Finished my degree from a pretty prestigious university in December after being derailed for a couple years, luckily I have a very solid resume and have been starting to get some promising interviews with nonprofits. One job I’d interviewed with was my home county’s Community Foundation, and though the benefits and pay description was vague but certainly less than others I was being considered for, I liked the idea of trying to help out my hometown with my career. The interview went very well, I had even worked closely with the CEO before during an internship when he was with another organization and knew he liked me. There was a heavy focus on initiatives to support college students from our area and keep talent from leaving to bigger cities or cheaper states (we’re in CA), which very much spoke to me as I’d especially come to realize how much I loved my hometown in the previous few years. However nobody addressed pay in the interview, and they awkwardly ignored my question about benefits.
About a week later, the secretary had me schedule a call to the CEO for the next day. He started it by talking about how perfectly qualified I was, how nobody else that interviewed even bothered to submit a cover letter or knew what a community foundation was, and how I would be key to his strategy moving forward and could do advanced statistical analysis and modeling (not in the job description lol, just stuff I have experience with through political science). He asked me if I would join his team, and I told him I needed some time to consider as I had a final round interview the next day. Only then did he tell me pay would be “somewhere around $20 an hour” and benefits were “we pick up a chunk of your health coverage”.
If anyone who interviewed or spoke to me had bothered to ask some fairly obvious questions, they would’ve learned my current hourly wage is $25 for very easy remote work and that the main other opportunity I was interviewing for started at $70k with amazing benefits. Maybe it’s sorta important for a nonprofit trying to address local brain drain to offer a living wage appropriate to their area, especially for a crucial role requiring experience and a four year degree?
Now I’m waiting to hear back on an offer for that job that pays well with awesome benefits in the next few days, thank god 🙂 Was pretty easy to turn down the “offer” described here.