Probably Good's Quick takes

Our board now has more roles than before (1600+), and a public Airtable version that you can use to set up custom views and automations (including with Slack).

A quick guide for using the new Airtable:

1. Open the public Airtable and click "Use this data". Make sure "Create a synced table" is selected. Choose which Airtable base you'd like the jobs data to live in. This creates a read-only synced table with our published roles.
2. Create a filtered view in the new table (e.g., filter by cause area, location, or role type).
3. From here, you can set up Slack notifications:
   1. Trigger: "When record enters view", selecting the filtered view you created in step 2. 
   2. Action: "Send a Slack message" (via Airtable’s built-in Slack integration)
   3. Compose your message using field tokens to pull in live data from each role, e.g. New role: {Job Title} at {Org Name} | {Job URL}. Use markdown for basic formatting like bold or italics. 

If you use our job board, here’s a few ways you can help us to help you:

• Test out the new Airtable and let us know if there are any issues or if you do anything cool with it.
• If you land a role that you found on the job board, please get in touch! Even a short message about how our services helped you makes a huge difference to our ability to continue providing these services.
• If you know of any orgs you think we should monitor for the board (including ones you work for), please share them!
• If you work at an org that's listed on the board, note that links to your roles from our job board automatically include utm_source=probablygood_board so if you track referral sources, you'll be able to see applications that came via us. If you have a question on your application forms regarding where candidates heard about the role, please also consider adding "Probably Good" as an option. 
• If you’re a hiring manager/recruiter who ends up hiring a candidate who found your role through our job board, please let us know!

Other than that, please also share the job board with people you think could benefit from it, and get in touch with us if you have any feedback or other suggestions. Thank you!

Farmed animal welfare is one of the most important cause areas out there. Though we’ve written about animal welfare broadly before, we recently published a dedicated piece on farmed animals specifically. Given how often this cause area shows up on our job board and throughout our content, we thought it deserved its own standalone overview, which covers:

• How different farmed animals are treated, including fish, crustaceans, and insects.
• Promising approaches already reducing suffering at scale.
• Why farmed animal welfare remains highly neglected despite its enormous scale.
• Concrete ways you can get involved, whether through your career or otherwise.

It’s intended as an approachable introduction to the cause area; if you're already familiar with farmed animal welfare, especially through other EA content, you probably won't be surprised by much here. But if you're new to the topic or looking for a solid overview to share with others, you might find it useful.

You can read the full article here.

Heads up for job-board users: you can now find more roles (1,200+) and set custom email alerts on our job board.

For added context: As promised earlier, we’re continuing to scale and improve our job board, to help talented people find impactful roles (including in causes, regions, and orgs that might have been underrepresented in EA so far). Mainly, you can now find more roles than before and set alerts for your chosen filters, in addition to smaller improvements, like being able to filter for highlighted roles. We’ll continue doing significant work on the board in the coming months, including by adding more roles, and improving existing features while adding new ones.

Here’s how you can help us help you:

• If you land a role that you found on the job board, please let us know! Even a short message about how our services helped you makes a huge difference to our ability to continue providing these services.
• If you know of any orgs you think we should monitor for the board (including ones you work for), please share them!
• If you work at an org that's listed on the board and have a question on your application forms regarding where candidates heard about the role, please consider adding "Probably Good" as an option (or consider asking your recruiting team to do it). We’re also happy to collaborate on adding a UTM parameter to links or doing something similar; let us know if you’re interested.
• If you’re a hiring manager/recruiter who ends up hiring a candidate who found your role through our job board, please let us know!

Other than that, please also share the job board with people you think could benefit from it, and get in touch with us if you have any feedback or other suggestions. Thank you!

