AMA with recruiters at impact-focused orgs

Hi Saramago, thanks for the question and sorry that it got missed initially! This made me curious about how Open Phil compares on this metric to the companies you mentioned, and it turns out we're actually pretty similar to Google and BCG (slightly fewer positive and negative responses, slightly more neutral responses). We also keep an internal candidate survey which shows a broadly similar picture. So I think we're doing some things right, but I agree there are pain points as well:

• Our main reasons for negative feedback are the length of our process and the lack of feedback. The former involves difficult tradeoffs against making sure we're hiring the best candidate from each hiring round, but we have been placing higher weight on it in recent months and looking for ways to shorten the process e.g. by using one work test rather than two where feasible. The latter is difficult to solve at scale without huge investments of staff time, but we're aiming to provide more generalised feedback that's hopefully still actionable to candidates where we can.
• We've also invested in setting out clearer timelines and communicating these with candidates from near the start of our processes, and have found that this often mitigates many of the negative impacts of longer round timelines.

Finally, I would love to hear if you or anyone else has been put off from applying to Open Phil by perceptions about what the hiring process will be like, either due to Glassdoor or otherwise – this kind of data is extremely valuable and really hard to get! 

This is a really interesting question! (flagging that I wrote this comment hastily and didn't edit much—lmk if it would be helpful to clarify anything.)

Bottom line: If you look at Glassdoor applicant reviews and sort by recency, you'll note that in the last ~year and a half, GiveWell has only received 2-3 negative reviews, which is about 10% of the total reviews. I think that's a departure from years prior, in which we received many more negative reviews.

I spent a lot of time thinking about Glassdoor shortly after I joined GiveWell (IIRC I was thinking about this in late fall 2023?). My diagnosis was that we were doing a pretty bad job of informing candidates about what to expect from our hiring processes, we were moving too slowly with candidates, and our communications were weak. Here are a few specific things that I think contributed to the improvement in our reviews:

• More up-front communication about the requirements of our hiring processes (for example, see this Research Hiring FAQ, and the FAQs on our jobs page). We've also added more details about future steps to every stage of our hiring processes.
• Clearly signaling throughout the hiring process that we don't plan to provide evaluative feedback to candidates, and that candidates should not expect this.
• Changing the tone/voice of our candidate communication. This is hard to describe clearly, but I think we've moved substantially away from language that felt cold/distant/corporate and toward language that feels personal/inviting/warm, without necessarily changing the factual content of the communication.
• Moving faster with candidates. This was mostly accomplished by hiring dedicated recruiting staff. Before we had dedicated recruiting staff, we often (and fairly!) received the critique that our hiring processes moved very slowly. Now our hiring processes move quickly—it's rare for us to take more than a week to get back to candidates at any stage, and we sometimes make same-day decisions on initial applications.

I also echo much of what @PhilZ said in his response to your question, especially: It's very difficult to get information about the extent to which Glassdoor (or similar) reviews deter strong candidates from applying. This is painful; I wish we had better information.

Last thing—wanted to quickly note current Glassdoor data (which I think is somewhat different than what you describe):

• Right now GiveWell has a 4.5 overall rating. Glassdoor notes this is higher than companies of a similar size and in the same industry, but we probably shouldn't put too much stock in either the base or comparative information—the former is based on 9 reviews, and the latter is based on comparison to companies that probably have very different hiring processes than GiveWell.
• The "interview ratings" tab shows 40% positive, 28% neutral, and 32% negative.

