Net Impact connects passionate students and young professionals to innovative social enterprises, such as Dobility Inc., a technology company dedicated to a social mission. In this featured post, Dr. Christopher Robert, the Founder of Dobility Inc. shares his insights on careers in the social sector. 

Global employment by social enterprises is growing by leaps and bounds. Despite the sector’s rising prominence on every continent, tight labor markets across many countries also mean that recruiting talent remains a challenge for social entrepreneurs. The recruitment puzzle is even more complicated when a social enterprise is engaged in building complex tools, and must compete with Fortune 500 corporations that can invest millions of dollars in recruiting for full-stack engineers, SaaS sales experts, and other scarce experts.

At Dobility, we are committed to keeping our costs low (and profit margins modest), while still investing in rigorous data security protocols and other “social good” features. For example, our SurveyCTO tool has allowed the researchers leading the fifteen-country, multi-year Global Early Adolescent Study to protect sensitive data from their teenaged respondents at a low cost, important since the GEAS’s “very small team” means the researchers “don’t have anyone who can dedicate the time to managing servers.” Also, our decision to strategically overinvest in the flexibility of SurveyCTO’s form logic enabled us to support “the world’s biggest patient safety survey conducted so far” in Kenya—a project that then saw SurveyCTO repurposed by Kenyan government inspectors for on-site decision-making, to determine when to immediately shutter a health facility that puts patients’ lives at risk.

However, our tools could be even stronger if we spent less time scouring the globe for talent. The challenge of recruiting in today’s market absorbs hundreds of hours of Team Dobility’s time each year, time that we could otherwise invest in facilitating better and more life-saving research in the roughly 150 countries where our users deploy SurveyCTO. Organizations like Net Impact provide a crucial service to the social sector by building the talent pipeline for NGOs, social enterprises, and others committed to life-changing work. Individual Net Impact members and allies can also provide an invaluable service to our community, by encouraging gifted business and technical experts to consider careers in social enterprise—and by educating their networks about the broad range of worthy organizations that can use their help.

The next time you meet a talented programmer (or marketer) who is eager to put her or his skills to better use, encourage them to get involved in Net Impact, and to look at social enterprise careers. The satisfaction of seeing your work improving lives on a daily basis is priceless. Our sector can use every type of skillset to advance our efforts, and any recruitment help you can provide is a service in its own right!

Dobility is growing its team in the Eastern U.S. and globally – and would love to see more applications from the Net Impact community! Please see the firm’s recent job announcements at this link, and share them with qualified candidates who might be excited by Dobility’s social mission.

If you are interested in more impact career opportunities, visit our job board: https://www.netimpact.org/jobs.