After one year of applying for EA jobs: It is really, really hard to get hired by an EA organisation

Adding some more data from my own experience last year.

Personally, I'm glad about some aspects of it and struggled with others, and there are some things I wish I had done differently, at least in hindsight. But here I just mean to quickly provide data I have collected anyway in a 'neutral' way, without implying anything about any particular application.

Total time I spent on 'career change' in 2018: at least 220h, of which at least about 101h were for specific applications. (The rest were things like: researching job and PhD opportunities; interviewing people about their jobs and PhD programs; asking people I've worked with for input and feedback; reflection before I decided in January to quit my previous job at the EA Foundation by April.) This does neither include 1 week I spent in in San Francisco to attend EAG SF and during which I was able to do little other work nor 250h of self-study that seems robustly useful but which I might not have done otherwise. (Nor 6 full weeks plus about 20h afterwards I spent doing an internship at an EA org, which overall I'm glad I did but might not have done otherwise.)

• Open Phil Research Analyst - rejected after conversation notes test - 16h [edit: worth noting that they offered compensation for the time spent on the trial task]
• OpenAI Fellows program - after more than 6 months got a rejection email encouraging me to apply again within the next 12 months - 5h [plus 175h studying machine learning including 46h on a project I tried to do specifically for that application - I count none of this as application cost because I think it was quite robustly useful]
• BERI project manager application - rejected immediately (the email was ambiguous between a regular desk reject and them actually not hiring at all for that role for now) - 1h
• Travelling to EAG SF from Germany to get advice on my career and find out about jobs - ~1 full week plus something between USD 1,000 and 5,000, which was between 10% and 50% of my liquid runway
• CEA Summer Research Fellowship [NB this was a 6-week internship, not a full-time role] - got an offer and accepted - 4.5h
• 2nd AI safety camp (October) [NB the core of this was a 1-2 week event organized by 'grassroots' efforts, and nothing that comes with funding above covering expenses] - got an offer and accepted - 1.2h
• FHI Research Scholars Programme - got an offer and accepted [this is what I'm doing currently] - 30h
• AI Impacts researcher - withdrew my application after the 1st interview because I accepted the FHI RSP offer - 44h [NB this was because I 'unilaterally' spent way more time to create a work sample than anyone had asked me to do, and in a quite inefficient way; I think one could have done an application in 1-5h if one had had a shovel-ready work sample. Again I'm excluding an additional 64h of teaching myself basic data processing and visualization skills with R because I think they are robustly useful.]

[I did manual time tracking so there might be some underestimation, with the error varying a lot between applications. A systematic error is that I never logged time spent in job interviews, but this is overall negligible.]

(I feel slightly nervous about sharing this. But I think the chance that it contributes to identifying if there are valuable changes to make in the overall talent/job landscape and messaging is well worth the expected cost; and also that as someone with a fixed-term but full-time job at an EA org I'm well-positioned to take some risks.)

I really like the specific numbers people are posting. I'll add my own (rough estimates) from the ~5 months I spent applying to roles in 2018.

Context: In spring 2018, I attended an event CEA ran for people with an interest in operations, because Open Phil referred me to them; this is how I wound up deciding to apply to most of the roles below. Before attending the operations event, I'd started two EA groups, one of which still existed, and spent ~1 year working 5-10 hours/week as a private consultant for a small family foundation, doing a combination of research and operations work. All of the below experiences were specific to me; others may have gone through different processes based on timing, available positions, prior experience with organizations, etc.