Thanks for your thoughts and questions, Andrew! I’ve not addressed everything you touched on, but here are my quick takes:

• I wouldn't say an immense amount of priority is placed on work tests over interviews, at least at OP, though we do find them to be an extremely useful part of our decision-making process. It's true that a lot of time and effort goes into creating, completing, and assessing them, but a lot of time and effort also goes into interviews, e.g. in preparation, conducting multiple rounds, taking notes, in team discussions, etc. Maybe what you're getting at is that hiring processes are disproportionately front-loaded with WTs—which is fair! 
• I totally hear you on the lengthy work test bit—7 hours is a huge commitment, especially for people with full-time jobs or a family or simply a life to live (which as you say, includes everyone). I think there's probably a point of diminishing returns with work test length, but I imagine it's different for each depending on the signal sought: maybe one type of role doesn't need a WT that's longer than 2 hours, but some others are so nuanced that the point of diminishing returns doesn't hit until 7-8 hours. This isn’t hard for me to believe, but to your point I think it's probably right for orgs that administer WTs to always be asking, "Can we make this shorter while still capturing the signal we want to capture?" It's a good push!
• I definitely agree that a hiring process can be effective and successful without work tests. However, I think they make hiring even more successful, and the tradeoffs (e.g. the time it takes us to develop and assess them, the risk of putting off candidates who might be strong in the role) feel acceptable. Whether or not there's an academic bias in impact orgs' liking of WTs, I can say that hiring managers at OP, at least, find great value in the data points provided by longer WTs (otherwise, we’d retire them!).

I also wonder whether we could do some kind of standardized test once a year on things that EA orgs uniquely care about, like reasoning transparency or understanding of EA, and then various EA orgs could use that for their hiring. 

If requires some initial coordination & investment, but after that it could save both orgs and applicants quite some time and money. 

Strongly upvoted, thanks!  

I've heard this many times, and I feel like some orgs might indeed overdo it with work tests. I'd be curious how much more info recruiters get from 4-8h work test, compared to 1-2h + a (short) interview, and maybe allowing people to submit an existing work sample or so. 

Hey Richard :)

1. % of roles filled through applications: Can't speak for all orgs, but at GiveWell a substantial majority of roles are filled through applications. We've previously made a small number of opportunistic hires, but not recently.
2. reasons hires didn't work out: By policy, my org just doesn't share detailed commentary on this sort of thing in any venue, even in most internal settings. But, I think the big-picture reasons for most staff departures at my org are fundamentally quite normal (growth opportunities, personal/family life demands, performance issues, etc.). When relevant, we use performance data to reassess our calibration on past hiring rounds and make changes for future rounds.

Related question: How often do you run a public open hiring round and end up hiring someone already on your radar, who would have been part of your closed hiring round as well? 

Not saying this is always bad, the public hiring round might still have been worthwhile in expectation, I'm just curious how often these things happen. Probably various a lot between roles & orgs. 

Thanks for asking, Geoffrey – I think this is a helpful and important question. My own personal heuristic after switching jobs as a mid-career professional ~2 years ago was something like: if I spend ~100h and get no signal or make any progress, I should either pivot or give up. Now, I think that number could be meaningfully lower or higher for different people and would depend on internal factors like a) time/capacity to search for a job, b) finances (if searching without a steady stream of income in place), and c) intrinsic motivation, and external factors like the “EA job market”. 

Granted, when I first started, I broadly took Michael Aird’s advice to not think and just apply, but I burnt out halfway through and ended up volunteering at several orgs instead, along with strategizing the roles I applied to a bit more.

It took me 5 months, >20 applications, and ~100 hours of research, prep, interviews and tests to land the right role, or any role, which happened to be the highest impact for me. I did not apply for any role I wouldn’t be excited by, and assumed others would feel the same way, so competition was high. Throughout the job search, though, the key thing that kept the needle moving for me was that through rejections, I was making progress, and the most helpful bit was receiving rejections at later stages. The later in the process I received a rejection, the more information I received about my fit for the role and general performance, though granted, some of that signal was noisy and much of it was self-interpreted. 

I think the ways one could tailor applying to roles better is through tiering their search by:

• Seniority of the role  
• Organization (how impressive and aligned/relevant their work is to you/your experience)

This both helped shape my perspective on whether I was applying to the right org and the right level.

If, through this process, the answer to the below questions is a resounding no, I’d consider rethinking my approach, pivoting, or an upskilling phase:

• Have I received any positive signals from processes I’ve been a part of?
• Do I have a competitive advantage over any of the roles I want?
• Would another 100-200 hours meaningfully shift the odds?
• Are there any roles that seem to fit my skills (but I think I just didn’t perform well)?

