Since January I’ve applied to ~25 EA-aligned roles. Every listing attracted hundreds of candidates (one passed 1,200). It seems we already have a very deep bench of motivated, values-aligned people, yet orgs still run long, resource-heavy hiring rounds.
That raises three things:
Cost-effectiveness:
Are months-long searches and bespoke work-tests still worth the staff time and applicant burnout when shortlist-first approaches might fill 80% of roles faster with decent candidates? Sure, there can be differences in talent, but the question ought to be... how tangible is this difference and does it justify the cost of hiring?
Coordination:
Why aren’t orgs leaning harder on shared talent pools (e.g. HIP’s database) to bypass public rounds? HIP is currently running an open search.
Messaging:
From the outside, repeated calls to 'consider an impactful EA career' could start to look pyramid-schemey if the movement can’t absorb the talent it attracts. A friend with a mortgage and a kid commented that EA feels 'pie-in-the-sky'; admirable but un-workable for anyone who can’t self-fund a long, uncertain job hunt wrapped up as 'exploring the right fit'. If the movement keeps overselling demand while undersupplying jobs, there's a risk of reputational damage beyond our bubble.
Maybe I’m missing data showing genuine bottlenecks in certain subfields; happy to be corrected. But from my vantage point, supply seems to have far, far outrun demand.
I also think it would be worth considering how to provide some sort of job security/benefit for proven commitment within the movement, instead of only focusing on how to get new people 'in'. Once someone has beaten the substantial odds and passed the rigorous testing to get in to the movement, they shouldn't have to start from scratch. I know one lady who worked at a top EA org for eight years; she's now struggling to find her next position within the movement, competing with new applicants! That seems like a waste of career capital.
I think it's time to revisit the notion that the movement is 'talent-constrained' or that you should 'apply even if you don't meet the criteria'. By contrast, if I ever find myself hiring, I might be tempted to say 'if you’re not confident in your fit, save yourself the trouble; our inbox will be full by lunch.' #transparency
Moreover, I would avoid the expensive undertaking of a full hiring round until my professional networks had been exhausted. After all, if you're in my network to begin with, you probably did something meritorious to get there.
Just one datapoint from the trenches!
Thank you for sharing your perspective and I'm sorry this has been frustrating for you and people you know. I deeply appreciate your commitment and perseverance.
I hope to share you a bit of perspective from me as a hiring manager on the other side of things:
It's very difficult to run an open search for all conceivable jobs and have the best fit for all of them. And even if you do have a list of the top candidates for everything, it's still hard to sort and filter through that list without more screening. This makes HIP a valuable supplement but not a replacement.
~
'The movement' is just the mix of all the people and orgs doing their own thing. Individual orgs themselves should be responsible for job security and rewarding commitment - the movement itself unfortunately isn't an entity that is capable of doing that.
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Hopefully her eight years gives her a benefit against other applicants! That is, the career capital hasn't been 'wasted' at all. But it still makes sense to view her against other applicants who may have other skills needed for the role - being good at one role doesn't make you a perfect automatic fit for another role.
~
While personal networks are a great place to source talent they're far from perfect - in particular while personal networks are created by merit they are also formed by bias and preferencing 'people like us'. A 'full hiring round' is thus more meritocratic - anyone can apply, you don't need to figure out how to get into the right person's network first.
~
You might like this article: Don't be bycatch.
Hi Peter, I see that you’re hiring right now (slicks hair back, clears throat). Thanks for engaging!
Addressing your points in order:
Thanks for sharing the article!
Two very quick thoughts:
As an intuition pump: there are currently 715 jobs on our job board. How many of those are meeting your bar for 'EA-aligned'? I think there's roughly 5-10k people who consider themselves EAs. So even if a very high % of them are currently doing job searches, there's no way that all of these roles have hundreds of EA applicants.
The reason I wouldn't do this is that: a) It's very hard to be well-calibrated on whether you're likely to be a good fit. I think some people (certain personality types; women; people from ethnic minorities) are much more likely to "count themselves out," even if they might be a great fit. b) For jobs I've hired for in the past, I'm actually more excited about candidates with excellent transferable skills (high personal effectiveness, organisation, agency, social skills, prioritisation ability, taste, judgement, etc.) versus role-specific skills. But role-specific skills are much more concrete and easier to write about in a job ad. I think language like this might deter some of my favourite candidates!
Hi Bella, thanks for engaging! I appreciate your time and input.
1. Besides big central orgs, I’ve applied for roles at small orgs, newly-incubated orgs, somewhat fringe ‘we identify as EA-adjacent but not full EA’-type orgs. Also across cause areas. What they all have in common is that they each received 100’s of applicants. I would say the majority were in the 300-400 range.
2. I’m not saying that they’re getting 100’s of EA applicants, but 100’s of applicants overall. I suspect that many of those have been brought in on the tide of ‘how to have an impactful career’ marketing that EA has been doing, even if they don’t define themselves as EA’s.
3. I’d like to know if any of the paid jobs advertised on 80,000 Hours receive very low or zero applications. That would be very interesting to this discussion.
4. I meant the part about ‘if I ever find myself hiring’ as hyperbole to show frustration, not a serious policy recommendation. However, it touches on a real albeit tangential point: that if someone doesn’t believe themselves to be a good enough fit, perhaps they’re best-placed to know that about themselves. It wouldn’t be my role as the hirer to second-guess that individual’s agency. People may over-or-under rate themselves for all sorts of reasons, some of them valid! Speaking for myself (I happen to be a woman from an ethnic minority), I wouldn’t want my immutable characteristics to play any part in whether or not I get hired… Unless it benefits me. Then I’m all for it. :)
I disagree — I think some people are just naturally under-confident, in a way that doesn't correlate particularly well with their actual skill. For example, see these seven stories written up by my lovely colleague Luisa :)
Yeah, I don't have that data sadly since it's with all the different orgs running those rounds. I've run 5 hiring rounds at 80,000 Hours, and the number of applicants was 110, 91, 137, 112, and 107 — so, all around 100 :)
Yes, some people experience IS which isn't a reflection of their actual skill. Data no, but it would be interesting to ask. It would surprise me if any of your job postings get the very zero or low number that you mentioned before.
When you opened up those rounds, did you consider near-misses from prior rounds or your professional networks first before deciding that a full open round was necessary each time? How do orgs make that decision?
I strongly agree with @Bella's comment. I'd like to add:
Hi Conor! Thanks for commenting. We met briefly at EAG Global.
- You won't catch everything, but your job board is an obvious go-to for people who believe in EA and want to plan their careers accordingly, as they've been encouraged to do.
- I find myself disagreeable on several of the points in Laura's post, in particular 'It's pure luck that an organisation asked someone who happens to know and remember me'. That's not luck (well, a bit). EA is still a sufficiently small community where positive reputation doesn't happen by accident, so that's merit - and more weight should be put on it!
- Earning to give is also a good 'catch all' for people who haven't got a position within an EA org.
been interesting to read these comment threads
in case it's helpful, here are a couple of other miscellaneous job search resources–besides the 80k and Probably Good job boards–that I used to share when i did university group organizing:
- Breakthrough Energy job board - opportunities at cleantech companies that are funded or endorsed somehow by bill gates
- https://jobs.engine.xyz/jobs - climate and related startups backed by an MIT-affiliated VC firm
- https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs
- influencers on LinkedIn such as https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholascmartin/ , who posted this list:
General:
1. idealist
2. Impact Pool
3. PCDN
4. Net Impact
5. Escape the City
6. NextBillion Jobs
7. Koya Partners (Execs)
8. Impact Opportunity
9. LinkedIn (Search for social impact, NGO)
10. The Bloom (Newsletter)
#InternationalDevelopment:
11. Humentum
12. ICT4DJobs
13. Devex
14. GlobalJobs
15. DevNet Jobs
16. KeyLime (Contract work)
17. SID-W
18. NGOJobBoard
19. Jonusta (Contract work)
20. Thrive (Global Health)
#humanitarianaid:
21. UNJobs
22. ReliefWeb
23. ALNAP
#Nonprofit and #philanthropy:
24. NationalNonprofits
25. WorkforGood
26. Chronicle of Philanthropy
28. Council on Foundations
29. NTEN (Non Profit and Tech)
30. Philanthropy NW
31. Imaginable Futures
32. Daybook (Policy, Politics)
33. Philanthropynewsdigest
#Socent:
34. ReconsideredJobs
35. GIIN
36. BWork
37. Social Innovation Jobs
38. BMeaningful
39. ANDE Career Center