We've heard from a lot of people who feel they're getting rejected from jobs for being overqualified, which can be pretty frustrating. One thing that can help with this is to think about overqualification as an issue with poor fit for a particular role. Essentially, what feels like a general penalty for past success is usually about more specific concerns that your hiring manager might have, like:

• Will you actually be good at this work? You might have years of experience in senior roles, or other impressive credentials, but this doesn’t always mean you’ll be able to perform well in a more junior role. For instance, if you've been managing teams for years, they may worry you lack recent hands-on experience and don't know current best practices.
• Will you stick around? If you've been leading large teams but are applying for an individual contributor role, they might wonder if you'll actually find the work engaging or get bored without the higher-stakes responsibilities. They may worry you're just using this as a stepping stone until something better comes along. Hiring is costly and time-consuming, so they don't want to invest in someone who'll be gone in a few months.
• Will you expect more than they can offer? If you've worked in more senior roles, an organization might think you’ll be looking for opportunities for growth, benefits, and a salary beyond what the organization is able to offer. If you’re likely to demand more than they’re able to give, they won’t want to waste time advancing you through the process.

If you're genuinely excited about a role, but are worried about being perceived as overqualified, the good news is that you can address these concerns in your application (especially your cover letter or application answers). For instance, if you're stepping down in seniority, explain why you actually want to do this work. If you’ve worked in management and are wanting a return to the hands-on work you’re really passionate about, then mention this. 

You should also make sure to emphasize the parts of your background that are most relevant to the role, rather than the ones that seem most impressive in general. Your PhD might be impressive, for example, but unless it’s closely connected to the role you’re applying for, you might want to highlight other parts of your CV instead (like your operational experience if you're applying for an ops role).

The important takeaway is to think about your fit for a specific role rather than your qualification level. Having more experience in a certain area isn't necessarily better if it doesn't help with the type of work you'd actually be doing, or if it implies you’ll have expectations that an organization won’t be able to match. 

If you want to learn more about this, you can read our full article on overqualification.

Lots of “entry-level” jobs require applicants to have significant prior experience. This seems like a catch-22: if entry-level positions require experience, how are you supposed to get the experience in the first place? Needless to say, this can be frustrating. But we don’t think this is (quite) as paradoxical as it sounds, for two main reasons. 

1: Listed requirements usually aren't as rigid as they seem.

Employers usually expect that candidates won’t meet all of the “essential” criteria. These are often more of a wish list than an exhaustive list of strict requirements. Because of this, you shouldn’t necessarily count yourself out because you fall a little short on the listed experience requirements. Orgs within EA are much better at communicating this explicitly, but it should be taken as a rule of thumb outside of EA as well. You should still think strategically about which roles you apply for, but this is something to factor in.

2: You can develop experience outside of conventional jobs.

For a hiring manager, length of experience is a useful heuristic. It tells them you’ve probably picked up the skills needed for the role. But if you can show that you have these skills through other means, the exact amount of experience you have becomes far less important. A few of the best ways to do this:

• Internships and fellowships. These are designed for people entering new fields and signal to employers that someone has already vetted you. They’re often competitive, but usually don’t require previous experience.
• Volunteering. Organizations usually have lower bars for volunteers than paid positions, making this a more accessible option (usually). Look for advertised volunteering opportunities at orgs you’re interested in, or reach out to them directly.
• Independent projects. Use your spare time to make something tangible you can show potential employers, like an app, portfolio, research paper, blog, or running an event. Obviously the most useful projects will vary by profession, but whatever you do, try and make it look professional–close to something you’d do in a “real” role.
• Courses and qualifications. Taking some online courses can fill gaps in your knowledge and demonstrate some investment in the career path, especially if there are well-regarded professional certifications in your field (though perhaps less relevant for EA roles). Employers also often interpret graduate degrees as relevant experience, and if you’ve done any relevant coursework in your undergraduate degree, you can bring this up too. 

Also: don’t neglect networking. If somebody at a hiring org knows you personally, they can be more willing to look past ways in which your CV might diverge from their listed requirements.

If you want to learn more about specific strategies and see a practical example of how to interpret job requirements, you can read our full guide on building experience through non-traditional jobs.

We recently published an interview with Matthew Coleman - another entry in our Career Journeys series. Matthew is the Executive Director of Giving Multiplier, a platform that encourages donations to highly effective charities through donation matching. Before this, he completed a PhD in psychology, researching the psychology of altruism.

The interview covers quite a lot of ground, but a few of the things we talked about include:

• The gap between what a career looks like from the outside and what it's actually like day-to-day.
• Advice for people wanting to make an impact through psychology.
• The tension between keeping your options open and committing to a path.