I think this 80k podcast: Serendipity, weird bets, & cold emails that actually work, is a treasure trove of helpful and varied advice for people generally thinking about their career. I also find it useful to read about founders’ incredibly difficult decisions to shut down their charity (e.g., this incredibly thorough post shutting down MHI). I hope this helps!

hey geoffrey, here are a few drafty thoughts that boil down to “You should probably invest a bunch of time before giving up” and “It’s hard to get useful data from rejections":

• Like Dee, I spent months and hundreds of hours applying to ~80 jobs before I found my current role. If I were job hunting right now, I would probably invest a similar or greater amount of effort. My impression from many conversations in my personal life is that more people under-apply than over-apply. There’s almost certainly some amount of effort that’s too much, but I’d guess most people won’t hit it.
  • Tbc, I’m not making the claim that you should unreflectively apply to any job that you see—you shouldn’t do that! But if you’re doing a lot of reflection and generally think you’re pointed in the right direction, I think the marginal job application is positive EV. Dee’s four questions and resources above are a great start for thinking carefully about the general direction of your search!
• I think you should be pretty careful about updating your beliefs about the relevance of any particular rejection to your job hunt because:
  • Rejections are statistically more likely than not. Rejections from even a high number of jobs don’t necessarily imply that your general job hunt is poorly designed. I don’t know how to put precise numbers on this, but if you have e.g. a 1% chance of getting any particular job, being rejected from 20+ shouldn’t be intellectually dismaying at all (although it’s of course very emotionally discouraging). And, a 1% chance is probably too high—for most jobs I manage, more than 100 applicants seem plausibly qualified at application review.
  • Some rejections happen because of communications/legibility issues, not because of real lack of fit. Here’s a personal anecdote: I once learned a year after the fact that I was rejected at the application review stage from one organization because my short answers showed insufficient evidence of alignment with effective altruism. That surprised me because at that time of my application I had been involved with EA for nearly a decade, but didn’t know I needed to signpost that on my application. Tbc, I’m not saying that the lesson here is “always say how much you love EA on your applications,” or “you should assume that organizations are wrong to reject you,” or "the organization was correct to evaluate candidates in that way", just that: It’s relatively easy for a failure mode to happen where candidates and organizations lack shared understanding about (1) what qualities the org is searching for and (2) how candidates ought to display their possession of those qualities. Hiring teams spend a lot of time thinking about how to avoid that sort of failure mode, but it’s impossible to completely eliminate it.
  • Many rejections happen because of organization-specific idiosyncrasies, not because of lack of fit with a general type of work. For example, my org might reject someone from a research role because there’s a specific, weird professional trait that’s important in our specific work environment and we don’t think it’s easily trainable. But that doesn’t indicate that (1) the candidate isn’t good at research in general, (2) the candidate couldn’t do a different job at our organization, (3) the candidate shouldn’t pursue work that they consider impactful and motivating.
  • In most cases, you will not receive informative feedback with a rejection. Because of that it’s just really hard to know if and how you should update your general approach to your job hunt.

This doesn't directly answer your question, but building on Calum's and Dee's points - I think it might also be helpful to first clarify what approach you're taking in your job search, since different strategies have very different success rates and timelines.

It might be helpful to think of job searching as existing on a spectrum - on one end, you have applying through job boards and official channels, and on the other end, you have less structured approaches like networking, volunteering and turning that into a full-time role, creating your own side projects, etc.

For the more structured application approach, I personally use a tiered approach that balances my long-term career vision (the one I spend 100s of hours discerning) with current personal constraints (needing a salary, visa sponsorship, supporting family). It may look like something like this, where I allocate a percentage of my job hunting time to specific roles under the following tiers:

• Tier 1: Organizations I genuinely want to work for or roles I want to be in - these align with my 10-year career goals (70% of the time I budget for structured applications)
• Tier 2: Roles that could be stepping stones to Tier 1 positions i.e., can help me build career capital for my dream role (20% of my time)
• Tier 3: Positions that meet my immediate financial or other personal needs (10% of my time)

However, the actual number of roles I apply for varies significantly - I have a very specific career path in mind, so there aren't many positions that fit Tier 1, especially when factoring in my personal constraints. This means I might apply to fewer Tier 1 roles in absolute numbers compared to Tier 2 or 3, but invest more time crafting each Tier 1 application.

