Impact & transparency

Our mission: to help you find a job aligned with your values

Context

This is urgent.

Social and environmental crises are accelerating, and there is no longer any doubt: our economy must transform quickly. There is work to be done.

Fortunately: 92% of French people want more meaning in their work, and 57% want a job that addresses environmental challenges, according to a study we conducted in March 2022 with Audencia.

At the same time, tens of thousands of jobs already exist, and millions more will be created to meet these challenges.

The Social and Solidarity Economy already represents more than 10% of jobs in France,

27% of executive jobs are "greening," according to APEC—meaning they include an environmental aspect,

and 1 million green jobs will be created by 2050 according to ADEME, meaning jobs directly connected to protecting the environment, in areas such as waste or wastewater treatment, nature reserve management, renewable energy, and more.

Our purpose is to connect citizens seeking meaning with committed organizations, so together we can shift the job market and serve the eco-social transition.

Because choosing a job that has impact is the most powerful way for an individual to help transform society.

What is impact?

OK, that all sounds good, but what exactly is an impact job?

Good question, dear Marcel(le).

We'd love to have a perfectly clear answer for you, but we honestly don't.

Why? Because the idea of positive impact is very personal—it's tied to what each of us cares about and how sensitive we are to certain topics.

Of course, there are general rules: working on designing a connected fridge is not really a positive impact job. Later on this page, we detail the guidelines we've set for listing recruiters.

But in detail, you might consider a job in the CSR department of a large corporation to be a positive impact job—because it helps transform the company to reduce its carbon impact, for example—while someone else might object that the company is still not respecting planetary boundaries and, therefore, for them it isn't impact.

And the crazy thing is, you're both right.

So with all that said, what do you do?

We've made three decisions to structure our approach as we built the platform.

Our Positions

#1

A broad vision of impact

#2

Fighting greenwashing

#3

You decide

Position #1

Offering the broadest possible vision of positive impact jobs

We've chosen to list as many organizations, jobs, and training opportunities with impact as possible. What they have in common: all contribute in some way to transforming society.

By the end of 2022, we had nearly 6,000 organizations recruiting on the platform and offering over 20,000 job ads each year, as well as 50 training organizations. These fall into 6 categories:

Organizations with positive impact: These are organizations whose core business is to transform society (definition from Thierry Sibieude, Positive Impact Chair at ESSEC), participate in ecological and societal transition and/or reduce inequalities. Financial gain is secondary, and impact is the ultimate goal. This covers all non-profit associations.
Responsible products and services: These are companies that design less polluting products or services but also have economic objectives. For example: an organic cosmetics company.
Transition Partners: These are organizations that help other organizations have a positive impact on people and the planet—consulting firms specializing in CSR, HR agencies like Omeva, or a platform like jobs that makesense.
Awareness-raising players for transition: These are companies whose main aim is to train and inform as many people as possible about environmental and social issues. This includes specialized media (Carenews), the training organizations we reference (3A, ESI, ecolearn, etc.), awareness workshops like La Fresque du Climat, 2tonnes, carbon footprint tracking apps (Carbo), and more.
Public utility services: We consider the public sector to have a positive impact, as it works for the common good. This includes jobs in local authorities, waste treatment companies, water, and low-carbon energy, etc.
Companies in transition: These are traditional businesses that are currently transforming to improve or reduce their impact. We only list job offers that contribute to this transition, such as CSR Manager or Carbon Footprint Project Manager, etc. The company may not have a broad aim to transform society, and we do not know their degree of transition.

Position #2

Taking maximum action to ban eco-washing (greenwashing) and social-washing

When creating a company account on the platform, we ask the organization to specify:

Which sustainable development goals they meet, out of the 17 UN SDGs
Their social and/or environmental impact in a clear and specific paragraph
Their impact measurement, if they have done one
All documents that demonstrate their transparency, especially: financial and social statements, code of ethics, right to disconnect, company mission statement, social and environmental goals, salary range, impact report, legal status, funding structure, etc.
Any special status or legal structure, for example, ESUS or Entreprise à Mission
Labels of trust or certifications from external organizations they've obtained. At the end of 2022, we listed about fifteen labels & certifications, such as B Corp, Bleu Blanc Zèbre, Mouvement Impact France, Zei… You can find the full list of labels on this page

When in doubt, we have also implemented an internal analysis framework to determine if a company can post job ads on jobs that makesense.

We mainly use this for companies in transition, which account for less than 5% of the organizations on our site. We analyze three main criteria:

Is the sector compatible with a 1.5°C pathway and respect for other planetary boundaries? We especially rely on Shift Project studies and other reports to support our analysis.
Is the company involved in economic, social (internal and external), and/or environmental transformations, especially toward inclusive and sustainable behavior? For this, we review what the company says (for example, on its own site), and we monitor relevant news articles.
Is the company involved in (minor or major) illegal activities, scandals, or controversies? We monitor media coverage on the topic. This point is moderated if the company has since taken real actions and made decisions to address the situation.

Position #3

Giving you all the tools to consciously choose the impact company that's right for you

We give you the power, because you have the best definition of impact for you.

As a candidate, we give you as many filters as possible for your searches: depending on causes you care about, labels of trust, sectors, and soon, by type of organization. You can filter your searches by all these elements to match the offers to you.

For each organization listed on the site, we display all transparency documents we have: impact study, labels of trust, social and environmental objectives, mission, salary range, and more. All these elements are on the organization’s page.

We will be focusing heavily on this in the future, to let you select only the offers that really fit you and give you the most transparency possible on each organization.

We're not perfect. Even within our team, we often struggle to define what impact is and, therefore, what can or cannot appear on jobs_that_makesense. These ongoing debates are what make this project rich.

If you have any doubts about an offer or organization on jobs_that_makesense, contact us to tell us about it.

We need you to build a trusted platform for everyone.

This platform is, above all, yours.

Our impact

And us — what is our impact?