Here’s one of our favorite extracts from the full interview:

On engaging with the (often mundane) realities of academic research:

I learned a lot. By the time I started my lab manager role, I was fairly confident I wanted to do a PhD. But my research lab in undergrad, which I loved, was a very small lab where I was working closely with the faculty advisor, and I wanted to try out a larger lab studying different topics to explore a bit more.

As the lab manager of an unusually large lab, I got a bird’s-eye view of a lot of the research projects going on and understood what the day-to-day looked like, whether that was grant applications, hiring and onboarding, or actually conducting research myself alongside my colleagues. I found the experience amazing and fascinating and really intellectually stimulating, which confirmed that I wanted to go the PhD route, so I followed through on my original plan from undergrad.

[…] I was certainly very fortunate to have gotten a lot of hands-on experience in research as an undergraduate, so I think I had a better sense of the day-to-day than many people do. But I do think it’s a very important point, and some related advice I like to give is: when you wake up on a random Tuesday in February, do you actually want to do the things that you have to do? Not just do you like the topics or ideas you’re studying (although that’s of course very important, too). Maybe you read a book, watched a TED talk, or listened to a podcast about some topic you found fascinating, and maybe you do want to pursue work in that domain. But I think the ideas themselves aren’t enough, because you actually have to do the day-to-day work.

So what are the actual responsibilities and tasks you like doing? For example, you may find neuroscience fascinating, but maybe you don’t want to spend a large portion of your workweek interacting with research subjects running brain imaging sessions, or whatever it might be. In such a case, even if you think the subject matter is fascinating, maybe that’s not the best career fit for you. Or maybe you do also enjoy most of the regular responsibilities associated with that career, in which case it could be a great fit. So I think a combination of enjoying the topic itself plus the day-to-day responsibilities is important. I was lucky that, early in my career, I was able to test it out and experiment with which responsibilities I liked more than others. 

AI systems that match or exceed human intelligence could very plausibly arrive within the next decade, and raise some significant challenges as they do. Alongside the well-known issues surrounding AI safety, there are many other potential problems that we don’t yet seem prepared for, but that could affect society on a huge scale. Forethought has published lots of research on this recently, and we wanted to cover some of the key points for people who might be interested in exploring some of these challenges with their career.

A few of the issues that seem particularly important:

• How a sharp acceleration in technological progress could leave us unprepared for new technologies, including potentially dangerous ones like engineered pathogens.
• How growing reliance on AI for information could reshape how individuals and institutions form beliefs, and the risks this might bring.
• The prospect of power and value lock-in, where AI provides the means for institutions and groups to entrench power dynamics and values.
• Questions around AI sentience and welfare, and why now may be a particularly important window for thinking about them.
• Ideas for how people can engage with these problems through their career, along with relevant organizations in the (broad) space.

Here’s an excerpt from our section on the risks of accelerated technological progress:

We can think of technological development as akin to pulling balls from an urn. As we develop each new piece of technology, it’s like we’re reaching into the urn hoping to pull out balls that will help humanity. Many of these are straightforwardly beneficial, like vaccines and other medical technologies. But some balls can be highly dangerous, like nuclear technology. The trouble is, we have a limited ability to know whether technology will harm us or help us until we’ve developed it.

The scientific speedup that advanced AI may bring is like tipping this urn upside down, spilling thousands of balls onto the ground at once. If this happens, we’ll have little time to evaluate and prepare for each new technology before the next arrives, leaving us able to do little more than hope that one of these destructive technologies isn’t revealed.

You can read the full article here, and explore the many other cause areas we’ve covered here.

Heads up: We’ve got new job-board email alerts that you can use to automatically get notified about impactful new roles as soon as they’re published.

As you may have noticed, we released an exciting new version of our job board last week. One thing we didn’t cover much in our main announcement is how much we’ve improved our job alerts. These alerts are probably the most time-efficient way to find relevant roles, so it was a priority for us to make them as good as possible.

We’ve made a bunch of improvements, but the main theme is that they offer much more customizability and look much better:

If you’ve been meaning to set up an email alert for the board, treat this as your nudge. It only takes a few seconds: just select your filters on the board, then hit the green Get job alerts button and enter your email.

As always, please let us know if you have any suggestions or encounter any bugs!