40. WordSpark Social Impact Job Board
Regional:
41. DevelopmentAid (Europe)
42. MakeSense (Europe)
43. BOND (Europe)
44. Coordination Sud (France)
45. Acodev (Belgium)
46. Volint (Italy)
47. CharityJob (UK)
48. Eurobrussels (Europe)
49. Third Sector Jobs (UK)
50. CharityVillage (Canada)
51. Daleel Madani (MENA)
52. Ethical Jobs (Australia)
53. Seek (Australia)
54. Matteria (Latin America)
55. NGOJobsInAfrica (Africa)
56. Asia/Pacific UNDP Jobs (Asia)
57. Arthan Careers (India)
58. Naukri (India)
59. Akhaboot (Jordan)
60. Tech Jobs for Good (mostly US)
61. The Hague Humanity Hub (Europe)
62. USAJobs [dot] gov (US agencies, including USAID, DOS, Peace Corps)
63. Work for Impact (Global freelancers)
64. GoodJobs (Germany)
Hi Sam, yeah a lot of lurkers here I think. Wow, thanks for writing! I'll check those out.
One relevant data point is that in last year's Meta Coordination Forum Survey, respondents estimated the gap in value between their first and second most preferred candidate to be:
However, you can see from the distribution that in many cases valuations are significantly higher than the average.
And note that this is their valuation of the gap between the first and second after they've conducted extensive evaluations. The gap between their most preferred candidate after selection and the candidate they would get after not undertaking such an extensive evaluation process (perhaps their 10th or worse most preferred candidate) could be much higher.
As a more general point, it seems worth noting that the costs of sub-optimal hiring can be very high. I wouldn't be surprised if the costs to management and other staff time of even slightly sub-optimal hires would be >60 hours a year, with a long tail of much, much worse outcomes (including potentially just having to rehire), which is high even relative to quite intensive hiring rounds.
Its an important datapoint, but I'm skeptical that the gap is actually this much. Conformation bias might well play into this?
In principle this could be driven, in part, by scepticism about the absolute valuation of EA hires, rather than the relative valuation of hires.
Do you have a sense of what the percentage difference is between the typical first and second most preferred hire (i.e. the first most preferred hire is X% more impactful than the second), and what you think the absolute $ difference is?
We could start with the survey data suggesting that the difference between the first- and second-place choices being about 1/3 of the total value of position and then adjust downward from there.
I would adjust downward considerably, especially for more junior positions, for various reasons:
At least as of 2010, the standard error of difference for a section of the SAT was about 40-45 points (out of a range of 200-800). So -- despite having a very high reliability (at/over .9) due to tried-and-true design and lots of questions, an administration of the SAT will have enough measurement error that it likely won't identify the single best candidate out of a medium-to-large size group of good students who is the best at SAT critical reading tasks (much less the candidate who is best at critical reading itself!)
Although organizations hiring have some advantages over the SAT test writers, it seems to me that they also have some real disadvantages too (e.g., fewer scored items, subjective scoring, a need to reject most candidates after only a few items have been scored).
On the whole, I'm not convinced that the reliability of most hiring processes is as high as the reliability of the SAT. And if re-running the hiring process five times might get us 3-4 different top picks, that would make me skeptical of a proposition that the #1 candidate on a particular run of a hiring process was likely to be heads and shoulders above the #2 candidate on that run, or even the #5 candidate in a sufficiently large pool.
Hi David, Nick and Jason. Thanks for engaging and bringing in numbers to what would otherwise be a very subjective discussion!
I'm afraid I don't put stock in that survey due to the potential echo chamber bias and small number of respondents (7). What I would put stock in, and be very interested to read, would be an assessment by an external, unbiased consulting firm that can tell us what great hires are worth and quantify the drop-off to second-choice candidates. ChatGPT suggests the following:
That said, I will note that this question about the value of intensive hiring is distinct from the question of whether EA is talent constrained. It's quite possible that we have a surfeit of talent and that orgs should rationally engage in intense hiring rounds.
I don't think they're distinct; if there is an abundance of talent already circulating around the movement (as I believe there is), then full open hiring rounds are harder to justify from a cost effectiveness perspective.
In this 80k podcast episode from 2020 Bejamin Todd was already nuancing the claim that EA is "talent constrained".
TL;DR : EA had moved in 2020 from funding-constrained to talent-constrained to specific skills-constrained. Meaning that it is no longer hard to find generally talented, motivated people, what's hard is to find people with concrete experience/talent/career capital in the niche you are hiring for.
This also follows from logic (but correct me if I'm wrong): given that EA works on the most neglected issues, there are few positions in a given cause area because the world is not spending enough money solving it. Now, through the efforts of 80k, CEA and others (e.g. this one that I took part in), many people are now applying. So if we continue to hear that EA is "talent-constrained", this must mean that it is constrained for the specific talents it needs. (Talent, should then not be taken as "workers" as we have come to understand it in current use of English. It means actual talent at some concrete thing).
So, if I put it abrasively: most of us are not "talented" enough at what is needed. Again this is not too surprising, given the widely accepted claim that talent follows a pareto distribution, with a small number of workers being 10x more productive than the average, as well as the survey results mentioned above. However this should not be discouraging: upskilling is possible. In fact, if I continue my logic, it should be a priority of the community to do this: if we have many "generally talented" enthusiastic people, then we need to turn these into people with the specific skills needed.
On an individual level, this means we should aim to increase our demonstrable skills in the areas mentioned above. Notably, leadership seems to be a bottleneck. One way that was suggested to me is to do skilled volunteering (useful post here). If the volunteering is just outside your current capabilities, it can help you grow wile providing value. Arguably though, this is harder to do with 'leadership' than with other skills as it needs more consistent effort.
On a community level, maybe this means we should invest in upskilling. There are many incubators by now, though those are mostly geared towards founding.
Which brings me to the third "lesson": there should be more people founding startups and the like, in order to turn more funding into more positions. Given all those incubators, this is indeed already happening. But, as a mid-career working parent, I know very well that grants and start-ups are not for everyone. So maybe there should be additional effort to turn mid-career people into the talent that is needed, while providing at least a little bit of income stability. It seems like a hard puzzle to me. Income stability is very costly... but maybe worth it if indeed the community needs specific skills so badly. I would love to hear if there is work in this direction.
I wouldn't put much weight on the number of applicants. The job that received 1200+ applicants, I assure you that over 800 and perhaps over 10000 of them were complete nonsense/very low effort applications that have no chance. This is because you get a lot of automated fill outs/copy paste to anything/sites that do this for you.
I generally recommend against a common "come one, come all" hiring round since I think you get a lot more signal from people you know/their recommendations. I think they seem more meritocratic, but you are often filtering for the skill of resume writing.
Job searches are notoriously difficult for many reasons but I would expect to need to fill out >100 to land a job. That's pretty common in the non-EA world. Don't get discouraged.
That one was OpenPhil. Everyone and their cat wants to work at OpenPhil.
I think even once you account for the slush pile, there is still sufficient talent circulating around such that it's no longer necessary to imply scarcity, nor spend on open rounds for soft skills-based roles. Thanks, I'll try not to get discouraged. The non-EA world is beckoning...
PS, As a specific example of the scarcity-baiting: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/animal-advocacy-careers_3-career-path-in-focus-activity-7350927244191576065-Lwdz?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAACCDb2oBVyFGrMG4W_uNnRXDDAk0Tt5jLTE
I know of two others besides myself who are searching in that cause area with at least one of those skills, and we've all worked at EA orgs before. I wonder what I'm missing here.
@SiobhanBall
We have spoken about this a few times before. But just to clarify it’s not scarcity-baiting.
Two statements can be the same organisations are struggling for the right candidates with these skills and talented individuals with these skills still struggle to get roles.
I will lead with data to highlight this. We have published 3,000 jobs from 2021-2024. High impact roles about 380 (defined as OP or EAAWF funded orgs plus skill bottlenecks) Reposting level for the high impact roles are 18%, reposting for all other roles is 2.5%. That is a huge difference. Along with the fact that organisations consistently state themselves they struggle to find the right people at these organisations…
Hi Lauren, fair point. What's been the re-posting rate in 2025?
We only analyse at the end of the year 🙂 but I don’t think it will be drastically different. I think another poster mentioned above the number of applications isnt actually a signal of quality and there is still a situation where organisations are struggling to find people at a certain seniority that fit with their culture, have the right mindset, right to work in the region, accept the salary and have the right skills and experience. I don’t think it’s an easy fix although I do agree there are some great candidates who are yet to be hired.
Mmm. Once those great candidates are hired, the talk of gaps will make more sense. Until such time, from the candidates' perspectives, it doesn't add up, even if you do assume a generous AI-generated slush allowance in the pool.
I do still think it's not at all cost effective for orgs run full rounds when there are known good individuals bouncing around waiting for their moment. On the other hand, with OP handing out huge grants with apparently little scrutiny, maybe the 20k price tag isn't as much as it would be to me. That could just be it.
@SiobhanBall I think your argument doesnt factor in 1) the largest cost to an organisation is actually the wrong hire. It can be 3-5 x the cost of a hiring round. With network based hiring you are increasing the chances of a bad hire 2) the impact of a lower performer on the outcomes of the organisation. These are all mentioned above by @David M. I feel quite strongly it would be bad for the EA or AR movement to go back to network based hiring.
What was the prompt? Mine produced different studies. I’d rather not trade LLM outputs; suffice to say, the evidence is mixed.
3-5x costs?! That’s not just a bad hire. That’s a catastrophic hire!
I’m sure those calamity hires happen sometimes. But you’d only need to network-hire cheaply for 4-6 other roles for every disastrous case to break even on the cost. So unless the calamity hires are occurring more than 15-20% of the time, the savings would offset the outlier risk.
I would change my mind if it could be shown that network hiring increases the chance of a catastrophic result, not by some unknowable margin, but by enough to override its cheapness compared to open hiring.
Well I would also be interested in knowing what yours said, because I’ve never seen research of a good sample size that backs up network based hiring as outperforming hiring rounds. That’s why they exist and in almost every high performing company. How many of the greatest companies in the world do only network based hiring?
But I think you just have very strong priors on this and we are unlikely to agree.
The cost of a bad hire logically are significantly higher, it’s hard to fire people- it takes times from the organisation, it disrupts the team, outputs are poor and ultimately you have to do another hiring round to replace them.
IMHO you are weighting the experience of candidates over the cost to organisations here.
Ask for research on network vs open hiring and there'll be studies in both directions. I don't know, I imagine they do both. The context of a greatest company in the world is probably different to a lean EA org.
EA focuses very much on cost effectiveness as a central principle. I think hiring could be better at walking the talk in that regard.
We both have skin in the game here - me as a disenfranchised applicant and you as someone whose org relies on there being talent gaps to fill! Thank you for engaging in good faith.
I would just like to say, that if the movement pivoted towards network based hiring we would heavily benefit from this. So me arguing against is a genuine belief not coming from my own benefit.
I do agree with you that the talent density of the EA AR movement has increased in the last few years and there aren’t enough high impact roles to absorb all the talented people. Which is why we have shifted away from just promoting non profit roles to ETG, giving more broadly and policy work.
I just don’t think the solution is open hiring rounds.
And why we also continue to do the skill bottleneck survey every year despite working consistently with organizations to have more objective data on where they are struggling to find people and I do think talent density is a different problem than skill gaps.
Anyhow thanks for engaging and it’s an interesting post to read and the comments are great.
To add some thoughts/anecdotes:
Hey, thanks for writing!
A personal and therefore rather limited observation (sample size about 40-50 people in total). Interestingly enough, for all this intensive hiring processes, I’ve happened to come across presumably nice people (in very different EA organisations and across diverse ranges of experience) who are nevertheless spectacularly ineffective, at least using my (probably too high) bar of experience in investments. What surprises me further, such people so far significantly outnumbered highly effective people whom I was fortunate to meet in EA.
I deliberately don’t give examples of ineffectiveness so as not to offend those nice people, but with my 25+ years of working in highly effective business organisations and managing people, believe me – I know what I’m talking about 😉
Hi Alex, thanks for offering your perspective.
What you've said happens to mirror my observations also. Intensive hiring practices don't seem to necessarily lead to superior outcomes at all, let alone so superior as to justify the cost.
As for the main theme of the post, there seems to be a simple fundamental reason for such difficulties in finding an EA-aligned job. EA overall funding is just not big enough to create enough jobs for all interested people. And among other consequences, an important one is that it limits participation in EA - 2019 EA survey by @David_Moss showed that "too few job opportunities" were No. 1 barrier to greater involvement with EA.
This situation will not change until EA starts focusing on how to attract or create more donors (I have ideas but no one would read this anyway, so why bother )))
Thanks Alex. Unsurprisingly, I agree.
I would also add that this situation is perfectly compatible with talent shortages, if there's a mismatch in talent needs. For example, in the Meta Coordination Forum, among the most prioritized skills, we see Leadership / Strategy, People management, Strategy development, and various niche skills in Government, Policy, Media. Among the least valued (though to be clear, many respondents still valued these skills), we see Generalist research skills, Quantitative expertise, forecasting, software development and philosophy.
This matches my experience where there are many 10s/100s of people I would be keen to hire as a researcher, but finding people who can autonomously develop and implement strategy for a specific research context is much harder.
Yes, supply of talent is way more than the movement can absorb. Therefore, do you think open hiring rounds (as opposed to, for example, consulting the list of previous near-misses, the HIP directory, or one's own professional network to source candidates) are cost effective?
Thanks for this valuable datapoint, Siobhan. Your 25 applications competing with up to 1,200+ others suggests a potential epistemic disconnect between EA's "talent-constrained" narrative and current reality.
This gap might arise from legacy framing (what was true in EA's early days persists, even as funding becomes the tighter constraint), organizational incentives (competitive hiring boosts prestige and applicant quality), ego protection (those who endured grueling processes need to believe their roles are uniquely high-impact), and information asymmetry (without published metrics, the community can't update on aggregate data). While technical AI safety roles might remain genuinely bottlenecked, generalizing from exceptions distorts the broader picture.
If this disconnect exists, the costs multiply: wasted human capital that could be earning-to-give or building skills elsewhere; reputational risks as rhetoric diverges from reality; and missed opportunities for orthogonal impact in other institutions where competition is lower but leverage might be higher.
Potential improvements include transparency first (organizations publishing basic metrics like applicants/hires and time-to-fill to enable evidence-based updating), reframing career advice (explicitly elevating earning-to-give and paths outside traditional EA organizations as equally valid), and coordinating rather than competing (e.g., via "impact portfolios" where community members diversify across approaches).
Hi Brad, thanks for offering your time and thoughts here.
Yes, well, I agree with you - and I think the reputation risk from, as you poetically put it, the divergence of rhetoric from reality, is a real danger to the movement's credibility. I'm getting words and whispers from people in my position who are feeling rather fed up and misled (but not airing that publicly on this post in case it hurts their chances, understandably!). Not getting a job you wanted is always disappointing, but it's the misled aspect that carries the risk.
If 100's of people would come away from job rejections with a sense, not that they've been out-competed, but misled, then the whole movement (which already relies on an ambitious brand mission of, well, saving the world) can quickly start to look... not credible anymore: not as rational or cost effective as it claims to be. Something you dabbled in when you were a student. A passing fancy, not a serious life philosophy or calling.
I don't want this to happen. I think EA is a fantastic movement and I'd like very much to see it keep going from strength to strength. But the hiring situation has become quite unbalanced and I think the reputational risk is being overlooked.
This was so amazing to read - thank you for sharing. Sometimes it honestly feels a bit like gaslighting to be told to “pursue a high-impact career,” when in reality the applicant pool is massive and competition is intense. I subscribe to several newsletters and jobs boards, and then see the same roles and fellowships posted across Slack channels and LinkedIn, which means hundreds if not thousands of people are looking at the same opportunities.
Like many others, I often get the generic “too many applicants to provide individual feedback” email, which makes it hard to know where I stand or how to improve. It would be so valuable to have something more personal that helps place you and gives direction - especially since many of us are working full time and trying to transition careers. Treating job applications like full-time work just isn’t realistic for everyone.
The next step is usually applying for career mentoring or consults, but even there, it’s common to get rejected multiple times before getting a breakthrough. So even the pathway into high-impact jobs can feel like rejection after rejection.
Hi Siobhan,
I find it helpful to think about the (expected) benefits and costs to decide whether to apply to jobs. One can estimate the benefits of completing the 1st stage from "probability of getting an offer conditional on completing the 1st stage"*"value in $ from getting an offer", and a lower (upper) bound for the cost from "value of my time in $/h"*"hours to complete the 1st stage (all the stages)"[1]. It is only worth applying if the benefits are larger than the lower bound for the cost. For example, if one thinks there a 1 % chance of getting an offer conditional on completing the 1st stage, considers an offer to be worth 20 k$[2], values one's time at 20 $/h, and estimates it will take 1 h to complete the 1st stage, and 40 h to complete all the stages, the benefits would be 200 $ (= 0.01*20*10^3), and the cost between 20 (= 20*1) and 400 $ (= 40*10). So the benefits would be 0.5 (= 200/400) to 10 (= 200/20) times the cost, and therefore it seems worth applying.
One can estimate the probability of getting an offer from "offers for similar roles"/"applications for similar roles". If one has never got an offer for a similar role, and has progressed at most to the Nth last stage, the probability of getting an offer can be calculated from ("probability of progressing to the Nth last stage" = "number of times one has progressed to the Nth stage applying for similar roles"/"applications for similar roles")*("probability of getting an offer conditional on completing the Nth last stage" = 1/"expected number of candidates in the Nth last stage"[3]).
This is a lower bound because one would still need more time to complete subsequent stages.
For example, 5 months until getting a new job with 2 k$/month more of net earnings relative to the current job.
Even better, "probability of getting an offer conditional on completing the Nth last stage" = "expected value (E) of the reciprocal of the best guess distribution for the number of candidates in the Nth last stage", as E(1/X) is not equal to 1/E(X), but I do not think it is worth being this rigorous.
Hi Vasco, thanks! That's a very well thought-out and technical way of thinking about things. It does seem to miss an important caveat on what I think is the reality for many people: that we need a job to pay for things. That need pushes one towards applying rather than not, regardless of the relative likelihoods. Also, it's impossible to know those probabilities.
More to the point of my post - do you think open hiring rounds are cost effective in situations where there are suitable candidates already in one's own circles/the circles that one trusts?
You are welcome!
People who currently do not have a job can still use the framework I described with a lower value of their time, which results in a lower cost of applying, and therefore makes applying more often worth it.
I think it is possible to get a sense of the probabilities. If one expects a hiring round to have 100 applicants, and has no more information, a good best guess is that there is a 1 % chance of getting an offer. If one has applied 10 times to similar jobs, but only progressed to the last stage once, and there were 5 people in the last stage, a good best guess is that there is a 10 % chance (= 1/10) of progressing until the last stage, and 20 % (= 1/5) chance of getting an offer conditional on completing the last stage, such that the probability of getting an offer conditional on completing the 1st stage is 2 % (= 0.1*0.2).
I think closed hiring rounds make sense in some cases, but that open hiring rounds are the best option for most cases. I do not have formed views about which organisations should be running closed hiring rounds more often. I personally like open hiring rounds because they give me the chance to decide whether applying is worth it or not based on my sense of the expected benefit and cost.
Have you ever read back on your own post later and thought 'oh no, I hope that didn't come across as snarky'? I'm having that moment right now. The 'more to the point' wasn't meant with that tone, just in case! I meant it as a neutral transition.
What factors make the difference between those two options - some yes, most not? And how are you weighting each? Maybe there's a way of analysing the cost effectiveness of closed vs open rounds.
No worries! I read it as a neutral transition.
Thinking more about it, I would say open hiring rounds are the best option for over 90 % of roles. Closed rounds make the most sense when the hiring managers can reach to many candidates who have already succeeded in a very similar role. For example, people who did well in Ambitious Impact's (AIM) research program (ARP) would be a good fit for reseach roles at AIM, and a rigorous selection process for these roles would be very similar to ARP's selection process.
Phew, wholesome, thank you.
Using your example, why not research roles at other EA-aligned orgs? Is it such a specific skillset that say, RP or WAI or another research-focused org would say 'it's nice that you did the ARP and we recognise that you're currently looking... but we do things so differently here that we need to pay 20k on a hiring round all the same'..?
I think people who completed ARP (like me) will do better in Rethink Priorities's (RP's), and maybe Wild Animal Initiative's (WAI's) selection processes than random applicants. However, I believe RP's and WAI's research is sufficiently different[1] for the very best candidates to differ. Candidates who completed ARP could skip the initial stages, but this would not decrease the overall assessment cost much considering they would be a small fraction of the initial applicants, and the usefulness of having everyone complete the initial stages for greater comparability of the performance of candidates.
In particular, significantly deeper. AIM's research team only has 3 people, Filip, Morgan, and Vicky. WAI's research is also academic, unlike AIM's, and the majority of RP's research.
Once an org has already committed to running an open round no matter the level of talent readily available, I agree, allowing some applicants to skip some part of the process doesn't change the cost much.
I can relate to that. In the past 2 years, I applied for almost 50 positions at 30 EA-aligned organizations, with no success. (Yet, I have 3 PhD's, am president and co-founder of EA Belgium) Especially the remote jobs are extremely competitive.
Hey Dr Dr Dr Stijn, thanks for breaking cover. I hope you're rewarded for your efforts and contributions to the movement soon! It might also be made tougher by what I imagine is an influx of talent since the US aid cuts etc.
Well, I'll probably move to teaching at high school. It got me thinking...
I also feel the increased competition with AI. I underestimated how important it became to learn to use state of the art AI https://80000hours.org/2025/04/to-understand-ai-you-should-use-it-heres-how-to-get-started/
Yes, everybody should invest some time learning how to use AI.
I hope you find a good job soon.
If it helps at all, I solidly reckon that leadership skill development remains one of the best ways to get to the most impactful jobs later in your career, and that most leadership skill development can take place just fine outside of EA.
Thanks Kestrel!
I think I'll have to move outside of EA if I don't get hired soon. Somebody else posted on the Forum recently asking for stories of people who'd left and then come back at a later stage. I didn't see anyone replying and I wonder how often that happens.
I know of several who have gone down the non-EA PhD route and returned to longtermist researcher roles.
I expect those who find stable, very-well-paid increasingly-senior work they enjoy elsewhere don't return, of if they do it's as an EtG donor rather than taking the pay cut implied by an EA-internal job.
I wouldn't exactly count those kinds of people as "not impactful" though. I imagine they're out there doing a bunch of good.
Ok, I should've clarified to only include professional changes, as in somebody who worked for an EA org, worked somewhere else, and then returned to an EA org in a presumably more senior position.
I expect the same as you - once professionals have left, they don't or seldom come back. But that's my speculation only.
I solidly imagine that it's a combination of whatever made you leave, and the fact that once you're out you have no inertial drive pushing you to stay.
Thanks for these interesting thoughts, I agree with lots of what you say!
A few comments:
Hi Aleks, thanks for engaging!
1. That's good. Do you have any thoughts on how often this happens vs open rounds?
2. In my experience, the surplus of applicants is the case regardless of role seniority. I think level of talent is very subjective for soft skills-based roles. In my view, if many people are applying who are able to do the job with decent competence, one cannot call oneself talent-constrained. The jobs themselves don't seem very technical/in need of very unique factors.
3. Yes, I meant once someone has been hired by an EA organisation. I think prioritising getting the very very best comes at a cost that is difficult to justify if one considers themselves to be cost effective, a central tenet of EA, and is by no means guaranteed/the benefit of the first choice vs the second or even the third, fourth, fifth, is hard to pin down.