This approach of focusing on time invested rather than sheer number of applications is useful because it takes into account the realities of the job market (e.g., how many jobs that fit Tier 1 are actually available right now), the actual amount of time you have for job hunting (which varies depending on whether you have full-time work, etc.), and other personal factors (like whether you're prioritizing an impactful role right now instead of meeting immediate financial needs). I also spend about half my time exploring the less structured approaches to job searching - mixing both helped me land my current and previous roles. Worth noting that everyone's situation is different - those with strong safety nets might focus more % of their time on Tier 1 roles, while others might need to prioritize Tier 2 or 3 initially.

A helpful estimate someone told me during my freshman year in college that I still use today is expecting around 1 response per 10 applications. This might even be optimistic given that there are likely 50-500 (sometimes even more) applicants per role and only 1 person will be hired, but it helps me set realistic expectations and stay motivated rather than getting discouraged. During my last job search, I remember applying to at least 50 jobs within 1 month.

I agree with Calum about being careful about updating your beliefs based on rejection data - many factors beyond your individual qualifications and fit for the role affect outcomes.

Hope this was helpful!

Hi Joseph! My take:

• Don't worry too much about it for EAish orgs, as long as your CV is relevant enough to pass the earlier stages, you have a lot of opportunities to demonstrate your fit that goes beyond CV info
• If you did something in the meanwhile that you can frame in a way that credibly shows something beneficial or interesting about yourself (e.g., international travel, self-study), I'd probably put it in
• If you didn't, just leave it out. After a couple years in the workforce, people's stations tend to get too long for the ideal CV length for most roles anyway (ideally 1 page, 2 pages max) and you'll likely end up leaving out whole irrelevant job stages anyway. For early stages, what's usually most important is that there is (some) relevant experience in your CV, how much differs for each role and org.
• In the later stages, I will probably look at your LinkedIn to see if I can find out what happened during a long gap and if there's nothing in there I'll ask about it in the interview. By that stage you'll already have impressed through things like test tasks so it's a smaller piece of info unlikely to strongly change my impression unless it's relevant for the role
• If it's something that could be relevant for a job (such as burnout), what I am then ideally looking for is a sense of "the candidate has reflected on it, understood why it happened, and taken convincing measures to keep it from happening again", plus hopefully the thing(s) that caused it aren't things likely to happen in the role you're applying for
• Most of the above may apply a bit less in other EAish orgs, and definitely outside EAish ogs

All the best! :-)

Hi Nnaemeka! The short answer is, there is no single ideal candidate; we usually end up with 10-15 quite different folks on the program. That said, there are perhaps ~10 common archetypes, such as "the disgruntled nonprofit worker", "the medical professional unhappy with how little impact they're having", "the consultant who wants to radically switch careers to change the world" etc.

Perhaps more useful for you to develop a sense of your fit for yourself, I'd like to share a recording of a talk I gave on this question 2 years ago: youtube link to 20 minutes 16 seconds in. This both presents some misconceptions, then the top 5 traits, and has some questions for you to ask yourself to explore if this could be you for each trait. Quick overview:

1. Ambitiously altruistic
2. Results-focused
3. Start-up fit
4. Scientific mindset & good epistemics
5. Collaborative and ecosystem/community-oriented

In case of doubt I recommend to just apply! :-)

Furthermore, I recommend Probably Good's nonprofit entrepreneurship career profile, and the adjacent for-profit entrepreneurship profile!

