Pros
- Travel the world - Lose your idealistic views of the world
Cons
I wasn't going to write a review, but after perusing this page and seeing what appear to be fake reviews - likely written by the HR team to cover up truthful negative reviews - I have been persuaded to comment. I'm going to keep this pretty simple: DO NOT WORK AT OPERATION SMILE. Within the first ten months of working at Operation Smile 6 out of the 9 people I started working with had begun seeing a therapist in response to the immoral, unethical and, at times, illegal things they were exposed to on a daily basis. The organization believes that all ends justify the means by which they come about. This often results in lower level employees being expected to do whatever is necessary to make things happen, even tasks that are at best immoral and at worst criminal. Operation Smile is run by selfish and out of touch co-founders who use the organization as their personal piggy bank. At the same time that they sent a representative from the organization to Congress to testify about why the Department of Labor should not change the rules on paying lower level employees overtime because it would be too much of a "financial burden" on the organization, our board of directors was signing off on a more than 33% raise for our co-founder and dear leader, Dr. Magee (as seen in public financial statements his salary went from $387,918 in FY 2015 to $518,471 in FY 2016). To reiterate: in order to not pay their lower level employees a living wage, Operation Smile sent a high level representative in front of congress to give a sob speech about how many fewer surgeries OS would be able to provide if the Department of Labor's new rules went into affect. In the meantime, I have heard nobody at the top of the organization sob about the number of kids who won't receive surgeries because Dr. Magee retired from his surgical practice and doesn't want to have a reduced income (if you were wondering, based on their math it would be 540 fewer kids receiving surgeries). To be clear, it is not as if Dr. Magee deserves this raise given the state the organization is currently in. Just a cursory look at public financial forms show that over the same period of time that Dr. Magee received a 33% raise, Operation Smile's revenue decreased by $5 Million and their spending increased roughly $10 Million, leading to a yearly deficit of $5,135,906. To save money, the organization has gone through waves of layoffs over the past few months, the yearly hiring of program coordinators was not able to take place because of budget cuts, and projects around the world were put on hold until the organization could find itself in a better financial situation. I would go on, but most of the negative reviews on this site give a pretty good idea of the problems at this organization. Please note that the positive reviews are all short, use HR lingo, and even appear to be written by the same person who, oddly, keeps starting sentences without capital letters. They are so inept they can't even fake Glassdoor reviews properly. Please don't let them fool you. This place was by far the worst place I have ever worked and I wouldn't recommend it to my worst enemy.