[Closed] AMA about roles at 80,000 Hours

Hey Batur,

Thanks for your detailed & thoughtful questions!

I'll answer in order:

1. For the rounds I'm running, I'll reach out to candidates we're moving forward with either just before or shortly after applications close on the 18th and 25th August.

2. I haven't yet confirmed precisely what all the stages of the application will look like — it'll probably depend on the applications I get, and might vary a bit from person to person. But to give you a sense, for the last hiring round I ran, we had the initial application (3 substantive questions), then a paid 4 hour work test (doing work similar to what you'd do in the role), then a 30min-1hr interview, then a 3-day in-person work trial (which was also paid, where we could do so legally).

3. I hope to be able to make offers for the roles I'm hiring for by mid-late September, but it might take longer or shorter than that (depending in part on scheduling for the trial).

4. Hiring rounds are run by individual hiring managers, and a hiring committee of (usually) 3 people. We do coordinate somewhat (such as by doing this post together!) and if candidates are applying to multiple rounds, we might share details of their application with one another. However, the rounds are mostly quite independent, and e.g. it's possible we could offer multiple positions to the same person (& it'd be up to the candidate to decide between them). There is an organisation-wide people ops function, but they're low on capacity at the moment, so this round is mostly being run by the individual teams we're hiring to.

5. Teams at 80k are quite independent, but do have some interaction, and it varies quite a bit by team. For example, the marketing team goes to fortnightly web team meetings and weekly web team standups; plus, our work is often completed in collaboration with team leads whose product we are advertising!

6. The current marketing team is myself and Nik Mastroddi (so, it's two right now). We'd most like to be able to hire both a new head of marketing and a new marketer, but that might not be possible, so the final team size will depend on how many hires we make and for which roles.

7. The short-term vision for the team is...hiring! (while maintaining our current channels.) The medium-term vision should be set by whoever is head of marketing, so I can't say for sure what they would decide. If we don't hire a new head and I stay in the role, I would likely recommend keeping the team at a size of 3, or perhaps 2 or 4.

8. I'll leave the two questions about advising to Huon! :)

Thanks for all the questions! Giving the perspective for the advisor round:

The application process will vary depending on the candidate but will likely involve: A short screening call, a ~2–4 hour work test, an interview, a 2–5 day in-person (if possible) work trial, if we think it’s at least 50% likely we’d offer you the role. 

As for how fast we will move through those rounds, it's unfortunately quite hard to say! How quickly I can move it along will depend in part on what other work lands on my plate. This is my first time running a hiring round, so I don't have personal experience. But the in the last advisor hiring round, we were able to get back to most candidates about whether they progressed to the interview or not within 3 weeks of the application closing. For applicants who make it through to the work trial stage, there might be a delay depending on how difficult it is for them to fit a work trial into their schedule. 

The advisor role is very autonomous! We hire people who we trust to react to a persons individual situation with sensible recommendations, not people who can learn a script. This isn't limitless, for example, I would expect advisors to flag if they think their colleagues would disagree with a piece of advice they are giving. 

Thanks for your question, and for reaching out to me even though you felt hesitant!

You're right that the job description mentions interest in effective altruism and longtermism, and that our staff often have backgrounds in EA or related areas.

However, I think that if 80k only ever hired people who had previously had roles which were legibly EA — or excluded people who'd ever had a harmful career — we'd likely turn people away who could have been excellent in the role, and we'd be making a mistake. So, I don't think you should think you're unqualified if you have either of those traits!

I'd also hope that you wouldn't encounter any stigma at 80,000 Hours — our staff are, in my experience, empathetic and lovely people — but it's hard to be very confident without knowing the specific roles in question, or asking my colleagues directly.

That said:

• I do think that knowledge of (and even experience in) "EA meta" or "community-building" is a useful trait, for the roles I'm hiring for. That's because 80k is an EA meta organisation — we're engaged in the project of trying to get people to work on the world's most pressing problems — so that knowledge would be directly relevant.
• I also think that the strongest candidates for these roles will be really excited about 80,000 Hours' mission, and using their talent and effort to help us do more of what we do :) At bare minimum, they need to be willing to spend the coming months/years working towards our mission, and ideally, they should think that sounds like among their top options for ways to spend their time at work. So, if you're on the fence about whether you support EA-style approaches to doing good (I'm a bit unsure from what you wrote?) then you might want to spend some time working out what you think before applying to roles like these. If you're feeling confident, but just haven't acted on it much yet — there's no time like the present! :)

Hope that helps — feel free to reply here with an anonymous Forum account if you'd like, or to reply on my Admonymous again.

Hey Vincent! Thanks for your question :)

I think that there are lots of diffuse and hard-to-directly-measure benefits of having employees work from our London office. The main one that I'm especially excited about is the person in this role absorbing — and contributing to — our team culture, which I think is really helpful for keeping us as an organisation aimed at producing the most impactful outcomes.

I'm somewhat unsure this is the right attitude overall, and we are open to remote applicants (& many of the applications we've gotten so far are from remote candidates).

Thanks for your interest in our work! 

Advising calls are entirely over zoom, so it's all from a desk. That said, this gives advisors a lot of flexibility to design their work schedule around other constraints, such as childcare. 

A typical day probably looks like spending ~1 hour preparing for calls, ~3 hours delivering calls, ~1 hour following up with previous advisees, and the remaining time working on projects for the team or on personal development. Team projects range from hiring, to identifying useful resources and opportunities to share with advisees, to streamlining our application process. Personal development often looks like learning about our top problems, or setting up systems to improve personal productivity. 

Thanks for your question and for giving some detail on your situation!

It's not a hard requirement that the Head of Video be able to spend time in London (though we do prefer it for the same reason we prefer all our staff to be in London — so that they can both absorb and contribute to team culture!).

There is an additional complication about videos, which is that if we're making videos, we'll likely need to film them and/or record audio in some particular location. So, it is a requirement that the Head of Video would be able to arrange that happening...somehow!

I'd guess that a Head of Video would want to be physically present for filming, at least some of the time, which would mean that they'd need to arrange it to happen in a location that is accessible to them and to whoever else would be involved in the filming.

I guess it might be hard to do that in the Cotswolds (?) since you might need to arrange travel to the Cotswolds for a bunch of people, but definitely not impossible!

I hope that gives you some more context on how location might constrain applicants to the role, & please feel free to ask followups on Admonymous if anything is unclear!

Thanks so much for your questions! I'll answer them in order:

For me, the precise wording of your CV is not at all important. I mostly look at CVs to get a sense of the candidate’s prior experience, so if you wanted to highlight parts of your work experience which seemed relevant, that’d be cool, but it doesn’t seem necessary.

In general, titles at 80k are very much up for negotiation, with a couple of constraints:

1. We have some words that we use in titles which refer to specific groups, such as ‘director’ or ‘head of’ — and you can’t use them if you’re not a director or a programme lead!
2. We generally want the title to give a reasonable impression about the kind of work done in the role (so, the head of video couldn’t have the title ‘head of podcast’ or something).

The salary formula has lots of inputs, so it’s not easy to say ‘you’d be paid £x more per year of experience.’ However, to give you a sense, for the ‘marketer’ role, someone with no relevant prior experience would be offered approximately £58,000 per year; someone with four years of relevant prior experience would be offered approximately £65,000 per year; and someone with ten years of relevant prior experience would be offered approximately £76,000 per year.

I'm glad to hear you're interested! I loved my time as an advisor, the conversations can be a lot of fun and very fulfilling! 

I think of advising as a generalist position, we all talk to people interested in all sorts of careers and causes. Not having academic or professional experience in a top priority area certainly doesn't rule you out.

That said, being familiar with the context around our top problems is important. Personally, I think I mostly picked up this context from listening to the 80,000 hours podcasts over the years, but there are lots of ways to gain this familiarity. In terms of trying to make your application strong without anything you can point to on your CV that relates to our top problems, I'd recommend making sure you're happy with your answers on the form. Particularly question 10: "What do you think is the most promising way of helping the most people? Why does that need more attention (relative to other things)?"

Hey Emily, I'm sorry to hear you've had trouble figuring out how your broad skill set fits in.

For the roles I'm hiring for right now, specific experience is less relevant than evidence of the most important skills for the role. Copying directly from the job description for the Head of Marketing role, for example:

• A strong interest in effective altruism, longtermism, and/or having a big, positive impact in the world — ideally with experience in applying EA principles in real-world decisions
• Strong judgement; the ability to consider complex strategic questions evenhandedly, communicate them clearly, and get others on board

(This is just the first two from a longer list!)

When I'm evaluating candidates, I expect these traits to show up in various different ways at different stages of the application. To give some sense, here's what I've written in some of my own documents about how those two traits will show up in the initial application form:

• Excitement about the role; they seem EA / longtermist (or say that they are).
  Mention interest in EA on the application form (with evidence).
• Their answers seem thoughtful. Clear communication; lucid, easy-to-engage-with writing.

Does that help give you a sense of the kinds of things I'm looking for that aren't specific experience?

I'm not sure if this really answers your question, but I hope it's helpful & let me know if there's anything else I could share!

Hey Helena — thanks for your question!

I'm happy for generalists to apply to the marketer position — I don't think prior marketing experience is required to excel in the role, so long as you're excited to learn the relevant skills!

You're certainly welcome to apply to both! We'll typically share application materials internally where it seems decision-relevant, but otherwise, the applications are progressed separately.

If I were you, I might spend some time thinking about if one of the roles seems better suited to you based on your skills & the type of work you're excited about doing. I think they're quite different ways of working — for example, advisors do a lot of talking to people! Marketers at 80k don't do nearly as much. Which sounds more energising to you?

Hey Tamar! Huon's already answered for advising, but for the other rounds: we're happy to try to rush applications if there's a particular reason e.g. a deadline you have coming up for another job. However, like Huon, I'd be very surprised if we were able to make an offer before applications are closed, since it's not enough time to do an in-person work trial. Hope that helps!

Answering for myself and the advising round, I'll try to answer questions as they come in.

As for whether an exceptional candidate might get an offer before the closing date has elapsed, I think this is basically not possible for this round. In theory, I'd be open to this, because we have quite a good sense of what the talent pool for advising looks like from previous hiring rounds. In practice, I'd want to work trial anyone before making them an offer, and there just wouldn't be time to organise that so quickly.

Hi Pranshul,

Thanks for your comment, and I'm really glad to hear you'd be excited about working at 80k!

I think being a new high school graduate is not a dealbreaker for us / doesn't directly rule you out, so you'd be very welcome to put in an application on our website!

However, for full transparency's sake, I do think I should say that I'd guess it will be a fairly significant downside compared to candidates with more experience, and I'd be somewhat surprised if ended up hiring someone with no prior work experience or tertiary education.