Hey Clare, quick thoughts:

• How do EA hiring processes differ from other organizations? I think the main characteristic of EA hiring that people typically point to is work trial usage—EA-ish hiring processes typically rely on those heavily! But, whether work trial usage differs from other organizations probably depends on the comparators—for example, it's common for tech companies to also rely heavily on work trials, but it's uncommon for nonprofits to do so. One other feature of EA-ish hiring processes that I hear people talk about frequently is values alignment, which I'll very roughly define here as 'a combination of personal values, attitudes, and habits of work/mind that the organization regards to be crucial to supporting its impact.' Here, I'm not sure that EA-ish organizations care much more about values alignment than other organizations, but I do believe they often have stranger and harder-to-find values.
• Initial format of applications: I don't know precisely what job you're referring to here, but that sounds like an interesting question! I think I agree with your intuition that it's likely providing some indirect information on values alignment, but that's probably not all—it's probably also providing some signal on writing ability and how capably one structures one's thoughts. Sometimes the main value of 'unusual' or 'weird' application questions is that they force candidates to generate fresh, original thoughts instead of relying on standard, pro forma language.
• How much weight on engaging with EA ideas: This question just doesn't have a universal answer; it will differ markedly by organization and by role within an organization. At GiveWell we have very successful team members with all levels of prior engagement with EA ideas, and the same is true for several other organizations in the EA space that I know well.
• What do people get wrong: Hm, I think people probably consistently underestimate the value of being casual, direct, forthcoming, and plain in all aspects of their applications (and especially in their writing). And on work trials, I think people underestimate the value of including meta-commentary on their thinking processes, even if the commentary is rough!

Hey hey, thanks for participating! Your questions:

• General take: Pitching (along with all kinds of cold messages) is probably underrated, but I think it takes careful thought and hard work to get right.
• Make it work by: Understanding your target very well and saying legible things about the value you can add.
• Mistake: Being overconfident!
• Low confidence tip (would be curious if others disagree): At bigger organizations, it might be more effective to pitch program/research staff instead of recruiting staff. The former group is more likely to have insight into poorly formed staffing needs that haven't yet developed into full hiring rounds.

Additional loose thoughts:

I can't speak for all organizations (seriously! this is something I'd expect to wildly vary across org type and size), but at my organization (GiveWell) it's currently unlikely that any cold pitch for full-time employment or a contract would be successful. I receive lots of pitches, and I typically ignore or decline them. That's because at our current size and level of specialization:

• We think pretty carefully about headcount planning and post any full-time hiring needs quickly. If we don't have a role posted on our job board, the most likely reasons for that role's absence are (1) we just don't have the hiring need or (2) we aren't interested in accepting applications from the public.
• Volunteers and contractors have very high management and training overhead relative to the value they produce.
• External people are unlikely to have a good grasp of our highest-priority needs.

I can imagine a cold pitch that would be useful, but it would need to be related to a hiring need that met some of these criteria: (1) it's pretty complex and hard to describe legibly to external folks, (2) it requires very high context on our work and we think it would be difficult to find the right person with an external search, (3) Neither of the previous conditions apply, but we just don't have time to design a job application process at the moment.

The biggest mistake I think pitchers make is being very confident about their ability to provide value without really understanding the organization they're pitching—that's a big turnoff! Fwiw, this is a failure mode for all kinds of cold messages.

This message is very light on advice for making pitching work (sorry), but that's only because I haven't experienced many successful pitches. I hope these thoughts were useful, and good luck!

Hey Antonia—thanks for the thoughtful questions!

First, your vet experience is likely way more expansive than you think. I suspect you're not fully accounting for some critical aspects of your work: you've been doing project management, people management, and administrative work this entire time, even if you haven't been calling it that. Every treatment plan is essentially a complex project with multiple stakeholders (e.g. owner, specialists, staff), budget constraints, timeline pressures, and success metrics. I’m sure you've been analyzing data, communicating technical information to non-experts, managing resources, and supervising people. These are important skills that research orgs and think tanks need. Your challenge is drawing that clear, credible line between what you've actually been doing and what these job descriptions are asking for. Don't make hiring managers do the translation work—spell it out for them.

