalent about the job and only really applied because they are bored where they are and need a paycheck. Not every manager feels like me however, and I'll be honest too - if you are completely unqualified for something you should not expect your enthusiasm to be enough.

Being willing and being needed are different things. Many jobs that you could do are not jobs that organizations need expatriates for. In many instances, to hire you to an entry level role could actually be unfair to people we are trying to help as it would eliminate jobs from local communities. This is why you won't get an opportunity with my team to do something that I can hire someone locally to do, even if you are willing to pay for your own ticket and lodging and work for free.

If you really want to work for free and teach in a refugee camp (or build latrines, distribute blankets, etc.) there are voluntary organizations that will gladly work with you. I highly recommend looking within your own community at home to start with, there is a lot of need where you live too. Your local Red Cross/Red Crescent is a good place to begin, as are any number of refugee and migrant serving organizations, or any other nonprofit in your community. Working with Afghan refugees in Sacramento, and working with Afghan IDPs in Afghanistan, are both very rewarding ways to spend your life. Kids can use help everywhere, not just "abroad."

Basically, you need to understand that it is better for me and my organization and the people we serve to hire teachers, or community workers, or volunteers, or latrine diggers, or etc., from the population of people who live in the community we are serving. Where you need to be is at the level where you are an expert or able to be very supportive in something important or relevant to a defined emergency cluster/sector and are able to teach or support others.

One exception to this is doctors and nurses and mental health care professionals. If you are one of these, you are widely needed in many places and there are many ways you can get involved. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) or your country's national society of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies - IFRC are good, impartial, humanitarian avenues to start that discussion. I personally don't know anything more about the health assistance side of aid than that, so sending me questions on this sector won't get you far, but I encourage you to get involved.

I definitely understand and sympathize with the fact that you have sent out hundreds of resumes. You are not being blacklisted, no one has any personal issue with you (at least not that I know of.) Here's the thing - blanketing all the open positions in the humanitarian world with your resume will not increase your chances of landing a job. Of the hundreds of jobs you've applied for, your resume likely hasn't been seen more than a few times (particularly if you don't know people or if you are not already overqualified.) Being more focused and applying the points I'll get into below is a more effective approach and use of your time.

Even if you are sending your resume to every single job that you can find, your chances will not increase on a case-by-case basis, and all hiring is done case-by-case. There is no cumulative advantage in sending your resume to the same recruiter 25 times if the result is that they are just not going to look at it 25 times. Each application is an independent event, and without further action from your side each application has the same odds of success, and your odds to start with are low (in the same way that flipping a coin gives you the same odds of one side or the other each flip, even if you flip 10000 times.)

I regularly receive 300+ applications for the entry and junior-level positions I post as a hiring manager. I don't even see most of the resumes submitted for the openings I post - as the hiring manager I get a file from my HR person with the top candidates based on the criteria I've given them. In short, spending 8 hours a day applying to jobs won't help you.

Here's my own history as an example. After university I spent two years with the Peace Corps in rural Russia. I felt like it was a hugely valuable experience and that I was qualified to go back and do development or aid work in the former Soviet Union. The rest of the world disagreed. I ended up back home and lived poorly, working minimum wage at a bookstore and then a community center for 2.5 years. During that 2.5 years I applied for every single job I could find that might get me back overseas. I finally got a job in Russia - because I was actively looking and scouring every source I could find for opportunities, yes; and because I was ready to get on a plane the next day and pay for the flight if I needed to, yes; and because I was applying to jobs for which I had appropriate skills, yes; but most importantly because the person leaving the job was one of the other volunteers in my same Peace Corps group and he recommended me to the hiring manager on his way out the door.

It still takes me about six months to land a new job, 20 years later, and it is still almost always in part thanks to my network. Even the one time I genuinely thought I got a job with a cold application, I found out later that the hiring manager knew a friend of a friend and informally asked about me. Your network is crucial.

You, me, and everyone else has had periods where they sent out as many job applications as physically possible hoping for something, so what you are trying to do is understandable. You feel like at least you are doing something to make your dreams happen, taking action, grabbing the bull by the horns (as we say in America.) And you are, kind of, like how clicking "like" on an Instagram post makes you feel like you contributed to a cause. Someone on Instagram might notice your "like" and ask you to join their team, but it is pretty unlikely. Same for your blanketing the world with job applications. There are better uses of your time and better ways to take action.

