By Caroline Preston

Not long into life as an unemployed person, Lauren Deutsch got to thinking about the similarities between her new routine and her time as a nonprofit fund raiser.

For years, she recalls, she had been “begging” on behalf of causes she cared about from behind a desk at a local Girl Scouts council, at American Public Media, and elsewhere. Then she found herself begging for a job, for income to help get her life back on track.

A year into unemployment, she is still begging.

Ms. Deutsch, 62, estimates that she has applied for about 200 jobs in the past year. She has heard back from perhaps 30 of them and has had more than two dozen interviews and 10 follow-up interviews. But those have hit dead ends, she believes, because employers have their pick among so many great candidates that they are further refining the qualifications they seek.

“It’s a buyer’s market,” she says.

One reason for the intense competition is that so many nonprofit groups have laid off workers. A Chronicle study conducted in the fall estimated that as many as 425,000 jobs had been eliminated in the previous year.

But Ms. Deutsch and others like her must also vie with the greater flow of applicants from the business world. Ms. Deutsch is on the e-mail list for a nonprofit group near her home in Los Angeles that provides management assistance to charities. She learned that it was offering a seminar touting the availability of charity jobs for out-of-work businesspeople.

An upbeat person who has tried hard to stay optimistic during her search, Ms. Deutsch was so mad at that rosy spin on the job market that she wrote a letter. “I want people to know what they’re saying really means something,” she says.

Lower Expectations

Many laid-off workers seeking nonprofit jobs­—even those with years of experience—continue to hit roadblocks in their searches like those encountered by Ms. Deutsch. The worst recession in memory is forcing many of the thousands of workers charities have laid off to get creative and sometimes lower their expectations.

The past year “has been the worst I can remember for nonprofits and employees,” says Gayle A. Brandel, chief executive of the recruiting firm Professionals for Nonprofits, who has worked with charitable organizations for 30 years. “But having said that, there’s definitely a real sense of optimism that nonprofits are starting to hire again.”

But a pickup in hiring has yet to reach people like Claudia A. Timmerman, who was laid off in July as a major-gifts fund raiser at the northern Ohio division of the American Cancer Society. She has applied for about 30 jobs, half of which she felt would be a good fit. She spent 20 years in business before the 2001 terrorist attacks prompted her to become a charity fund raiser, and she does not want to go back to the corporate world. But Ms. Timmerman has been talking to one company that approached her about a position and last month also stepped up her search in other ways after two development positions she sought went to other candidates.

Experts say most employers will be sympathetic to the tough choices people have to make during this recession, so returning to fund raising and charity work may not be a problem for people like Ms. Timmerman.

“It’s wise to have a career trajectory in mind,” says Susan Egmont, who heads Egmont Associates, a company that identifies executives to lead nonprofit groups. “But these are uncommon times. People will be very understanding when we get out of this economic cycle that people will have had to make choices they wouldn’t have chosen in an up economy.”

Making Sacrifices

Knowing when to compromise, however, can be difficult.

Ben Nemenoff, 33, is trying hard not to take a step back. Mr. Nemenoff was told in June that he would soon be losing his job at American Humanics, a group that prepares young people for nonprofit careers. He started looking for other work, but when his job ended in October he was still without a full-time position.

In some ways, Mr. Nemenoff considers himself lucky. He has some contract work and his wife has a job. He holds a master’s degree in public administration and believes he is at a good age to be looking for work, not too inexperienced but young enough that he doesn’t have to contend with age discrimination.

Mr. Nemenoff says he would love to work someday at a foundation or a government agency that makes grants to nonprofit groups. Finding a job like that probably isn’t realistic now, he says, but he’s still focusing his job hunt on management positions in his two primary areas of interest: the arts and higher education.

Still, he says he has applied to a few positions that don’t match up quite as well with his past experiences, and he says he would be willing to consider a pay cut. With his first child expected this month, Mr. Nemenoff says he often grapples with whether he is making the right decisions.

“Do you take whatever you can get or are you more selective?” he says. “It’s hard for me to strike that balance.”

Less Pay

If people like Mr. Nemenoff are an indication, lower pay may be one consequence of the recession. Many out-of-work individuals say they are applying to jobs that pay less than their previous ones. “I tell people I’m having a sale,” says Ms. Deutsch.

Ms. Egmont says she doesn’t see evidence that charities are exploiting people’s desperation, but she does warn that it will take workers a long time to recover their previous salaries. “You’re not going to get 10 or 20 percent raises,” she says. “You’ll get 2 or 3 percent if you’re lucky.”

Charlotte Walker, 24, took a pay cut this fall when she accepted two part-time jobs after losing her entry-level fund-raising position in April. She is now making about $26,000—$5,000 less than she did at the social-service organization where she previously worked.

Ms. Walker moved from Indianapolis to Bloomington, Ind., for the job at a food bank, where she had volunteered briefly as a college student. Shortly after, she got the second part-time job, at an animal shelter where she had also volunteered. She learned about the jobs through a newsletter and the organization’s Web site, respectively, but says her familiarity with the organizations was key to getting the positions.

Ms. Walker wakes up at 5:30 each morning so she can arrive at the food bank at 7. She heads to the shelter around noon and sometimes does not get home until 8 at night.

The schedule is exhausting, and the work doesn’t always use her skills.

“Both of my jobs only required a high-school education, so I’m very proud of that,” she says with a laugh.

Ms. Walker says she believes she will need more education to advance to an executive role in the nonprofit world. Next year she plans to take the Graduate Record Examinations, the test that serves as a gatekeeper to most American graduate programs, and apply to graduate school in public policy.

Her dream job: doing advocacy for an animal-welfare organization, a goal that has become clearer by working at the animal shelter. Losing her social-service job, she says, could be “one of those blessings in disguise.”

New Skills

But putting a positive spin on the loss of a job has proven tough for most out-of-work nonprofit executives. The job market today is just so drastically different than what they faced in the past, and they say they sometimes struggle to fight off depression.

Mr. Nemenoff says he is reaching out to everyone he knows for informational interviews, just like he did when he was looking for work in his mid-20s.

In the past, efforts like those went somewhere. But he says that today, they might lead to the name of another person to call or a job board to investigate but probably not to a job.

Adding to the tension for job seekers: So many organizations are rethinking how they manage their operations that they may never offer the same types of positions that they did before the recession.

Susan Raymond, executive vice president of Changing Our World, a nonprofit consulting group, says that as a result, even veteran charity workers might find they need additional training before they can win a new position.

But not all groups are ready to rethink how they hire. When Ms. Deutsch learned about an organization that was hiring for three positions, all with responsibilities for tasks she has performed in the past, Ms. Deutsch told the group she could do all three jobs and save the organization the money and hassle of seeking two other people. The charity didn’t bite.

Even if she could afford to retire, Ms. Deutsch says she wouldn’t want to. “It’s not how I pictured myself,” she says.

She has widened her search beyond charities but is still seeking jobs that somehow help society. With that goal, she applied for a job at Whole Foods, took an hourlong online personality assessment—and never heard back.

She says this recession is far worse than any other she has endured. “This was a slow death,” she says.