Just quickly noting the Forum hosted two AMAs recently that might be helpful to browse through (or still engage with!). One was with career advisors, one with recruiters. 

Good luck with your job search Taylor and thank you for trying to find an impactful job and for posting here asking for advice!

EA-"branded" jobs are often heavily oversubscribed by people who've spent years hanging around EA. Make of it what you will - EAs tend to stick hard to other EAs if they can, and there's a lot of ingroup bias. EAs are also really awkward about this whole ingroup bias thing, so I'm not surprised it didn't get mentioned.

There's also an issue (from a community perspective) where EA organisations can overpromote applications to their roles because they're (overly?) interested in maximising to find the best applicant because of mindsets core to how EA operates - maximisation, heavy-tailed distributions, etc. Which means a whole load of talented people get encouraged to apply and then rejected, constantly.

It's a fair fact that without any track record of successful EA work, you're heavily selected against in extremely competitive applications rounds. So if you're really motivated, my advice is: get that track record. Which is hard, given you can't get an EA role. But there's stuff you can do on your own initiative.

I'll make the same offer Joseph did; I'd be happy to talk to you in depth about this post, review a resume, and try to be otherwise helpful. I've run some hiring processes, failed some applications, and had a lot of conversations with people in similar positions (thanks to this post).

What you write aligns with the challenges we see from our advisees, and based on your profile, you may be a good fit for our career advising program if you are open to working on AI Risk reduction.

For people we have helped in our program, we typically see transition timelines of 6-18 months, but just today I talked with someone for whom it took two years. My colleague Moneer wrote about his experiences in getting into a position, which included taking 170 actions (like applications, 1-1s, projects). This can seem like a lot, but it comes down to 3 per week on average over a year.

You don't have to have an academic background to succeed (I never went to university myself), but regardless of your qualifications, be prepared for it to take time to find a position. In our advising, we emphasize the importance of building networks, conducting informational interviews, and getting more information on how to position oneself as a promising candidate.

That being said, you might be able to have a higher counterfactual impact if you find a position that is not in one of the well-known orgs - I would keep that in mind.

If you want, I'd be happy to have a conversation, give you feedback, review your resume, etc. I've been involved in hiring for quite a few years, including at multiple EA organizations. I also know from personal experience how rough it is to send out many, many applications without success.