In short, if you’ve been doing that for just six months so far, you probably have a long road ahead if you lack a network of people and champions to help you, and if you are not applying for the right openings. Do you really want to spend years doing that? If not, you need to change your tactics or consider a different career.

Here's My Advice

Finding the right opening that leads to a job is very much like magic. When you break it down however, it consists of some very specific elements, all of which you can influence, a little bit:

• You have the right skills.
• You find the right opening.
• You are in the right place to be considered.
• You have the right network to support your application.

Getting all four of these things right will often lead to you getting the job you've applied for, unless someone else is already in the wings. Even if you get all four of those things right you might find yourself being interviewed for a job just to be the third candidate, so an organization can say they had a fair hiring process. Someone else had those four things figured out before you did basically, remember that you are never the only person dreaming about landing that job. It happens to all of us. It sucks. It's also a great opportunity to grow your network, connect with HR people, and meet hiring managers. Look at the positive side and say thanks for the opportunity to be considered, "let's stay in touch for the future."

To increase your chances of getting the job you want, you need to increase the level to which you meet those four criteria. You need to put yourself in the right place, develop the right skills and experiences, have the right network, and be monitoring the right sources so you can apply when your dream job pops up. Here are some ways you can level up (versus everyone who has not read this article at least!)

Have the Right Skills

I frequently get people that I'm trying to help ask me if they think they are a right for "job x", where "job x" is something completely outside their experience, skills and history. In your mind the leap makes sense, you think "I did something kind of like this, it's not such a stretch for me to do that, I really want that job." I've definitely applied to jobs in that situation too. The honest answer most of the time in that scenario is, "no, you're not right for the job."

If you are not right for the job, the person reviewing the resumes will probably never see your application. Your background won't get past the filters on the HRIS system they use to review CVs, because you have no relevant direct experience or history with the job requirements. Being able to stretch only goes so far, and your stretch has to be directly and immediately understandable to someone who doesn't know you, maybe doesn't know the organizations you've worked for, has never talked to you, and may not be a native speaker of the language you use to apply for the job. With 300 resumes to review, the reviewer is usually not going to take the time to look at your not-relevant resume unless you've been recommended by someone they know and trust.

It can also be frustrating for those with some relevant domestic disaster response experience to learn, but internationally your domestic experience doesn't easily translate. I agree that you have transferable skills, but a lot of people overseas don't necessarily know or think that. Many international aid professionals have not worked domestically in aid or nonprofits, so they have no frame of reference for what you are trying to convey. Your domestic experience also sits outside the framework we utilize for international response, so you do still have quite a lot to learn even if you are bringing transferable skills, and other candidates already know the stuff you don't.

Fortunately for you, you have figured out how to do humanitarian work at home. Many expats want to figure this out and can't, much the same as your frustration trying to figure out how to get an international job. You can leverage this and your experience to build your network.

Many job descriptions in the aid sector also call for extensive levels of experience. How do you get that much experience if no one will hire you? My rule of thumb and recommendation is that if you've got about half the experience called for, in a reputable volunteer program or related professional experience, you can consider going for it.

Don't apply for jobs you guess can do or that you are willing to do - apply for jobs that you know you can do, that you have the skills for, that you have some relevant experience with, and that you can preferably get recommended for. There's no reason for anyone to take a chance on you and give you a job that you're not proven or recommended for, even if you are willing to work for free, considering how many applicants you're competing with. Your willingness to do the job is appreciated, but it's not enough. This is why applying to everything you can find is not a good idea, it's a waste of time. It's better to spend your time building your network.

If you've got no experience whatsoever, I'd say about half of the expats I meet started domestically as national staff with the agency they work for as an expat, 10% got in because of their education and internships, and around 40% of the people I meet working as expats have done some sort of volunteer program such as Peace Corps or VSO. I was a Peace Corps volunteer. The UN Volunteer, the EU aid volunteer program, and many unpaid internships across the globe are also popular targets. CorpsAfrica (their website is here) is also a very impressive organization. Finding a domestic job with a nonprofit that has international programming is a way to start, and is also usually very competitive. Be of use at home, and make it known that you want to eventually work overseas. Build your network by being helpful to the overseas teams you support from wherever you are, if they appreciate you they might hire you when they have an opening.

Also, just to note, if you think the time commitment required by Peace Corps or similar programs is too much, then you should probably reconsider the career pathway you are going down. You might end up spending the rest of your life living in even rougher places for longer stretches of time than you would in those programs.