At the same time, there genuinely aren't really shortcuts to getting jobs you're not demonstrably qualified for, especially at the senior level where organizations are understandably risk-averse. But you can (somewhat, and maybe) help bridge experience gaps by your alignment with the org's mission and values. If you can show a deep, specific understanding of why their work matters (not just "I care about animals" but "I've seen how X policy gap affects animal welfare outcomes in ways that your Y initiative directly addresses"), hiring managers may become more confident that you'll spin up quickly.

There aren't secret entry-level roles floating around, but many orgs do closed recruitment rounds where they only invite people already on their radar. The way onto that radar isn't mysterious—if you volunteer with target organizations, show up to EAGs, join relevant communities, and submit thoughtful applications even when you don't get the role, your name is more likely to percolate and stick. The goal is becoming someone they think of when the right opportunity emerges.

As for proper framing, a common missed opportunity I've noticed is writing resumes that list responsibilities instead of highlighting impact on the organization's mission, e.g. "Implemented protocols that reduced average treatment time by 15%" over "responsible for patient care". I’d also recommend resisting the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach—craft something lean where every single line directly supports your case for a specific role. For me, at least, an exaggerated, 10-page resume inflates away credibility rather than establishes it.

Your clinical background is genuinely valuable here, you just need to translate it in ways that make the value obvious to people who've never worked in veterinary medicine. Animal Advocacy Careers will prove to be a very useful resource here!

Hi Antonia, I'm not an expert in the animal space, but my soft sense here is:

1. as Evan wrote, your prior exp is likely more relevant than you think and you should use your CV to explain how in the way Evan mentioned -- titles are a bit less important than types of things you did (e.g., I imagine being a vet did involve a bunch of planning and juggling priorities and optimising processes).
2. The animal welfare space even more so than other spaces does thrive on connections and relationships -- going to conferences and connecting e.g. via Hive can be really beneficial both to get information and hear about opportunities
3. Internships and volunteering are particularly common I'd say and super useful ways to move into the space and new types of roles. Given the effective animal advocacy space is so small, having a great reference from a known org doing a project for them or e.g. organising a meetup or mini-conference can open many doors and puts that recent experience on your CV
4. Personally, at AIM we get a lot of people with (human medicine) clinical backgrounds. To us, clinical backgrounds generally indicate 1. altruism/impact drive, 2. empathy, 3. ability to juggle and fix difficult, potentially high pressure situations, 4. general competency, from finishing the education and getting the job.
5. If you haven't already, it can also be useful to spend a bit of time figuring out what types of roles are a really great fit for you. I'm mentioning this because a lot of the human medicine clinical background folks we get at AIM end up on average being better fits for smaller, more early stage orgs where they can be a generalist, things are pretty urgent, and they see the impact of their work more directly. A "project manager" role at a small org will end up being a very different role, and look for quite different traits and amounts of experience (spoiler: much less), than a "project manager" role in a 50+ people org.

All the best! :-)

Thanks for the question Christoph! I’ll start with my takes on the examples you listed and then pivot to some broader thoughts:

• Being at one company for a long time: this really depends on the specifics. The main reasons I might see this as a negative signal are a) if I worry that the long tenure indicates that someone will find it difficult to translate their experience to a different working environment or b) that they haven’t been successful in their career and have been stuck in one role for a long time (if they haven’t switched roles as well as not switching companies). I think these can both be real concerns, but there are often mitigating factors too, and frequent job-hopping can also be a relevant concern. The question of ‘would staying or leaving be better for my career’ is really the thing to worry about IMO - if you’re making the decision on that basis, you’ll probably have a convincing story to tell. 
• CV certificates: it depends on the role! Usually a good job description will highlight skills or qualifications that are relevant to it, and certificates that demonstrate those can be helpful, especially in more technical roles. If there’s no obvious connection, they probably won’t be helpful (or harmful). 
• Cover letters: I would recommend being guided by the application form on this front. If it includes an option for a cover letter, I’d almost always recommend including one. If it doesn’t, I’d almost always recommend not including one. This is a personal preference, but I don’t enjoy reading unsolicited cover letters myself!

