Six easy tricks for finding a job in public policy
A short guide on how to find job openings that interest you.
The most common approach to looking for jobs is also a pretty bad one: typing “policy” into a job board website and then hopelessly doomscrolling.
There are a number of problems with this approach. For one, you only end up finding what’s available at the exact time you’re searching, and a small small proportion of the opportunities that are out there. It can be time consuming, too. And it’s also ‘noisy’; you’re probably not even paying attention after sorting through the pile of junior roles asking for trilingual candidates with 12 years of experience.
At one point in my life, looking for jobs was quite literally my job — I was paid to help students find work placements. Ever since, I’ve been very interested in how people find, keep, and carry out their work. In my time working in public policy, I’ve been struck by a disconnect — as policy professionals, we often talk about policy frameworks and service design for strong labour markets. But what about finding jobs in our own field? There it seems the careful analysis gives way to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Because our team puts together the weekly PolicyJobsTO newsletter, we’re often asked where else people should be looking for jobs. Here’s our best advice. While it is written with early career public policy professionals in mind, much of it should be useful to people in other fields or career stages.
1) Let them come to you
Jobs newsletters (like ours!) can be some of your best friends in your job search. They do the hard work for you, sorting through the mess and aggregating the roles you might be interested in. To start with, make sure you’re subscribed to your alumni newsletter. There are many newsletters that share policy jobs even though policy isn’t their main focus: The Bloom for social impact, Civic Jobs for municipalities, CED Network for community economic development, Reconsidered for more social impact.
Along the same lines, try to follow people on LinkedIn or Twitter who share jobs regularly (Nicole Doray and Nick Martin are a couple of examples).
If you’re dead-set on continuing to scroll through pages of job postings, at least try something new! There are many industry or interest-specific job boards out there, including:
- Social Innovation
- Bmeaningful
- UN jobs
- 80,000 hours
- Institute of Public Administration of Canada
- OPS “open targeted” (links at the bottom of this page include “open targeted” positions that are not advertised on the main OPS jobs board)
2) Note the hiring cycles
Especially in larger organizations, hiring cycles typically happen at the same time each year. To this end, know when that hiring happens, and mark it down in your calendar. The same can be said for any specific scholarships, fellowships, or programs you want to apply for. For example, the federal government’s post-secondary recruitment happens in the fall, while consulting firms typically recruit recent grads in the spring. OPS summer employment opportunities for students open in the spring. Often, you can sign up for an email alert as well. Speaking of email alerts…
3) Set up email alerts
Select the search terms you’re interested in and schedule weekly email alerts on Linkedin, Charity Village, Indeed, etc. You can also do this for big employers, like the OPS or the Government of Canada (for the latter, you have to make an account first).
Rather than casting a broad net and setting an alert for any mention of “policy”, you can set multiple alerts for more specific terms — say “housing policy” or “public relations and advocacy”. You could even go a step further and use a site like Visual Ping to be notified of changes to careers pages of organizations you’re interested in. Of course, these methods could mean lots of emails, so filter these emails to a “jobs” folder in your inbox.
4) Know the market
Email alerts aren’t necessarily the best way to find job postings (see #5 below if that’s what you’re after), but they’re a great way to monitor the “landscape” of available jobs. Do some employers hire very often? Do you have a sense of different job titles and the experience associated with them? Do you have a sense of salaries for different roles and organizations? Understanding these things well can help you value yourself accurately in the job market.
5) Make an employer list
In my brief, aforementioned stint as a professional job-finder, this was the go-to method: 1) Create a spreadsheet listing every organization that you’d be interested in working at. 2) Any time you see an interesting organization, add it to your list (and follow their social media). 3) Review it periodically to check for job openings. To go a step further, add a column with links to the careers page and an employee to contact. When you have more time, reach out to people on the list.
6) Talk to people
You’ve probably heard that “it’s all about networking” about a million times. This is because, for many years, standard advice has been to contact potential hiring managers and charm them, hoping they will offer you an unposted job. But this hasn’t been primarily how things work in many years, partly because organizations are (thankfully) trying harder to promote hiring fairness. But networking is still important and can be done in a variety of ways:
- Attend professional events!
- “Connect” virtually with people after meeting them.
- Ask people who have really cool jobs for informational interviews, and ask people about jobs they used to have, too.
- Be collaborative rather than competitive — share job postings with classmates or contacts who might be interested in them and ask them to do the same for you.
- Join clubs, committees, and groups (of course, the reason for joining a club should primarily be because you’re interested in what they do, with your networking masterplans as an afterthought).
- Join alumni job boards or LinkedIn groups.
- Create a list of people you know, and reach out to them about work-related stuff, if it feels appropriate — you never know who has a cousin who’s hiring for a great policy role!
Have other great tips? Don’t keep them to yourself — let us know.
Khiran O’Neill is an Associate at Springboard Policy