Find the Right Opening

A few job boards are key to your search. I pay for four professional memberships annually, and three of them are on this list, and the fourth is right under the list:

• ReliefWeb
• ImpactPool
• Devex
• DevelopmentAid
• LinkedIn

I really like the Society for International Development - US too, which is not really a job board but is a great resource for young professionals in particular. It pays off most if you are in the Washington, D.C. area but they host some very interesting virtual career building opportunities too. Internationally there is also a broader membership-based SID.

ReliefWeb is the core website for humanitarian action globally, it is run by the UN for the aid community. It is a great source for intelligence, information, and insight, not just jobs. ImpactPool and Devex both offer some stellar CV, resume, and career guidance to paying members, as well as tons of insight and good data. DevelopmentAid is geared more towards Europeans and higher-level roles, but is worth being on your radar. LinkedIn, well, here we are. There are others out there too, but those are the core that you should monitor.

You’ll find many jobs at these sites, but not all. Job postings are expensive and smaller organizations don’t post all of their roles on these websites, particularly junior roles. For more you need to go to their organization websites and also talk with their HR people, because sometimes jobs don't even get put up on websites, they can come word of mouth. I got an expat job once because I applied for a different role with the organization, and they reached out to say "hey, that one is filled now, but we have this other one . . . " It's not the most common thing, but it does happen.

So, to be most effective you need to monitor these websites for the types of jobs you want, and also monitor the websites of organizations you want to work for, and figure out who to talk to at those organizations.

How do you know who you want to work for?

The amount of information out there is overwhelming. This leads a lot of people directly to the group of top 10 organizations who have big advertising and fundraising budgets. Don’t apply only at these place, the most famous INGOs. Almost everyone has heard of Save the Children International and almost every junior aid professional dreams of working there. Once you start digging you will learn a lot about Norwegian Refugee Council, International Rescue Committee, Danish Refugee Council / Dansk Flygtningehj?lp, Mercy Corps, and others.

You can and should try to get jobs at these places. I've worked for them, currently work with one of them, and can say that they are great places to work.

You should also equally (or even more so) target less aggressively advertised agencies, those who get fewer headlines. Ever heard of Polish Humanitarian Action (PAH)? People in Need? HelpAge International? Folkekirkens N?dhj?lp (DanChurchAid)? They all do amazing work, even if you don't hear about them every single time there is a crisis somewhere.

One of the truths of the industry is that the organizations with more funding and fundraising tend to pay more too, so a lot of high caliber or very experienced people apply for jobs at those top organizations. That makes it hard for you. The same role at Acted may pay half of what is paid at a bigger, American, INGO - which is what makes Acted or Nonviolent Peaceforce an easier place for you to try to launch your career. Many of the expats at NRC, for example, started at a smaller NGO or as a national staff member with NRC. Start where you can get a interesting opportunity and plan your future appropriately towards wherever you want to be. At the beginning of your career, finding smaller, passionate, flexible organizations will almost always be a better bet for your first doorway, and you can work your way towards the larger organizations if you really want to do that. You might find that you love the culture at PHA or Acted and decide to stay.

Target the organizations that are genuinely doing the work you want to do and that you are qualified to do. This requires effort on your part to research what is out there and find them.

How do you do this research?

This is the question that makes or breaks a lot of people. At this point in the discussion with those who ask my help, I give them a bunch of resources (which I'm about to dive into, start taking notes!) I tell them to go find ten organizations you want to target, most of which should not be in the top 10 list. Come back to me with the names of the agencies, the countries you want to work for them in, and some job titles. If people come back to me with that then it is clear they are very serious about finding a job. If you are not willing to do that, then you will be sending out resumes for years. If you have that list though, you can start finding real-life people to help you.

If you don't like spreadsheets, you are going to need a big notebook of some kind, because this requires keeping track of what you learn. There are a few ways to find the organizations you might be interested in but have never heard of, and all of the information is available online.

First, you need to understand how the humanitarian industry is organized. In general, the INGOs that are involved in a humanitarian response somewhere are organized on the ground in either "Clusters" or "Sectors."

While a 'sector' refers to a specific area of humanitarian activity, a 'cluster' is defined as a group of organizations and other stakeholders who work together to address the needs where response gaps appear.

The above quote is courtesy of the CARE Emergency Toolkit.

Organizations identify their work and their programming value-add in the field around these clusters and sectors. Official cluster or sector coordination mechanisms exist and are stood up where there are officially declared disasters or UN-led humanitarian response activities. Sometimes the structures will remain in a different but similar form after the UN draws down, frequently led by an INGO or a local ministry. Most humanitarians involved in programming become some sort of expert in one of the thematic areas, or they work on the support side (logistics, admin, HR, IT, risk management, security.) There are sometimes similar groups for support functions at the country level, but they can be harder to find. The Logistics Cluster is the biggest one globally on the support side.

Learn this system. Understanding how humanitarian field activities are organized is your key to understanding the various stakeholders in the system. You can start here. This is also an important source of information on the system. ReliefWeb, UN-OCHA, and the Interagency Standing Committee (IASC) are things you need to learn about.

The Global Cluster Coordination Group (GCCG) is composed of: Global Cluster Coordinators (GCCs) of the 11 IASC recognized Global Clusters (CCCM, Early Recovery, Education, ETC, Food Security, Health, Logistics, Nutrition, Protection, Shelter, and WASH) and Coordinators of the Global Protection Cluster's four Areas of Responsibility (Child Protection; GBV; Housing, Land and Property; and Mine Action.

There are global leads, country leads, and field sub- leads. These are the INGOs, UN agencies, RCRC actors, and other who are responsible for coordinating the activities, the reporting, the meetings, and the data behind a specific response. There are also members to each of these bodies, who are all the INGOs and others working on the issue in a particular place. Save the Children is global co-lead for Education, for example, but if it is not in a country where a disaster is happening, someone else may lead the cluster in the country. Same for sub-clusters, NRC or Save and others won't lead a cluster somewhere they don't have a presence.

Finding the leads for these levels of coordination will give you a lot of potential targets. Finding the membership list for the local clusters will give you a better list of targets.

Back to the search. Now that you know the word you are in need of is "Shelter," how do you know the agencies working in shelter? Looking for "shelter" under the "organizations" tab of ReliefWeb is a good place to start. It leads you here and here for a starting point. If you dive through this information you will find the lead agencies on the various steering committees, advisory bodies, etc. If this is the world you want to be a part of, all of this is information you need to learn, so dive in.

You can do this with any sector or cluster, and you should if you are looking for a career in the humanitarian world.

As I mentioned, there is a difference between the global members of a cluster, and those who are present at a country-level. You can find the agencies working at the country level by reading the various cluster or sector reports posted under the country on ReliefWeb. You can find the lead agencies for each cluster globally and at the country-level usually by Googling it or asking ChatGPT. What you want is to find the full member list at the country level. You can do that by reading the reports under the country and the cluster on ReliefWeb or in reading the Humanitarian Response Plan.

Every official disaster tracked by the UN can be found here. Every official update for every country with an official response is posted there as well. These updates include all the "who is doing what where" information you could ever want, and that is where you find the name of which organization is doing the work you want to do, in the country you want to do it.

Similarly, if you go to the cluster page for the country you want to work in, you will often find the points of contact listed. This gives you an indication of who is leading in that cluster where you want to work. It also can yield names and email addresses of people to reach out to ask for advice and for the full list of cluster members.

Here is the Shelter Cluster in Niger for example. It gives you two people at IOM, a Ministry employee, and an IRC employee. Publicly available data.

You can also try some basic Google hacks. Search for the cluster of your choice plus a country, you will sometimes get back results that include meeting minutes, attendance records, and other useful information. Sometimes emails and phone numbers if you can find the attendance sheets.

Another very good source for finding out who is in the country is to open the Humanitarian Response Plan for that country. Donors in some responses will only give funding to projects that have been included in the HRP, so every agency trying to work in the response will put a project in the HRP. Reading the HRP, you will see which INGOs are working on which projects in which sectors. Here is Nigeria for example, where I work. Sometimes you'll find names of people and email addresses here too.

So, now that you know you want to work in the education sector in Palestine, and you know that 37 organizations (or whatever it is now) work there, you have a better list of INGOs you want to potentially monitor for opportunities. Cross reference this with other countries you want to work in, and you will start to see the NGOs who are doing the work you want to do in the places you want to live. You can also see where they are working in countries that you haven't thought about living, and maybe some of those should be on your list too.

Search Tip: Set a search with filters for exactly what you want on ReliefWeb. Save the URL in the search bar when your filters are set, you can come back to this URL anytime and get the updated results for the same search. You can also ask an AI to do this for you automatically.

Once you have your targeted list of organizations, it is straightforward to search their websites for jobs, to keep track of them via ReliefWeb or ImpactPool, to set Google alerts and LinkedIn Alerts for new opportunities, to build a custom GPT to do it for you. It becomes easier to target your efforts to reach out to people on LinkedIn. It becomes easier to try to track down attendance lists with email addresses of people you want to know from country or field-level cluster meetings. You can't do this if you are applying at every INGO out there, but you can find absolutely everyone who can help you get a job, and every opportunity that meets your criteria, if you are monitoring 5 - 10 relevant INGOs in a few countries.

ChatGPT and other AIs are exciting tools, and they make much of what I am writing redundant. Most AIs out there can do almost all of this work for you, if you know how to ask them the right questions.

If you have a paid subscription to ChatGPT, you should be able to utilize the Humanitarian Advisor I've created for my own research purposes. It can help you with job searching, gathering intel on business development, examining program models, and more. You can access it here. Sometimes the AIs get it wrong too, but as a newbie you won't know when they are wrong, so be careful and fact check the information you get if you are going to action it.

Look at this, with links and references included!

If you are not driven specifically by a sector or cluster idea, are not tied to any one country in particular, or just want a broader understanding of who is working on humanitarian projects globally, then there is another approach to understanding the INGOs out there - our alliances. Or Coordinating Agencies. Or whatever you want to call them.

In the US, the UK, internationally, and in many countries, there are membership organizations that INGOs join. These agencies conduct joint advocacy on humanitarian issues on behalf of all members. The lists of members on their websites is a very easy way to find INGOs working in humanitarian aid. Every agency who has joined one of these is a legit, serious organization trying to do good work (and usually trying to get government funding to do it.) Find the ones doing the things you are interested in, and get to know their career sites.

• https://www.interaction.org/members/
• https://www.icvanetwork.org/members-info/
• https://www.bond.org.uk/jobs/careers-advice/ (Bond also has some great, free career information on their website, so I've linked directly to that instead of their member list)
• https://www.ungeneva.org/en/engage/civil-society/ngo-list (This is a hugely broad list that gives you only names and country of registration and a media contact, but that is super helpful if you want to do something like find every Costa Rican INGO engaged in advocacy with the UN. There's 1, btw.)

Another way you can find INGOs to research and target for opportunities is via their country forums. Most countries where there is a large response, and INGOs have been present for at least a year or two, have an INGO Forum of some kind that most of us belong to. If you are interested in a specific country you can have some luck if you find the membership list for that specific Forum. In Nigeria, for example, we call it the Nigeria INGO Forum. NIF. Want to work in Nigeria? Here are the organizations you should research.

Where INGO Forums don't exist or haven't updated their website, one last thing you can put on your list to check is the last "joint letter" that was issued by the humanitarian actors in a place in response to a crisis or critical event. INGOs will frequently issue joint letters on a matter of concern, and the signatories to that letter are all agencies you can keep on your radar for jobs. Google it, ChatGPT it, or look in ReliefWeb under the country of interest.

If you've done all of this and you don't find organizations to pursue, it means there is not an official international humanitarian response in the country you want to live in. Move on.

Be in the Right Place

If you live in the United States and you want to work for an INGO, your best bet is to move to the Washington, D.C. area. Remote work, which was gloriously available under COVID, has been killed for the most part (I am very sad about this.) You can have a bit of luck in the Triangle area of North Carolina too. Otherwise, there's like 5 INGOs in Los Angeles and a few based here and there in other cities across the country. Other countries have similar hubs, and if you want to work for a European INGO then look towards Brussels.

If you are applying from your home country only for jobs in places that your parents can visit or that will allow you to bring a cat, you are competing against hundreds of people for sure, every single time. If you apply for jobs in places that most people have never heard of and are usually considered very dangerous, you will be competing against dozens of people every time. You will double or triple your odds instantly. Apply for jobs in places that are not in the headlines and are far from capital cities to increase your chances of getting noticed. If you want to do humanitarian work, you should not take issue with a first job in a place that has no electricity, malaria, and any other number of challenges. If you do have an issue with that, you may be headed down the wrong career path.

