Your first job out of college is the hardest to get. Later on you'll be able to apply for jobs while working, which is less stressful, and you'll have a portfolio of successful projects you can point to. So hopefully it's some small comfort that applying for jobs will probably never suck as much as it does for you right now. I know how hard it can be though, and I'm sorry. A few years ago after graduating from my Master's, I submitted almost 30 applications before getting an offer and accepting one.

I do notice that the things you're applying to all seem very competitive. Since they're attractive positions at prestigious orgs, the applicant pool is probably unbelievably strong. When there are hundreds of very strong applicants applying for a handful of places, many good candidates simply have to get rejected. Hopefully that's some more small comfort. 

It may also be worth suggesting, though, for anyone in a similar position who may be reading this, that it's also fine to look for less competitive opportunities (particularly early on in your career). Our lives will be very long and adventurous (hopefully), and you may find it easier to get jobs at the MITs and Horizons and GovAIs of the world after getting some experience at organisations which may seem somewhat less prestigious.

To speak on my own experience, among those ~30 places that rejected me were some of the same orgs you mention (e.g. GovAI, OpenPhil, etc.). The offer I ended up accepting was from Founders Pledge. I was proud to get that offer and the FP research team there was and is very strong, but I do think it's probably the case that it was a somewhat less competitive application process. But ultimately I loved working at FP. I got to do some cool and rigorous research, and I've had very interesting work opportunities since. It's probably even the case that, at that point in my career, FP was a better place for me to end up than some of the other places I applied.

Sometimes EA Orgs will say something like “we have no degree requirements”... but in reality will mostly hire people with PhDs. I appreciate your open-mindedness regarding degree and experience requirements, but saying something like "we expect most successful applicants to have X"... helps applicants assess whether the opportunity is worth spending time on.

I would advise against this specific policy, since I think it risks being misleading. My impression is that many EA employers genuinely assign ~0 weight to an applicant having a PhD, but nevertheless find themselves hiring disproportionately PhDs, simply because the pool of people who have the traits they are interested in (e.g. interested in autonomously completing very high-level research) disproportionately choose to complete PhDs.^[1] If an org simply reports ">50% of successful applicants have PhDs", this will likely mislead applicants into thinking that having a PhD is important to success, even though it's assigned no weight (one could imagine similar dynamics by reporting other characteristics which play no role in selection, but which are heavily over-represented in successful applicants). 

To be clear, if employers actually do assign significant weight to a characteristic, but are open to considering exceptions, then I think it's good to be transparent about both sides of that.

1. ^{^}

    The EA community itself is very disproportionately skewed towards people with graduate degrees, which probably contributes to this. Last time we checked, in 2019, >45% of respondents had a graduate degree, and I would expect this number to have only increased since then, since many of the remainder were students, who will themselves likely go on to complete further degrees at quite high rates.

Having been rejected for a few including most recently by Giving What We Can, I'd say their feedback process was a country mile ahead of any other org I've applied to, and other organisations should look to them as the gold standard for such a process. I hope they'll write it up on the forum, soon.

If you haven't, you should talk to the 80k advising team with regard to feedback. We obviously aren't the hiring orgs ourselves, but I think we have reasonable priors on how they read certain experiences and proposals. We've also been through a bunch of EA hiring rounds ourselves and spoken to many, many people on both sides of them. 

Hey, Zack from XLab here. I'd be happy to provide a couple sentence feedback on your application if you send me an email. 

The most common reasons for rejection before an interview were things like no indication of having US citizenship or student visa, ChatGPT-seeming responses, responses to the exercise that didn't clearly and compellingly indicate how it was relevant for global catastrophic risk mitigation, or lack of clarity on how mission aligned the applicant was.

We appreciate the feedback, though.      

I've offered to review resumes previously, and if you'd like to send me a message I'd be happy to offer feedback. Heck, if you want to schedule a call to do a mock interview, or very informal advice/coaching/discussion relating to career and job applications (or even just to vent and express your feelings) I'd be happy to lend a hand. I can't offer any specific insider information for hiring rounds, but I can share plenty of broad/general information about how hiring rounds function and different factors or scenarios that might cause your application to be rejected.

Increase the required time-commitment as the application progresses.

I am a big fan of this concept. I'd estimate that between 25% and 50% of the hiring rounds from EA organizations that I've been involved in (as a candidate) have requested that I spend 2-3 hours of time as the second stage of the hiring round (the first stage is submitting an application). That strikes me as too big of an ask to occur that early in the process. I'd suggest proportional reciprocity (I concept I made up, which maybe someday I'll share a post on), and how there should be a gradual escalation of commitment, rather than a sudden/steep escalation.

I have several different Google Docs with rough drafts of posts that maybe I'll someday get around to relating to hiring rounds: actionable feedback, inviting candidates to apply, avoiding bad questions, validity, good and bad phrasing for rejecting candidates, letting people know what criteria they will be evaluated on, etc. None of them are fully fleshed out, but if anyone wants to see and comment on the rough drafts and the brainstorm versions, please let me know.

I'm happy to chat informally with anyone planning or designing a hiring round that wants to get input, ask for suggestions, or generally bounce around ideas.

I wanted to quickly say thank you for your suggestion that orgs increase information sharing transparency. I haven't seen this discussed elsewhere, and I think it's a good idea! It's now on our list of things to consider for future hiring rounds at 80k.

-- Sash, Head of Recruiting at 80k

Have you applied for 80k career advice?

At least where the acceptance rate is 3-5 percent, it seems plausible that there could be something like the "AI Safety Common Pre-Application" that would reduce the time burden for many applicants. In many cases it would seem possible to say, on information not customized to a specific program, that an applicant just isn't going to make that top 3-5%.

(Applicants meeting specified criteria would presumably be invited to skip the pre-app stage, eliminating the risk of those applicants being erroneously screened out on common information.)

By analogy: In some courts, you have to seek permission from the court of appeals prior to appealing. The bar for being allowed is much lower than for succeeding, which means that denials at permission stage save disappointed litigants the resources they'd otherwise use to prepare full appeals.

One thing I have heard is that having long-ish application stages provides value by getting more people to think about relevant topics (I have heard this from at least two orgs I think). E.g. having several hundred people spend an hour writing a paragraphs about an AI safety topic might be good by virtue of generally having more people think more about this being good. I haven't seen a write-up weighing up the pros and cons of this though. I agree this can be bad for applicants.