Speaking more generally, the key things that often put candidates higher on the priority list are the straightforward factors of e.g. do they seem to understand the role / organization and to be excited about it for genuine reasons, are their skills and experience a good fit for our requirements, do they communicate effectively, etc. If you’re demonstrating these things in a way that’s easy for a recruiter to understand even on a quick review, you’re likely doing just fine - I don’t think there are any special tricks here.

Thanks for asking, Elana! I think your question likely has two parts: application feedback, and feedback on RFP’s; I’ll answer the former first: I completely understand that it can feel frustrating and repetitive to submit similar materials without receiving feedback. However, I think it’s still worthwhile to apply to different roles and processes, especially if each of these has distinct requirements and application questions, and your answers may evolve meaningfully across them.

To your latter point: In practice, our hiring process is quite separate from Open Phil’s grantmaking and RFP processes, so we wouldn’t typically be involved in the review of EOIs or project ideas like the one you submitted.

That said, I appreciate your interest in finding ways to engage more constructively. If you’re looking to get feedback on your resume or EOI materials, a few potential options might include:

• Connecting with others from programs like GovAI, TASP, IAPS etc. who are further along in the AI governance space. My assumption is they’d be happy to share what’s worked for them.
• Exploring advising options from orgs like 80,000 Hours or Probably Good. You might want to check their AMA as well!
• Participating in smaller group career events or office hours that sometimes happen around EA conferences or city groups: these tend to offer more opportunity for back-and-forth than more formal channels.

I know that doesn’t solve the broader challenge of getting direct feedback, but I hope it gives you a few leads that feel a bit more human and responsive. 

Hi there, ElectricSheep! This is a good question—thanks for asking.

To my mind, your question boils down to the following: "How can folks who want to maximize their impact build towards an intentional, impact-focused career?"

I realize that phrasing strips away some of the details you shared about your own personal situation (e.g. that you're completing a PhD in Maths, that you're not interested in AI, etc.), but my advice is the same: leverage career guides (e.g. 80,000 Hours and Probably Good), be attentive to aligned job boards (again 80,000 Hours and Probably Good), build career capital (e.g. by volunteering with related orgs, getting involved with local or virtual EA groups), and talk to people (e.g. through participating in AMAs!).

I'll end there, since I know you posted this on the Career Advisors AMA and think this question is a good fit for that conversation.

Great question, justsaying! I’ll answer Q1 as concretely as I can and skip Q2, as I don’t think your question is too abstract. I don’t think there’s an expectation for candidates to have a high probability of accepting a role at early stages, above a simple yes to basic questions like “is this role interesting? Would I like working at OP? Do I think I can have an impact there?” 

One of the reasons we build in work tests, interviews and an admittedly intensive process around hiring is for candidates to have sufficient context and understanding of the role, team, and org they’d be joining, so I’d be equally happy with someone applying with a <10% chance of accepting but then updating that throughout the process, as I would with someone applying with a >90% probability of accepting off the bat. Of course, there’s a caveat that it’s not ideal to have all applicants come in with an extremely low probability of accepting a role, but I’d also be okay with that if they’re open to changing their mind if they are, in fact, a good fit! 

At later stages, I’d hope they’re at least 50% likely to accept, and that we haven’t wasted their time.

I don’t have precise figures on declined offers to hand; it’s relatively uncommon but certainly does happen! We encourage candidates to be transparent with us about how excited they are about the role, what they would say if we made them an offer, etc. Hiring is time-consuming and important, and it definitely helps us to know in advance whether someone is unlikely to accept. The more surprising it is if/when a candidate declines our offer, the more likely it is to cause delays to our process. 

Thanks for asking, Sen, and congratulations on making it to the last leg of your PhD! As someone who hasn’t gone the academic route, I’m probably not the best person to advise on postdoc applications or academic career paths, especially when it comes to things like publishing expectations or letters of recommendation. I do think connecting with a career adviser or mentor in academia could be really helpful (I see you’ve asked this in the AMA with career advisors, so you’re ahead of me here).

You might also have better luck posting in academic-focused spaces (like the Effective Thesis network, perhaps), where folks have been through similar challenges and could offer more specific advice.

Hey Siobhan, totally makes sense that you feel individualized feedback would be the most useful thing for you. I'm sorry that we're unlikely to provide that as part of this AMA! Fwiw, my personal reasoning for not responding to requests for feedback is:

• It’s difficult to give useful, quick, and legible feedback on application materials / resumes to people I don’t know well. I usually need lots of interpersonal context and careful thought to do that.
• I have limited free time to devote to the AMA, and I’d like to focus my time on answering other questions that I expect to be useful to both the question-asker and other readers.
• Giving pre-application feedback to people who might apply to an organization where I work can create (and has created, in the past) awkward, unpleasant interpersonal/social dynamics. I'm not saying that would happen in your or any other particular case, just that it's a type of risk that exists and that I'd prefer not to incur.

In general, I think it's ~always ok to cold message individual people and ask for their advice. In fact, I'd encourage you to do that: cold messages are probably under-sent, and they've been very useful for my career journey. But, I don't want to offer a blanket guarantee that I or others will respond to all requests for individualized feedback (regardless of whether the requests are made in private or public) because in some cases people will wish to decline the requests for valid personal reasons.

Notwithstanding the above, all of us are doing this AMA because we want to be helpful—so we really hope you'll ask any other questions that would be useful!

Hey Micah! Thanks for the helpful context. I’ll address your questions below in the order you’ve posed them:

• It’s hard to say if these roles are in demand relative to other roles you’ll commonly find on EA job boards, but operations roles of various stripes certainly draw on many of the skills you’ll have developed working in marketing and communications: clear writing, cross-functional coordination, systems and process design, and data analysis, to name but a few. Operations staff at smaller and growing orgs in the EA space tend to wear many hats, so being openminded and attentive to actual job descriptions even if the job titles don’t immediately grab your eye is helpful (e.g. an Operations Coordinator at a young org could very well be a key contributor to that org’s communications function). I’ll further add that, from my experience, strong writing skills seems more like a common denominator than a differentiator in the EA ecosystem, and so it’s relatively tough to find jobs for which that’s your comparative advantage. Superb project and stakeholder management skills are in shorter supply.
• From my perspective, the value of knowing a job applicant comes from an EA org is being able to more or less trust that that person cares about actually high-impact work. But you can get on fine without this heuristic benefit. Does your resume reflect your own tangible contributions to the orgs you’ve worked at, rather than generalized fluff? When filling out job applications, do you provide examples of how you improved processes that needed improving? Have you demonstrated initiative to solve problems that officially fell outside your remit, but mattered for your organization’s mission? Consider these questions (and others like them) when polishing your application materials. Prove you care about impact—and that you have the track record to deliver more of it—and you’ll more likely stand out. (By the way, I’ve deliberately skipped over some of the more obvious answers to your question that nonetheless remain true, e.g. clear and error-free writing, thoughtful application answers, etc.)
• I’m going to let my colleague, Dee Kathuria, speak to your third question—she drafted a response at the same time I did, and hers is better than mine 😀

Not a recruiter from this ama but just wanted to add:

I've seen a number of marketing roles advertised in the past year across field building and effective giving orgs in particular, but also (IIRC) some more direct work AI safety orgs.

There's also been calls for e.g. and AI Safety focused marketing agency and things like that.

Probably stemming from two things:

• recent influx in new effective giving orgs, which are now making their first hires (naturally, marketing + reaching new counterfactual audience is a top priority)
• in general other orgs in the EA space are seeing the value of marketing as they are going through growth phases
• the most developed / large marketing team in the meta or field bulding space is 80K's I believe. Most other meta orgs are very small
• I think animal welfare orgs also have more developed ones, while global health orgs don't as much since they do most of their fundraising from foundations

You might want to check out the work Good Impressions do - and this forum post they wrote: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8M8jGsCLcTzTnYtsw/opportunities-to-improve-ea-communications

Importantly if you can demonstrate comfort with doing 0 to 1 marketing (as that's where most orgs are at) - that would help.