People do come to me and say they really want to work in this industry, but can only live somewhere their family/spouse/partner can come, preferably Rome or Brussels or London. This is possible when you are a high-value candidate, but as an entry level candidate it is exceedingly rare. It is super expensive for an INGO to bring you to a job, let alone your family. Unless you are a high-value candidate filling a unique job, there's no reason to pay for that. If you are not bringing something super valuable from an incredibly unique education, a private sector experience, or a diplomatic role, then the chances of starting your aid career with an expat job at an INGO in a place like Bangkok or Bogotá are low. You might be able to find unpaid internships in places like that, but the rural parts of Sudan, Chad, and Afghanistan are going to be less competitive and should be higher up your list for paid work. If this is your goal, keep at it, just realize it will take you much longer than it would if you applied elsewhere. Like years longer.

If you want to work solely in a specific country, it doesn't hurt to go to that country if it is safe enough to do so independently. Being there and making yourself easy to get hired can help. It can also result in absolutely nothing, so be prepared to spend a lot of money with potentially nothing to show for it. Being in these places physically when a job is open immensely improves your chances. That said, as an expat hopeful, it is unlikely you are in Kabul hanging out and waiting around for something to happen.

If you can't be there physically, aim for places that can host you easily. If you are from Senegal, you can work in ECOWAS without a visa. If you're from Kenya, you have great odds on roles in East Africa. If you are European, look towards Ukraine and the Middle East. If you're American, you're probably not going to Iran, but many places will let you walk in the door and you can get a work visa later, that's a huge privilege you possess. Applying for jobs where you make the organization's work easier in bringing you on board will increase your chances of getting hired. Applying for jobs in locations that are hard for you to enter, but easy for others, decreases your chances. I'd love to work in Cuba for example, but as a US Citizen with no family in Cuba it is unlikely to happen; applying for a job in Cuba would therefore be a waste of my time and the recruiter's time.

If a job clearly or even just notionally states that it is for national candidates only, don't spend time applying. The money, benefits, funding, approval process, and labor law for an expat role is completely different than for a local hire. If you don't have the right to work in Moldova, don't waste your time applying for a local job in Moldova with an INGO hoping that someone will consider you just because you are enthusiastic and willing to work for local wages. They won't consider you.

One way that you could potentially help locally and also work towards a role with an INGO is via their local partners. Choose a country you want to go live in, go there, and volunteer or work for a national organization that is working with your INGO of interest. Read through the reports and news and success stories of INGOs working in places you are interested in, doing the work you want to do. Capture the names of the partner organizations they are working with locally. Google those and research them too, particularly if you really want to help a specific location. Sometimes those local NGOs will be interested in having you come work for them, for free or for a local salary, and sometimes that can be the doorway to your career. Local NGOs can sometimes hire foreign employees as local workers where INGOs can't. You can end up stealing a local job if you do this however, so think about it seriously before heading down this path. You might find after the experience that you prefer working with local community development, and that can easily be brought home with you too, bonus.

Particularly in places such as Palestine, where humanitarian operations have been going on for a very long time, there are amazing local NGOs in need of good staff. It was very common to see groups of people clearly not from Palestine hanging around in Ramallah at Snobar or Café La Vie, all of them working for some of the outstanding Palestinian NGOs in the West Bank, or hoping to find a job. I hired some of them to come work for me at Save the Children and NRC.

Build the Right Network

The best way to map out and build your career is to find someone doing the exact job you want or who has done it in the past, and ask them how to get there. You also need to ask them to connect you to at least two other people doing what you want to do. Keep doing that every day for six months and you'll know a great number of humanitarians doing things you want to do, and you'll have a much better picture of what you are trying to achieve, and better odds of achieving it.

One of the best ways to make this happen is to engage in the info interview process. Not everyone know what an info interview is, so here is a LinkedIn article that explains it. Read it and come back if you haven't heard that term before.

An info interview is a way to gain insights, get information, understand different roles, careers, and organizations, and to most importantly, expand your network.

An info interview is not a way to get a job. It may help you get inside information about a job, and hopefully it will help you build connections and champions who will refer you to jobs or consider you for jobs or recommend you to hiring managers, but it is not about getting an open position. If you are asking for an info interview specifically to talk (plead) about a job opening, you're too late. Managers are often not open to discussing opportunities openly once recruitment has started, as that would be unfair to other candidates. Sometimes too, a hiring manager will get inundated with requests to ask about the opening, particularly when it is one of those perfect junior-level doorway kind of roles - it can get very tiresome.

