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Bella2
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Ah — thanks so much David for adding the more recent link!! I'll add that into the job ad on our site too :)

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by Bella, 80000_Hours
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AI safetyBuilding effective altruismOpportunities to take actionJob listing (open)Global outreach
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This is a crosspost of a job listing. I'm the hiring manager, so please feel free to ask me any questions in the comments, or anonymously here & I'll answer in the comments.

Summary

We're looking for a new Engagement Specialist to help us increase engagement among our target audience, by managing our outreach channels, contributing to our growth strategy, and helping to deploy our yearly budget of ~$3m.

Location: London, UK (preferred). We're open to remote candidates and can support UK visa applications.

Salary: Varies depending on fit, location, and experience. An applicant in London with good fit and no relevant experience would be paid approx. £60,000; an applicant in London with excellent fit and 4 years of relevant experience would be paid approx. £82,000.

To apply, please complete this application form by 11th May 2025.

Why this role?

80,000 Hours provides free research and support to help people find careers tackling the world's most pressing problems, especially mitigating risks from advanced artificial intelligence.

Since we started investing much more in growth in 2022, we've increased the hours that people spend engaging with our content by 6.5x, reached millions of new users across different platforms, and now have over 500,000 newsletter subscribers. We're also the largest single source of people getting involved in the effective altruism community, according to the most recent EA Survey.

Even so, it seems like there's considerable room to reach more people — and there are many exciting growth projects we're unable to take on because of low capacity on our team. So, we're looking for a new Engagement Specialist to help us ambitiously increase the amount of engagement with our advice and our impact.

We anticipate that the right person in this role could help us massively increase our readership, and lead to hundreds or thousands of additional people pursuing high-impact careers.

As some indication of what success in the role might look like, over the next couple of years you might have:

  • Cost-effectively deployed >$5 million reaching people from our target audience.
  • Reached hundreds of millions of people on social media with key messages.
  • Partnered with some of the largest and most well-regarded YouTube channels (for instance, we have run sponsorships with Veritasium, Kurzgesagt, and Wendover Productions).
  • Designed efficient digital ad campaigns that caused thousands of hours of engagement on our website.
  • Driven hundreds of thousands of additional newsletter subscriptions, leading to many of those people changing to a more impactful career.
  • Launched a new outreach channel that causes us to double the proportion of people who are aware of 80,000 Hours within a particular target audience segment.

We think this role seems very impactful if you're excited about 80,000 Hours' theory of change.

The main reason is that 80,000 Hours has a very strong track record of helping people find high-impact careers. This role lets you be a multiplier on the impact of 80,000 Hours as a whole, by finding larger and more relevant audiences who might be interested in the advice. We think this makes the role highly leveraged.

Since we are a nonprofit and we aren't selling a product, this is a fairly nontraditional role. We'd therefore encourage you to apply, even if you aren't otherwise looking for roles in growth, outreach, or marketing, and don't have prior relevant experience.

Learn more about 80k's new focus on AGI

Responsibilities

We're looking for a flexible Engagement Specialist, who will take on responsibilities such as:

  • Help us scale up and improve our outreach channels that are currently most effective at increasing engagement. For example, you could run new campaigns aimed at particularly-important segments of our target audience, improve our messaging through user research or ideation, or make the case for how quickly (or slowly!) we should scale up investment. These channels are:
    • Sponsorships with people who have large audiences, primarily on YouTube (see examples here, here, and here).
    • Advertisements on social media sites (e.g. Instagram), Google search, and elsewhere (digital marketing — see examples here, here, and here).
  • Write or design the promotional material for new releases on our website and podcast — such as the "hook" accompanying podcast releases, the titles and thumbnails for YouTube video releases, or filming videos to post on social media.
  • Improve our measurement and evaluation of our attempts to grow our audience, using analytics platforms such as Mixpanel, Plausible.io, and Google Analytics.
  • Carry out research on relevant audience segments, and help us decide who we most need to reach.
  • Help design pages on the website that we use for outreach (example).
  • Manage the promotion of our book giveaway.
  • Take on experiments with other new outreach channels or initiatives.
  • Manage our budget (which currently totals just under $3 million per year) within your areas of responsibility.

Note that this role will not primarily involve writing for the website (though you might write and publish some especially growth-relevant pages). If you're most interested in that, you should apply for our writer-researcher position instead.

About you

We're looking for someone who has the following traits:

  • Mission-drivenness: A commitment to helping advance 80,000 Hours' mission — particularly mitigating risks from advanced AI. You don't need to already know a lot about AI, but you should be interested in learning more about the potential risks.
  • Good "taste," where that means you're willing to think carefully about how we can best grow our audience and why, and exercise that judgement
  • Great communication skills — in particular, the ability to clearly write out and show your thinking / your uncertainties in decision making
  • Flexibility: excitement about trying out and evaluating new approaches, platforms, and messages
  • Ambition: An ambitious approach to the role, with enthusiasm for helping grow our impact
  • Conscientiousness: Good organisation skills, and the ability to competently manage multiple priorities at work
  • Data-drivenness: A data-driven and results-oriented attitude to their work, aiming to get the best outcomes for our mission

Ideally, you'd also have the following traits — but we encourage you to apply even if they don't describe you!

  • You have some previous experience relevant to this role. (Please note we definitely do not expect any candidate to have all of these.) Here are some kinds of experience we'd be especially excited about:
    • Measurement and evaluation of a product or programme; data science or statistics
    • Influencer marketing, or experience with anything to do with online content creation or monetisation
    • Digital marketing, especially performance marketing, design, copywriting, and/or experience with Meta and Google ads
    • Communications, including PR, media, campaigning, science communications, etc.
    • Other marketing experience; for example, marketing for a university society
    • Product experience, especially where this includes launching and attracting or maintaining a lot of users
    • Social media, including posting regularly on your own social media and/or blogging platforms
  • You are creative, and good at generating lots of new ideas.
  • You currently stay up to date on news relevant to AI risk, or would be excited to start.
  • You really "get" our target audience (talented, ambitious, altruistic 18–35 year olds), and/or are excited to learn more about them and their interests.
  • Though we expect most candidates won't, we're especially excited about candidates who have experience writing for or working with Chinese audiences.

Role details

The new Engagement Specialist would be managed by our current Director of Growth, Bella Forristal. Our existing team focused on growing our reach and engagement consists of just Bella Forristal (the current head) and Nik Mastroddi.

This is a full-time role, but staff can work flexible hours — i.e. whatever schedule (consistent with full-time status) will allow them to be most personally effective.

We would prefer for you to work in-person — either based in London or able to regularly visit (we can support UK visa applications if needed). However, we are open to remote applications.

The salary will vary depending on your fit, location, and experience; however, to give a rough sense, an applicant in London with good fit and no relevant experience would be paid approx. £60,000. An applicant in London with excellent fit and 4 years of relevant experience would be paid approx. £82,000.

Our benefits include:

  • The option to use 10% of your time for self development or other self-directed projects
  • 25 days of paid holiday, plus bank holidays
  • Standard UK pension, with 3% contribution from employer
  • Flexible work hours and location
  • Private medical insurance
  • Long-term disability insurance
  • Up to 14 weeks of fully paid parental leave
  • Childcare allowance for children under 5
  • Coverage of work-related expenses like travel to conferences and office equipment
  • £5,000 annual mental health support allowance
  • £5,000 annual self-development budget
  • Gym, shower facilities, and free food provided at our London office

We have a really awesome team and are excited for more people to join us in our mission to help people use their careers to solve the world's most pressing problems.

Evaluation process

To apply, please fill in this form. If you have any problems submitting the form, please send your CV to bella@80000hours.org.

Our evaluation process will vary a bit depending on the candidate, but is likely to include a written work sample, an interview, and a multi-day in-person trial. We offer payment for work samples and trials, conditional on your location and right to work in the UK.

