Strangers calling: the value of warm responses to cold outreach

Tl;dr: I think responding to cold outreach (Linkedin DMs, emails) is a high-leverage way to help someone pursue an impactful career. Spending 15 minutes on Zoom or a couple minutes to share resources in writing can:

• Introduce someone to job boards, career advising and other professional development resources (EA Anywhere Slack, EA Virtual Programs, EA Opportunities Board, Effective Thesis, High Impact Professionals, etc.) that they hadn’t previously been aware of.
  • More people hear about EA from personal contacts than from any other single source. Rethink Priorities’ recent surveys suggest that only ~1% of the American general public is aware of EA. Your response may be the reason someone discovers EA career resources, or you may significantly speed up their discovery of these resources.
• Support a job-seeker’s motivation to continue putting themselves out there for impactful roles.
• Strengthen the reputation/practices of your team, organization, or the EA movement to be more inclusive and welcoming.
• Answer someone’s questions and help them learn about new areas of work.

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My sense is that some EAs are reluctant to answer cold messages, especially if they come from someone between jobs, in school, or working at a “non-EA” org. Someone reaching out in this position may be especially open-minded about pursuing a career that does good effectively.^[1] If a response makes it 0.1% more likely that someone pursues a high-impact career who wouldn’t have otherwise, I think time spent responding would be the most valuable few minutes of my week.^[2] 

So how much of a difference does a response make on a job-seeker’s career? Over the past three years, I’ve had brief informational calls or in-person meetings with about 550 people, and brief written back-and-forths with about 1,000 people.^[3] I haven’t seen any instances where one of these conversations appeared to be a significant catalyst for a career change. However, here are some rough estimates of outcomes that give me optimism about the value of responding:

• ~10% followed up with updates or questions after our initial back-and-forth. Updates often included signing up for career advising, or for learning programs like High Impact Professionals or EA Virtual Programs.
• ~15% of people joined the EA Anywhere Slack since I started sharing an invite link in my followup messages (Slackbot notifies you when someone joins via your link).
• ~40% said some version of feeling more motivated to keep faith in applying to impactful roles after our conversation. It’s hard to know what to make of this (it’s a polite thing to say, and potentially a fleeting feeling). But I think speaking to a real person can make a meaningful difference in the modern job-hunting process (which often feels like sending applications into the void for hours a day, mostly getting ghosted, and dragging yourself back to your computer an unknown number of weeks or months).
  • But what would have happened otherwise? People need to make money; wouldn’t they apply for jobs regardless?
    • Speaking from personal experience, demotivation is paralyzing. It’s easy to question yourself, to allow inertia to take over, to feel social pressures from friends and family to get something, anything, that keeps you moving forward, especially when you’re unemployed. For most of the time I dealt poker I wasn’t applying to other jobs, despite feeling like in the long run I wanted to work directly on impactful causes.
    • For people already applying to impactful roles, advice (e.g., from 80k) can increase an applicant’s efficiency. In my view, speeding up the time it takes an employer to hire for an impactful role by one month is similar to counterfactually creating a month’s worth of contributions in that role. 
       
• Data I don’t have:
  • (Most importantly) what percent of people began caring more about doing good, and about EA principles, after our discussion or after engaging with resources that our discussion led them to.
  • What percent applied for or started jobs they discovered through the resources I shared. 

Advice for sending cold messages

• Have a specific goal for your message. I would not recommend reaching out if your only goal is to ask for a referral for a job at their org. Example goals could include:
  • Understanding what resources or actions will best help you learn about their field, or prepare you to work in a role similar to theirs.
  • Asking for their opinion on a career decision you’re making (even better if you can articulate why you’re asking them specifically).
  • Addressing cruxes or uncertainties you have about work they’re knowledgeable about.
     
• Invite them to respond on a call or in writing. Some people find it easiest to talk while they’re in transit, so suggesting this as an option can increase the chances of a call.
  • Share a calendar they can schedule on if you have one.
    • A colleague told me “It might seem weird to cold-email someone and ask them to book a time on your calendar, but I find this extremely helpful! It saves me an email almost every time. Example outreach language I appreciate is ‘If you'd be willing to talk, I'd be happy to book time on your calendar — or you can use mine if convenient: [link].'”
  • If you have a call, try to be comfortable and natural. I recommend avoiding reading off a screen, at least when introducing yourself. 
     
