In the past week, almost everyone I know (slight exaggeration) have sent me an article from the NYT titled, The Unpaid Intern, Legal or Not.  It certainly was an interesting read focusing on the legality of for-profit entities “hiring” people to work for free.  This issue is certainly relevant to the areas of sustainability, renewable energy and clean tech (aka “green jobs”) since so many people lacking the background to easily transition into these fields, have relied on the opportunitty to work unpaid, in order to gain some level of credibility.

Thus, I was not surprised when one example focused on Oregon’s labor department citing that it had, “…recently handled complaints involving two individuals at a solar panel company who received $3,350 in back pay after claiming that they were wrongly treated as unpaid interns.”

WILL THIS CHANGE?
Offering free or “pro bono” work has definitley been one way that people have gotten into highly sought after positions/organizations.  And when the economy was at its worst, this often felt like the path with the highest probability of success.  Not to mention if unemployed, most highly-motivated individuals would rather do something productive with that time than troll the internet all day looking for jobs.

So what does this article mean?  Will there be any decrease in amount of pro bono work being offered and/or accepted?  Probably not.  The good news is that pro bono work is decreasing because companies are increasingly in less precarious financial situations and are needing to hire (strategically!)  The less good news is that this is still considered a reasonable way to aquire the experience that might be needed to make certain career transitions.

LESSONS
The lessons here are twofold…

1)  Be aware of these laws (and the specific criteria involved) so that you can hopefully avoid these issues even coming up.

2)  If you are actually offering to do a specific project for a company that is leveraging the experince that you do have (which I reccomend) as opposed to just “offering your time,” consider offering it at a deeply discounted rate rather than for free.  Human nature dictates that everyone will take the engagment more seriously which in turn, benefit all parties involved…

And of course, let’s hope that in the coming months this will all become less of an issue as demand for employees grows and smart, motivated and innovative people can make the career transitions they so desperately want…fingers crossed!!

Yet sometimes it’s hard to determine our impact. A farmer can tangibly and visually see the fruits of his labours. In recruitment, it’s much more difficult. Although we can hear the excitement in someone’s voice when they are selected for a prize job, we rarely get to see them on their first day. Although we work with them closely prior to their beginning work, we often hear very little from the company or the candidate until they want to hire another person. Indication enough that we did a good job, but harder to determine the extent or quality of our contribution.

Occasionally, a client or candidate writes to tell us about the work they are doing. For us, nothing gives us more joy than to hear or even see the tangible benefit that has occurred through a relationship we’ve created. We’ve had some lovely notes from people who’ve told us that without our involvement, they never would have ended up in a certain place. We’ve had clients write to tell us how happy they are with people we’ve helped them hire.

However, it’s extremely rare that we read about the results of our work in the international news. This week we saw that the British Government had created the biggest marine reserve in the world in the Chagos Archipelago, at a whopping 545,000-sq-km: