Good benefits. Too much bureaucracy and paranoia about faith identity.
Pros
For a non-profit organization, the compensation is not bad and the benefits are quite good. The health/dental coverage is actually much better than a lot of comparable for-profit companies of similar size, and the paid vacation/sick/personal time is good, too. As far as the workplace culture itself, employees here tend to become good friends with each other since there's much less of a "dog eat dog" mentality than at a lot of other companies. Indeed, this is not a cutthroat setting; there is a sense that the organization is invested in its employees and wants them to succeed. At least on my team, there wasn't an expectation of working long overtime hours, which helped foster a good work/life balance. There is also the benefit of working for an important global cause rather than for a group of shareholders.
Cons
There is way too much middle management there, and the organization can feel quite segmented. I often described it as being like 50 organizations under the umbrella of one. My department or team would often have no idea what another one was doing — and vice versa — and we'd often have competing priorities. Here's my biggest critique, though: There's a pervasive paranoia among senior management at World Vision that the organization will be portrayed as "not Christian enough" by its supporters or the media. That, of course, is a completely unfounded fear. The organization makes no secret whatsoever of its Christian identity — anywhere, at any time ever — and you simply can't find a job description there that doesn't explicitly reference to the organization's faith-based orientation. Nevertheless, this paranoia fosters a culture where job applicants and employees are judged just as much by how "Christian" they portray themselves to be as how qualified or competent they are at the job they are seeking or doing. It was disappointing to me that excellent job performance often seemed to take a backseat to corporate and individual Christian identity. Who cares how often you claim to go to church or read the Bible or pray if you're not qualified for or competent at the job you have? Also, the organization still doesn't hire married gay employees, and it prohibits sexual activity or cohabitation outside of the monogamous heterosexual marriage. If any of that pertains to you — or if you don't want to work for an organization whose HR department legislates your bedroom behavior as though the year is 1955 — then this might not be the place for you.