• Keep them updated when you achieve a milestone (like taking an action they recommended). No need to send more than one or two followup messages, but I find it motivating when people I speak with send updates! 

Advice for responding to outreach

• Write about your job.
  • This lets you scale the number of people you can reach. Write about your job once and you have the post forever!
  • I think I do a better job explaining my work in writing than off the top of my head in conversation, and I like being able to send something helpful to people I’m not able to speak with. I also like to add a Calendly link to the end of posts about my job so that the people who book calls already have context from the post - this helps us make better use of our time on the call.
     
• I would strongly recommend creating a curated list of career support resources, and sending them to people who reach out. Here is my list for people interested in global development; here is a more expansive set of EA professional development links you can draw from.
  • At the start of a call, you can preview that you’ll send career resources in a followup email. This takes pressure off the person you're speaking with to cover everything on the call, since they know you’ll be back in touch.
     
• Guide the conversation to where you can be helpful, and meet people where they’re at.
  • I usually ask what causes and ideas the person I’m speaking with is passionate about, then frame the conversation around their interests. We’ll talk about orgs  they might be interested in, and actions they can take to add value to these orgs.
    • If someone is especially engaged and I don’t know much about the space they’re interested in, I’ll see whether I can put them in touch with a friend who specializes in that area (this Forum post has great advice on the art of making intros)

Doesn’t it make sense for the professionals at 80k/Probably Good/Animal Advocacy Careers to manage career advising?

Two strong reasons to get back to people despite the presence of career advising orgs are:

1. The person who reached out may not know these orgs exist, or that they’re a good fit for advising.
2. You are probably better placed to answer questions about your work than a generalist career advisor. Even if the person receives advising from a professional later, it’s valuable to hear multiple perspectives.  

I find it draining to talk to strangers, especially if they’re going to ask for a favor.

• When someone reaches out about a call, it’s totally fair to mention that you’re not in a position to provide internal referrals to people you haven’t worked with, and that you understand if, given this, they can’t prioritize a call.
• I think that many job-seekers’ hope for informational calls is to learn more about work they find exciting, and to increase the chance of landing a job they find meaningful. Most people appreciate transparency around what you can offer.
• Social interaction, especially with strangers, feels different to different people. It is completely OK to never offer a call. You might consider drafting a template reply (or using this one) so that you’re a copy-paste away from sending someone a polite and helpful “no”.

I’m really busy.

• That’s valid; everyone goes through busy stretches and has different opportunity costs of time (some people are always busy!) I’m early in my career with a junior role at my org. I don’t think Peter Singer should post a link to his Calendly - 1:1 career calls probably aren’t as impactful as other opportunities for him (e.g., movement-building through writing, public speaking and podcasting). I also don’t manage people; I could imagine that managers have more responsibilities and want to protect time to avoid bottlenecking their reports.^[4] 
  
  But my hope is that this post causes readers to think of cold outreach as an opportunity, not an imposition. The vast majority of strangers who have reached out to me are caring, sharp, and motivated. I know I’ll never do the work of five people, but I think everyone has the potential to help five people get involved in impactful work — I suspect many other EAs are also agnostic of how good gets done, so long as it does. In the time it takes to floss and brush your teeth, you can be the person you needed when you were starting out. I think that’s pretty incredible. 

1. ^{^}

   As a comparison, I’m involved in EA community-building on a university campus. It takes a lot of effort to persuade students who are years away from entering the workforce to come eat free snacks and talk about impactful career paths. Meanwhile, someone who reaches out for a career call is usually proactively looking into how they can get involved, able to start work immediately, and interested in learning how they can make the world a better place. University community building feels like a great use of time, and I think being a resource for job-seekers can be similarly valuable.

2. ^{^}

   If one in a thousand coffee chats cause someone to pursue an effective career with full attribution, this suggests that 15,000 minutes of brief calls (6 FTE weeks) may unlock a career’s worth of impact. In practice, attribution for impactful careers is murky, and is almost always shared across a number of catalysts: visionaries who developed frameworks for effective action, institutions providing opportunities to act on these ideas, other social infrastructure, etc. However, a 1% chance of 10% attribution for helping people grow their engagement and excitement with EA yields the same impact expectation. 

3. ^{^}

   This is in large part due to the brutal job market in international development; lots of these messages came from former USAID staff or people who were laid off from USAID-supported organizations that lost funding. 

^{^}

On the other hand, EAs who are further in their career may be able to support the careers of more senior and influential professionals, and may be better at giving advice. 

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