Introduction

Being ambitious and applying to stuff has an obvious rationale: maybe you get a really cool role!

However, this reason alone misses out on a bunch of the concrete outcomes junior people in particular can benefit from in applications that don’t land a job directly:

1. Increasing confidence
2. Getting concrete feedback about what you need to improve on
3. Testing fit through applications
4. Trying to figure out what sort of jobs exist and what you’d actually be interested in
5. Increasing your network very quickly
6. Getting into the referrals cycle

Use applications to intentionally learn about yourself, the field you want to work in and increase your chances of getting cool roles in the future by iterating on feedback and getting on people’s radars!

Specifically approach these as an experiment where “failure” is seen as useful information that changes how you think. Make sure to record these experiments in an application tracker and reflect and grow from them!

Increasing confidence

Being able to take a rejection, reflect on it and repeat the cycle is tough but trains a type of resilience lots of young, smart people might not be used to.

As a student or early career professional, you might not be used to rejection, maybe you’re a super conscientious worker who gets top grades, that’s great, but probably means you’ve been set up to thrive in a setting unlike any impactful setting you’d ever actually want to be in!

Being able to take rejections gets you ready for the real world and being confident enough to do high stakes, important things that can lead to rejection. If your current rejection rate is low, this could indicate a lack of ambition where you stick to roles you are unlikely to learn from and do more with.

Concrete Feedback

As a junior person, it can be really hard to identify directions to push in. Maybe you care about AI going well, but what needs to happen for you to actually contribute to this problem? 

Maybe you’ve done a bunch of reflection and written a great career memo, that’s awesome,  but only one part of the problem. To have the most impact, you probably need some org or another to hire you or at least support your work and for that to happen, having input on what such organisations want from a potential employee is needed.

Lots of orgs look for things that aren’t obvious, and it can be really hard to know you’re not great, or even bad, at them. Going through applications and seeing why you get rejected gives you some real evidence of the skills you need to build to unlock higher leverage positions for you to have an impact.

I’d recommend having an Application Tracker (Template Here!) where you record all of your feedback and invest in improving on those areas, especially if you’d like to work for that org in future.

It can also be motivating to track how far you get in various applications over time and whether you get feedback on similar things repeatedly (caveat that applications are noisy and have lots of randomness, so your trend overtime could be filled with false negatives)

Testing Fit

Similarly, figuring out your personal fit is basically guesswork influenced by your experience. However, you likely don’t have much experience of the work you’d be doing at a given org unless you’ve already done similar things.

A common suggestion is to run “cheap, fast experiments” to get some evidence of your fit. A concrete way to run such experiments is going through applications that are directly assessing your ability to do the sort of work you’re exploring your fit for.

It can be difficult to have a tangible sense of what “programmes” work actually is without getting a chance to jump around the tasks you’d actually be context switching between. Work Trials are an excellent chance to get to try such things out and get more of a sense of how you find the work.

Mapping the Option Space

Doing helpful things is hard when it’s unclear who’s doing what, what concrete workflows and outputs are useful and what it would “feel like” to do this stuff.

Talking to people about a space is helpful to get their model of the situation and thinking about what sorts of work might be useful is great, especially if it surfaces work that no one is currently doing.

However, to develop a proper map of what YOU could be doing, it’s important to actually engage with the options yourself. Scrolling through job boards (e.g. 80K, Probably Good, AI Safety), reading job description (JDs) and completing the trial tasks in applications.

Networking

One way to ensure you get a call with a senior, exciting person at an org you’re interested in working for is to apply and get an interview! Talking to people is one of the most impactful things you can do to advance your career by getting informed opinions from people who have some relevant context and judgements about you and have shareable experience in the field you are wanting to move into.

The interview itself can be a good opportunity to have an expert give their quick take on some question you’re wrestling with, which is unlikely to come up randomly.

Also, people are far more likely to respond to you in future and respond to favours once they have some baseline association of who you are (given you don’t make a bad impression). Plucky young people who have some potential to be great leave a good impression and people in impact spaces are generally keen to invest in their development.

Another good outcome is applying for a job you don’t get but coming back later having enacted the feedback when you’re more able to do the role.

Referrals

For better or worse, the world of AI Safety especially, though I would guess this is true for many small community based fields, runs on referrals and impressions.

Hiring managers use referrals from trusted orgs as a strong indicator of someone’s potential in a role. They’re a helpful foot in the door for starting future applications with other orgs on a good note.

One area that may not be obvious is how referrals can get you into closed hiring rounds you would have literally no chance of being considered for otherwise. Different orgs have different ratios of open:closed hiring rounds, but from my experience, many strongly prefer a trusted recommendation over long, time intensive hiring rounds, with some hiring from referrals more than open hiring rounds.

Conclusion

Applications are experiments. To get the best model of the field, you and the person you want to become to do “the thing” you really care about, you need to gather information through experimentation. Rejection is information gain, not failure.

Go apply for things that seem wildly ambitious.

You might get it, but if not, you can get a bunch of helpful takeaways.