AMA with GiveWell’s Chief Operations Officer

Heya Tony, thanks for the questions! To be honest I do not feel particularly qualified to answer them, certainly not for any organization other than GiveWell. I tend to be pretty skeptical of off-the-shelf advice about how to build an organization! 

One thing I'll share that has worked for me is to be as opportunistic as possible. When an organization has a lot of gaps -- like if you are building across a bunch of different functions (legal, people, finance, tech) for the first time -- it's probably not possible to fill them all at once. So then one heuristic that I've found useful is to ask, "what is the gap I can fill the fastest?" Where is my low-hanging fruit? Maybe I know and trust someone from a prior organization I can call, or I think I can get a strong referral for someone, who can come in and fix one of my problems. I think it can be really tempting to over-plan; you might make a list of everything that needs to be built, stack-rank them in order of priority, and then go down the list one at a time, because that is what feels optimal. But building organizations is messy and almost never optimal! So for me, I have tried to find ways to get quick wins / bring in fast, trusted help, and then that can help build momentum (and resources!) to tackle the harder problems. 

Hi Madeleine! 

I think "grantmaking" can encompass a lot of different kinds of work; the skills you'd need to be an excellent program officer looking at high-impact global health funding opportunities or writing intervention reports, are quite different from the skills that would make you a great CFO or grants administrator or communications liaison. Overall my view is that almost all skills can be transferable in some way from a for-profit environment into a non-profit or mission-focused organization. I'd advise looking for roles where you have some anchor between your skill set and the requirements of the job. 

And then, when you are expressing interest or applying for a role, try to be specific, authentic, and personal when you are describing how you might be able to perform the job functions. We see a lot (A LOT) of super generic, likely LLM-generated application responses come through our hiring pipeline. In that environment, a response that is specific and personal to you will be what stands out.

The last thing I'll add on this front is that, in my (admittedly limited) experience in cost-effectiveness/impact focused organizations, it's okay -- preferable, even -- to be uncertain about how you might fit for a given role. I think the common approach is for job applicants to be extremely confident, in sell mode, in their responses. But at least for the roles that I screen for at GiveWell, and in my experience hiring talent over the last 15 years, I definitely prefer when a candidate is honest and calibrated about their skills as well as their uncertainties.

As to your second question, I'm definitely not the right person to ask about intervention area research! But as far as I know, we haven't found mental health oriented activities that are as or more cost-effective than opportunities in our existing program areas. 

Hi tasvidkhan! Sorry for the lag in answering your questions -- it took a minute for me to sort through my thoughts on these important topics. 

In an ideal world we would love to be in a position to do everything. We'd love to hire people based in any country in the world and compensate them appropriately (tailoring our compensation principles to local market conditions). We'd love to invest a ton of time in building a candidate pipeline for every role that's diverse across multiple dimensions; it'd be amazing if we could build internship or fellowship opportunities for underrepresented talent. Having a global workforce really requires a lot from an employer -- things like making sure managers are trained and informed about the complexities of cross-border management; that we are compliant with employment laws everywhere we have staff, including around performance management and departures; that we can process and renew visas on a timely basis; that we have the ability to manage work across non-overlapping time zones. This is a very incomplete list of considerations! 

At the moment, though, we are heavily constrained by our existing operations capacity, especially in People Operations. One of the reasons we are doing such a large hiring push now across Ops is so that we have enough human capacity not just to operate the footprint we currently have, but also to build out additional infrastructure so we can do more. We would love to be able to say "yes" to more internal requests for expansion and to more international candidates next year and further into the future.

Hi Amy, thanks for your question! I can't and wouldn't claim to speak for "Effective Altruism" as a whole. The set of organizations within the EA community, or aligned with or inspired by effective altruism principles, is very large and diverse! Each organization is going to have a different view of what core skills are required for different roles on their teams. Some will of course lean more "quant heavy" based on their mission, industry/area, or internal culture. But I would think that there are many organizations and many roles that do not require deep research and quantitative skills. So I hope you won't let that discourage you from trying to find ways to get involved and have impact in the cause areas that you care about.

Speaking for myself personally, I did not come from a research or quantitative background and I did not have much exposure to the effective altruism community when I joined Coefficient Giving back in 2022. I did have many years of experience as an in-house lawyer, which was relevant for the role I was applying for. I think professional skills & training tend to be transferable across roles.

And then speaking for GiveWell, we open lots of roles that don't require research experience, and where the core competencies are less focused on quantitative skills and more on interpersonal, communication, organization, or project management skills. I think there can sometimes be a misconception that the only way to have impact at an organization is to be in a research or program role, but that is definitely not the case. Fundraising, recruiting, human resources, project management, legal/compliance, policy... in my opinion, impact comes in many different forms. 

Good luck in your exploration of EA and your career search!

Hi Pholukx. Snuck in right under the wire! To your first question, we do collaborate with (and occasionally fund) multilaterals when our program priorities overlap. As to the second, unfortunately I don't have a great answer for you as I don't set research strategy in my role; however, I can pass your comment on to our Livelihoods team for consideration. Thank you!

thank you mattross!

Hi Renee. I think every function within Ops is adapting to the pace and scale of change at GiveWell. Some functions are building infrastructure from scratch. For example, People Ops has always been quite manual, and that was okay when we were onboarding a dozen or so people a year. But at our current and expected growth rate, we can't just throw more people at the same manual processes; we need the team to build a good systems foundation and automate what they can, then use our human capacity to provide better service when it really matters. Other functions, like Grants Administration have good processes to start with, but need to figure out how to update those processes to accommodate different styles of grantmaking and dramatically higher grant volumes. 

Across the board what I'd like to do is build for increased resilience and flexibility for the future. We need to learn to expect even more change, and build systems and processes that can accommodate that by design. 

I know I didn't answer your exact question, so let me know if you have any follow-ups.

Hi Adam, thanks for your question! Something you can do now (and ongoing) is to be curious about and engage with our work. That could mean keeping up with our blog or podcast, or digging in to our research write-ups (such as specific grant pages). When candidates apply to jobs at GiveWell, we are always happy to see genuine engagement with our mission, methods, and programs. (Note: you do not need to be a GiveWell donor to be considered or qualified for a role.)

I'll also say that, although we do have roles that are open to recent graduates, we generally find that candidates are more successful in our hiring process if they've already begun developing their professional skills -- clear writing, analytical skills, interpersonal skills, and higher-context thinking -- before coming to GiveWell. So if you're not successful in our hiring process right off the bat, I hope you will consider coming back and trying again after you've built professional experience and relevant skills at other organizations. 

I hope this helps!