We're aware that factors like gender, race, and socioeconomic background can affect people's willingness to put themselves forward for roles for which they meet many but not all the suggested attributes. We'd especially like to encourage people from underrepresented backgrounds to express their interest.

If you're feeling unsure whether you meet our criteria, I'd like to strongly encourage you to express interest; or reach out to bella@80000hours.org if you're still unsure.

Apply here

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Bella3
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I got another anonymous question! :)

In the post about 80K’s pivot to AGI, you discuss active headhunting for specific roles relevant to AGI. To what extent do you expect a candidate in this role (and 80K’s outreach more broadly) to focus on your historic audience (ambitious, altruistic young people) vs active outreach to those with relevant skills for making AGI go well (e.g. ML professionals, lawyers)?

The kind-of-annoying but true answer is "some of both!"

I expect that a reasonably high proportion of our new outreach efforts will be focused on trying to find people who are particularly well-suited to contributing to making AGI go well. But:

  • I think we'll continue with a lot of the kinds of outreach that's worked well for us in the past (since we can continue to execute on it efficiently)
  • I think we should still take the lowest-hanging fruit of outreach to our historical audiences

I also put quite a lot of weight on the argument that 80k as a product has been historically really valuable to a certain kind of person; we have hypotheses about how / why, but ultimately, making big changes we should expect to see some regression to the mean. So I'm keen for us to not entirely stop using our previous strategy.

But if e.g. the website changes so much that it doesn't make sense to reach people without a prior interest in AI, then that might change (tho, FWIW, I think this is pretty unlikely, at least in the near future / without the web team's views changing).

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David_Moss4
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We're also the largest single source of people getting involved in the effective altruism community, according to the most recent EA Survey.

 

Just to note that the even more recent EA Survey is here, and 80K are indeed still the single source most commonly cited as important for people getting involved!

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Bella2
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Ah — thanks so much David for adding the more recent link!! I'll add that into the job ad on our site too :)

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Bella2
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More anonymous questions!

How much weight is given to location? It seems that UK/US-based organisations within EA often claim to be open to remote candidates around the world but seldom actually make offers to these candidates (at least from what I’ve seen/heard over the years)

I think I'd give quite a bit of weight against a candidate if they never had the ability to visit the office. But I think if someone lived overseas but e.g. could spend a couple of weeks here every 3-6 months, it's not a big downside.

I'm not sure which organisations specifically you're talking about, but speaking about 80k here:

  • Until 2023, our policy was that "primary staff" hires must be in-person. Then we changed it to only managers/team leads needed to be in person, and then we later dropped that too — so we're relatively new to being fully open to remote staff.
  • That said, a lot of our staff are remote.
  • Scanning through our org chart, 13 primary staff are "fully remote", and a further 3 are "mostly remote" (visit the office 1-2 days a week). That's out of 32 total primary staff.
  • So, my overall impression is 80k is "genuinely open" to remote staff :)

If a remote candidate did make it to the trial round, would it be a remote or in-person trial?

In-person. We can pay for (and book, if you like) flights and accommodation. We unfortunately can't pay for your time, unless you have the right to work in the UK (but if you do, we'll pay for your time as well!)

How much quantitative work is involved in this role – e.g. calculating cost-effectiveness, etc?

A fair amount!

I'd say the person in this role needs to have the quantitative skills to answer moderately complex data-related questions, but they do not need to have a quantitative degree (though that could be helpful). I think "was reasonably good at high school maths," plus the willingness to learn a few key concepts (such as cost-effectiveness, and diminishing marginal returns) would be sufficient :)

The application form contains a quantitative question for this reason. I think if you get this question right without too much trouble, you'll be fine :)

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Bella2
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I got the following anonymous question:

Heya Bella! When is the preferred start date for engagement specialist role? And, how late a start would you be willing to accept?

The preferred start date is basically as soon as possible after we conclude the evaluation process!

But, we understand folks will have notice periods, and other obligations that might mean they need to wait a while.

I think needing to wait e.g. several months is a (significant-ish) downside, but we'd be willing to do so for the right applicant!

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