(You can however request an info interview referencing the opening, saying "I noticed this opportunity and would love to get your advice on how to best position myself for something like it in the future." That is definitely better than reaching out and saying "hey, I just applied for this job, can I talk to you about it?")

Where the info interview excels is in building your network of peers, champions, mentors, and your understanding of what a career can look like. It will help you find pathways and organizations and resources you didn't know about.

So, go get some info interviews. Easier said than done?

I have no data whatsoever to back this up, but if I had to guess - without being recommended to talk to you by someone else - I'd say around 9 out of 10 people will ignore you completely when you reach out to them cold, and maybe 1 out of 20 will agree to talk to you. I'd guess around 1 in every 6 or so that you talk to will help champion your job search. If I'm correct, than that would mean on average you need to reach out to around 120 people to find a real champion. You ideally should have multiple champions to land a job, so you are finding and approaching 350+ people for info interviews during the beginning of your career, just to get that first door open. Your odds of a response are significantly better if someone else that the person trusts or respects asks on your behalf. This networking process is where your investment of time should be, not on writing 5 cover letters a day or adjusting the keywords on your resume for every single application. It will give you a better return on your investment, and requires significant amounts of that time and effort that you've been putting into blanketing the world with job applications.

Search on LinkedIn, Twitter, and other avenues for the people you want to talk to. Contact them. Do it individually, with personalized introductory remarks (if you send the same message to every person you contact on LinkedIn you will get banned for spamming people.) Tell them you are very much inspired by the work they have done and that you hope to do something similar in your career, and that you would really appreciate 20 minutes at some point in the next month or two to learn how they got to where they are. You have to be genuine about this, you really should only be reaching out to people that have careers you want to emulate or jobs that you want to be next in line for or who simply, really inspire you and make you very jealous.

If the person you are talking to finds you to be a potential match for the career path you are asking about, they might just be willing to help you. If they are impressed and click with you well, then they might become your champion. I champion a few people a year, and info-interview with around two dozen a year. I am particularly interested in this topic however, and I do not think that many leaders in aid engage with this sort of thing nearly as much as I do.

The best champions are the ones who have some pull in an organization and eventually shoot an email to a hiring manager or recruiter with a note that says “this person has huge potential, recommend you check out her CV - good luck filling that role.”

You need champions.

You need to click well enough with the people you talk to to ask them to connect and introduce you with at least two more people. This is a very important part of the info-interview process. If you run out of people to talk to, your networking ends and your efforts have to start all over again. If you ask for two people, you'll generally get at least one more, so ask for two.

My last point on champions is a personal request to you. If you ever do get that door open, if you land that dream job, if you advance even a bit further down the path from where you are, please make sure to take the time to champion and info interview with others. There's not enough time given to this, and not enough support out there for young talent who want to enter our increasingly competitive industry. When I was marginally employed after Peace Corps I promised myself I would do this, and this article is part of that promise - promise yourself that you will do the same. If nothing else you will get to meet a lot of interesting people during your lifetime, and someone you help may end up helping you back someday.

Other Random Things

Some other random bits of advice and thoughts based on the questions I usually get:

• People will only give you time if you are serious and if you can demonstrate that quickly and professionally in your effort to contact them. Short and sweet is the rule. Don't send a five page email asking for an info interview. Send 5 sentences at most.
• If you ask me or anyone else for their time, you have to show that you've done the work above already. If you ask me for advice, now that I've written this article, I'll refer you to this article.
• You are best served finding people who are doing the jobs you want to do and asking them how to go about it. I am a general manager, my job is to know enough about things to hire other people who know more than me. I really can't tell you anything practical about what it takes to be a successful mental health or shelter program manager. Many other leaders are similar, they may be willing to help champion you, but we may not be able to help you much in terms of how to develop your career path.
• When looking for champions, reach high but reach close too. Reach out to people a year or two ahead of you, and reach out to someone who seems really high up the chain. The worst that can happen is they block your email and report you for spam (so be genuine!), but you might connect with someone really cool who can seriously help you.
• Honestly, almost no one wants to "just" take a look at your resume and make suggestions on how to improve it. Reviewing resumes for style and language usage is super boring for most people, and to do it right takes a lot of time (which some people get paid to do), so what you are asking is not a trivial thing. I could be playing Xbox or doing my own job instead. The core advice is this - learn the language humanitarians use and use that on your resume. Learn the templates and the standards that are out there and use them. You can learn that language by reading all the information I've noted above, and you can find the appropriate resume formats by copying others. You know who is really good at reviewing resumes and loves doing that kind of thing though? AI. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, with the right prompts they will give you some killer edits. Ask the Humanitarian Advisor GPT I linked above to give you the right prompts to use for your resume edits.
• There's a ton of information out there already in terms of how to best manage your resume - lots of it free for the search. There are also outstanding resources behind the paywalls at Devex and ImpactPool that are worth the cost of a membership, you can download very practical templates and find tons of practical advice. You can also download my resume from my LinkedIn profile (or the public resume of any other aid professional) and adapt it for your own use. Mine is based on a USAID review template and is generic enough for many INGOs. If you can somehow manage it, try to get people doing the jobs you want to do to review your resume for what you may need, expect most people to say no, or to say yes and never actually do it.
• It is frequently said that you should adapt your resume for each job application. I think this is said because, well, this is what people say. It's just about the least insightful piece of job search advice out there in my opinion, "make sure you submit a good application" is what that means. Yeah, that's a given. When this is as deep as someone dives in giving you advice, it's basically the same as them saying "have a good day, and good bye." This pearl of wisdom has been said so many times that people rarely question it, and it leads to a lot of wasted time and effort. I would instead advise that having a strong resume that captures who you are, what you want to do, in the right language using the right terms and in the right format, is generally enough. If you are applying for similar types of jobs at similar types of organizations, your basic resume is going to already capture most of what you need, most of the time. You know what will actually, noticeably help you more than a customized resume? Getting the hiring manager's work buddy to recommend you for the job. You are better off investing your limited time each day into building your network.
• Some of the essence behind the recommendation to customize your resume is actually geared towards you getting the right keywords from the job description into your resume. Given that the entire humanitarian world is built around the sector standards I mentioned above, you should already have appropriate language and keywords in your resume if you've done the research. Shelter Coordinator roles will have the same keywords across most INGOs, for example. You can also address this by adding a "skills" section to your resume and just sticking in all the keywords there.
• Cover letters are slightly different. A cover letter is your one real opportunity to tell the recruiter and the hiring manager exactly why you think you can stretch from what you've done to what you are applying for, to explain why your enthusiasm matters. You should absolutely customize your cover letter. It should not be longer than one page. If you are doing your job search right and targeting 1-2 jobs a day at the most, then this process should not be too onerous. There are sections of your cover letters that you can re-use as well, such as the paragraph describing who you are. Since you'll be applying for mostly the same kind of jobs, the paragraph explaining why you think you are qualified will also be mostly reusable.
• There are no human beings on the planet who seriously want to help you draft cover letters or "just" take a look to offer suggestions on those you've written if they are not being paid to do so - but again, AI, wow. Don't ever use something AI has drafted as your submission, but as a first draft or as an editor, it can save you a ton of time.
• The review process for most big INGO jobs will often look like this: 300 people apply. An HR person uses filters in the database to pull out those whose resumes have the criteria the hiring manager is looking for. Usually there is a button that will filter out the external candidates too and present only the internal candidates. If there are no suitable, or too few, internal candidates than the search will expand to external candidates. The HR person will then go through the "long list" and pull together a file of maybe 10 or so people for the hiring manager to review. The hiring manager will then look through the list and the blurb on each candidate, and will pull out the resumes that feel like a potential fit (some managers will review all the suggested candidates, some will only review the few who are a near perfect match). At that point the hiring manager will spend probably under a minute looking over a resume, and maybe will open the cover letter if curious. Then the hiring manager will ask the recruiter to set up a first round of interviews or screenings with 3 - 5 candidates or so. After that screening, there will be a first round of interviews, maybe a second, maybe a third (I once went through six rounds of interviews before getting a job!) After that you might get a job offer if the hiring process is not put on hold for any number of reasons that do regularly happen. This is what you are dealing with every time you submit a job application - do the smart thing with the limited time you have in your short life to increase your odds of being in that final round of interviews, get yourself some champions.

And my very final recommendation - if you get that job, take a copy of Alessandra Pigni's "The Idealist's Survival Kit" with you. It's great.

Best of luck to you in your career search, I hope you found something here that helps you get where you want to be, safe travels wherever you are headed.

What else is on your mind?

If you are an aid professional or job seeker and want to add to this conversation, please comment below with your advice. People will seriously appreciate it.

Copyright (C) 2024 by Thomas Hill, Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND.