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Exactly what I’d do if I had to get a job in animal advocacy now
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TL;DR: If I lost my income tomorrow and had to find a role in animal advocacy, I would spend most of my time becoming visible, legible and reachable, and only a minority on a small number of exceptional-fit applications. In 2021 I wrote a long guide to doing formal applications well (which I updated recently), and every tip in it still holds. What’s changed is the ratio and the sequence: AI has raised the floor for looking competent, so polish no longer sorts candidates; judgment and relationships do. Below is the concrete plan I would follow, in two versions: one for early- or mid-career advocates, one for senior people.
AI disclosure: The ideas, arguments and examples in this post come from my own earlier posts and my experience hiring at Hive. I asked Claude to draft this post based on my published writing, then substantially rewrote and edited the result myself.
In 2021, after a five-month job search, I wrote How to Get an EA-Aligned Job. It became my most upvoted EA Forum post, and most of it focused on doing formal applications well: getting CV feedback, preparing for interviews, cultivating references, and tracking your progress. This year I revisited it and published an updated version which incorporates other job-hunting advice I’ve written about.
That advice still holds. But if I were job hunting today, it wouldn't come first.
Two things changed. First, the market got harder: some recent hiring rounds in our space have attracted over 1,300 applicants. Second, AI raised the floor for looking competent. A tidy CV, a well-structured cover letter and a polished test task used to take skill and time; now they take a good prompt. When everyone’s application looks strong, employers stop sorting on polish and start sorting on what AI can’t fake: judgment you can defend and a track record people have observed over time.
So this post reorders my old advice. A weak CV or an unprepared interview will still sink you, and everything in the 2021 guide still applies when you submit your application. What’s changed is the ratio and the sequence. In 2021 I put applications at the centre of the search and treated networking as one tip among twenty. Today I spend roughly two-thirds of my time becoming visible, legible, and reachable, and one-third on a small number of applications where I’m an exceptional fit, executed to the standard the old post describes.
Consider the maths of the old approach. In a competitive market, you can easily find yourself writing 50 to 100 applications, spending 1.5 to 2 hours on each. That is 75 to 200 hours poured into rounds with 1 to 2% acceptance rates, where most of your effort disappears. The same hours spent on surface area serendipity compound: relationships, reputation, and visible work keep paying off whether any single opportunity converts.
I haven’t job hunted since 2022. Instead, I've sat on the other side of the table: four years of hiring, reviewing hundreds of applications, and watching how people in the Hive community find (or don’t find) roles. This post is what I would do if I swapped seats tomorrow, informed by what I now know employers can and cannot see in an application.
I’ve written this as if my network didn’t exist. The honest version of “exactly what I’d do” is that I would message a handful of people and probably have leads within a week. That is useless advice, and it only works because of years of doing exactly what this post describes. So the plans below assume I’m starting without the network and reputation I have now; they're how I would rebuild them. What I can’t strip out are my other advantages: I’m risk-tolerant, and I don’t have caregiving responsibilities. Your constraints (visas, runway, care work, health) change the plan, usually by stretching the timeline and by making a stable non-movement job part of the strategy rather than a fallback. Please critically assess whether this advice applies to you.
Before applying to anything, I would spend the first two weeks on three things.
Decide what I want. There is no point applying for jobs if you don’t know what you want from a job. I would write down the 2 to 3 role types I’m targeting and why, and pressure-test them with one or two people who know the movement.
Make myself legible. I would write a one-line pitch (”I’m looking for an operations role in farmed animal advocacy; my background is X”) and put it everywhere someone might encounter me: LinkedIn headline, community bios, intro messages, onboarding forms. The test I use: if someone met me once, could they later say “this sounds like the person who’s interested in X”? That single association turns a stranger into someone people remember and refer.
Set up the boring infrastructure. A tracker for applications and conversations, a living CV I edit for each role, a list of 5 to 10 potential references I’ll warm up now rather than when a form demands them, and an honest look at my financial runway. If I had less than 6 months of expenses saved, finding stable income would move to the top of the plan.
This is where the ratio flips from my 2021 advice. Most of my weekly hours would go here:
Show up where the movement lives. Join the community spaces, read the forums, attend what I can. Consistency matters more than intensity; disappearing after two weeks resets the trust clock.
Volunteer with a concrete offer. I would never say “I just want to help animals, how can I help?” I would say, “I noticed you don’t repurpose your newsletter content for social media. I have three ideas for how to do it. Want me to trial it for a month?” Skilled volunteering is far less competitive than paid roles, and it builds the references, relationships, and proof of work that applications can’t.
Start one small thing. A newsletter, a meetup, a resource that fills a gap I keep noticing. My own newsletter took 2 to 4 hours a month and eventually became Hive. One project, kept deliberately small so it fits alongside my full-time job.
Make my thinking visible. Short posts, thoughtful comments, and write-ups of what I tried. In a world where anyone can produce polished output, a public track record of how you think is one of the few signals that still cuts through. Audience size is irrelevant; the hiring manager who googles you is an audience of one.
Stay reachable and respond fast. I have watched promising candidates fall out of consideration for various roles simply because they replied three weeks later, after the role was already closed. I would check the inboxes attached to my community profiles at least weekly (or set up email notifications) and reply within days, even if only to acknowledge it.
Speak to superconnectors. A few people in the movement know a lot of people, and they often get requests to refer people for closed rounds. Don’t know who these super connectors are? Ask around. For farmed animal advocacy, feel free to DM any Hive team member, and we’d be happy to refer you where possible.
Only exceptional fits. Instead of 50 mediocre-fit applications, I would do perhaps 10 where I can make a case an employer would find hard to ignore, and I would still apply even when I meet only 60% of the criteria. Don’t reject yourself before they do.
Tailor every application, and send it clean. A generic CV asks the hiring manager to do the work of figuring out how you fit. Most won’t, especially when reviewing 500 applications. I would tailor my CV/cover letter for every role so the match is obvious within 30 seconds, and keep a folder per application with the versions I sent. Then I would run everything through AI to catch typos and unclear sentences before submitting. AI has removed the last excuse for sloppy applications; materials that arrive with errors now signal a lack of attention to detail.
Lead with my own judgment. I would use AI to check my work, never to generate my answers. When everyone uses AI to generate their responses, it’s hard for reviewers to see past “AI speak”. They are looking for a real mind: what would you prioritise, what trade-offs do you see, what would you do differently? If the best model wrote your answer, candidates who used the same model and have the context you lack will beat you.
Prepare before I’m invited. Interview prep, warm up references, and write down offer-evaluation criteria in advance. Application processes crawl for months and then suddenly demand everything within 48 hours.
Two mindsets from my 2021 post that I would keep exactly as they were. Track progress, never just offers: conversations had, people helped, things shipped. And after every interview, pretend you didn’t get it and move on; if the invitation comes, it’s a nice surprise.
One thing I would add now: zoom out the timeline. A 6-month sprint at this market’s odds is a recipe for burnout. I would plan on 12 months or more, take a decent non-movement job to fund the search if needed, and treat that job as career capital rather than defeat. My own first three roles had nothing to do with animals, and I needed every one of them.
Almost none of my earlier posts covered this, because I wrote them as an early or mid-career person. Now that I've spent four years as a founder and ED, here is how the plan changes at the senior level. One note on the thought experiment: a senior person can’t credibly pretend to have no track record, since the track record is what makes you senior. So Plan B assumes your work exists but isn’t currently circulating or working for you, perhaps because you’re changing fields, returning after a break, or your network sits in the wrong place.
Accept that the senior market is mostly invisible. Senior roles are rarely won through open rounds. They are closed searches, created roles, and “who should we involve?” conversations among a small number of trusted people. That was true of how we hired Kevin as Hive’s Managing Director: a role I would never have advertised publicly, because it required trust that only builds over time. The implication: for a senior person, the plan's surface-area share rises from two-thirds to nearly everything.
Tell the superconnectors, deliberately. Every movement has 20 to 30 people who hear about senior openings before they exist: funders, board members, community builders, recruiters. I would make a list and tell each of them, specifically, what I’m looking for and when I’m available. Vague availability gets vague results; “I’m looking for an ED or COO role at an organisation of 5 to 20 people, available from March” gets remembered.
Use consulting and interim work as the front door. At senior level, the equivalent of skilled volunteering is fractional and interim work: an interim ops lead, a fundraising sprint, a strategy review. It usually pays, lets both sides test fit with low stakes, and often creates roles. Board seats and advising serve the same function on a smaller scale.
Publish a point of view. For senior people, this matters even more, because what’s being bought is judgment. A handful of pieces showing how you think about the movement’s real problems does more than any CV.
Ask honestly whether the right role exists. Sometimes the best senior opportunity is one you build: a new organisation, a spin-out, a gap nobody is filling. That path has its own long timeline and risks, which I’ve written about elsewhere, but at senior level it belongs on the options list next to employment, evaluated with the same decision tools. I recently wrote about all the public options available to start a new org.
Tailoring still applies. When a senior application does happen, whether a formal round or a two-page note to a board, the same rule holds as at junior level: make your fit for this specific role obvious, and run it through AI before sending so nothing sloppy goes out under your name. At senior level, a typo costs even more, because attention to detail is usually part of what’s being assessed.
Budget for a longer runway. Senior searches are slower because there are fewer roles and higher stakes on both sides. I would plan financially for 12 to 18 months and fill the gap with paid fractional work rather than waiting.
Strip away the seniority and the two plans are the same plan: be clear about what you want, be somewhere people can observe you doing good work over time, be easy to find and quick to respond, and save your application effort for the handful of roles where you’re a strong case, then tailor those applications until your fit is unmissable and check them until they’re flawless. Timing stays out of your control at every level. What you control is whether you are visible, legible and reachable.
If you’ve found a role recently, junior or senior, which of these mattered most for you? And what would you add? I’d love to hear from you.
Hi, I’m Sofia Balderson. I lead Hive, a global community for people working to end factory farming. This is a link post from my Substack, Notes from the Margin to share the messier, more personal reflections that don’t fit in formal updates. If you care about leading, belonging, or building something that matters (especially from the edges), feel free to subscribe here.