• CEA (applied to many positions, interviewed for all of them at once, didn't spend much additional time vs. what I'd have done if I just applied to one)
• ~4 hours of interview time before the work trial, including several semi-casual conversations with CEA staff at different events about roles they had open.
• ~2-hour work trial task, not very intense compared to Open Phil's tasks
• 1.5-week work trial at CEA; there were approximately as many open positions as there were work trial candidates, and I'm not sure anyone went through a trial of this length and wasn't hired (though this might have happened). I was paid at a standard hourly rate for this, so it came out to ~$1500.
• Open Phil (research)
• They reused my conversation notes and charity evaluation test from a previous GiveWell application (those took me ~8 hours total, so perhaps I should count it as ~4 hours per application)
• The first interview took ~30 minutes (and was more of a Q&A for my benefit, not something that required too much preparation).
• The next work trial was ~12 hours (I worked until almost the maximum time permitted; we were instructed not to spend more than this, and to submit an incomplete application if we ran out of time).
• The second interview was ~75 minutes, and pretty intense, but not something I was asked to study for in a particular way.
• When you include the resume + initial submission, this adds up to 18-22 hours (depending on how you count the reused conversation notes), for which I was paid $1100 ($300 for notes, $800 for work test). That was better than my freelance writing rate at the time, so while it was time-consuming, it wasn't totally unsustainable.
• These hours were spread out over months of waiting time, which wasn't ideal, but given the many hundreds of people who applied, I'm not surprised the process took a while (I'd guess that staff spent something like 500 hours grading research tests and conducting follow-up interviews with the last round of candidates, which is a full month of work for three people).
• Open Phil (operations)
• Started with a ~45-minute informational interview (mostly for me to ask questions, didn't require much prep)
• Work test in the 2-8-hour recommended range, paid at $24/hour for up to 8 hours (which read to me as a strong signal of "don't spend more time than this", though I understand the pressure to keep going). It took me 2.5 hours for the four-page assignment; it was an email rather than a research report, so a bit less stressful to finish.
• I joined that hiring process fairly late, and someone else was hired before I got any further. When a new position opened a few months later, Open Phil asked me to come in for a one-day visit, and they were flexible enough that I was able to combine this with another trip to the Bay for interviews (the price of flexibility, of course, is that everything takes longer for each applicant -- it's a tough tradeoff).
• The visit was a full day, but didn't involve much "work", per se; there were ~3 hours of interviews, with the rest of the time spent on between-interview breaks, casual lunch with other operations staff (no interviews), and a visit to the daily morning meeting for ops staff.
• Total: Counting travel as "half time", 10-12 hours.
• MIRI (operations)
• One-hour interview to learn more about the position; I was also asked some questions, but this was more of a screening for "do you understand what MIRI does, and why".
• Initial one-hour test as part of their standard recruiting process for all staff (30 minutes of quantitative reasoning, 30 minutes of logic puzzles). I don't think this was a stage in and of itself, but I could be wrong (I think I was always going to do the work test).
• ~4 hours of work tests in the MIRI office, plus a ~one-hour interview with a MIRI staffer I'd likely have worked with as part of the role (very casual, mostly me asking questions).
• Total: 8 hours with travel as "half time" (this was done as part of a trip I made to the Bay to work through several interviews). I was paid $120 for my time on the work tests.
• Ought (COO role)
• Three interviews of ~4 hours total, which were fairly "work-like" (I was answering more questions than I asked, or discussing trial tasks)
• ~3 hours spent on two trial tasks; no time recommendations were given, but the work was light ("think about this brief technical article and be ready to explain it", "think about whether we should hire someone with this resume" -- I wasn't submitting any writing, just discussing the assignments in my interviews)
• I didn't get to the "work trial" stage for this position (though I don't know whether there was one -- they may have just trialed their one favorite candidate).
• Total: ~7 hours of work, all remote, and I was paid $250. Ought gets bonus points for giving me very good feedback on the ways in which my last trial task wasn't up to par.
• Vox (journalist and engagement manager positions, Future Perfect)
• ~7 hours on an initial work assignment, plus a 30-minute phone screening for me to ask questions. The journalist assignment took roughly the same amount of time as the engagement manager assignment.
• I didn't move beyond that in the process. Amusingly, the only non-EA organization I applied to led to my doing the greatest amount of unpaid work.
• AI Impacts (operations/research role, it's a tiny organization and I'd have been a jack-of-all-trades)
• ~2 hours of initial interviews before being offered a work trial
• Because the role was nebulous, I wound up planning my own work trial together with AI Impacts staff. I estimated that the work would take ~20 hours total (paid at $30/hour), but wound up accepting a CEA position before starting in on the tasks.
• CHAI (communications/executive assistant role)
• Two interviews of ~2.5 hours total (of this, 1.5 hours was talking to Stuart Russell, which was much more exciting for me than for him).
• ...and that's it. I received an offer (I think they had very few candidates) without a further work trial.
• BERI (project manager)
• Two interviews of ~1.5 hours total, nothing beyond that (no offer)

I also had some exploratory conversations with people at a couple of other organizations, but accepted the CEA position before getting to a formal interview.

All told, if I throw in ~5 hours for updating my resume and writing a few brief "cover letter" notes (huge props to the orgs I applied to for not requiring formal cover letters), I spent ~70 hours interviewing (with travel at half time) and was paid $1530 (outside the CEA work trial, which was another 60 hours and $1500). I'm not sure how to think about time costs from travel, but I got to meet a lot of interesting people and eat some free meals along the way.

I didn't find any process especially aggravating, though there were small adjustments I'd suggest for some organizations (mostly the small ones that hadn't done much interviewing). I think I was compensated fairly, and most of my interviews were genuinely useful to me, both for learning about the particular organization and for getting a better sense of my own strengths, weaknesses, and goals.

I agree with some of the criticism on this page, but I also want to point out some really good things EA orgs do with hiring:

• Cross-referencing!
• Open Phil passed me along to CEA as a possible operations candidate when they hired someone before I finished making it through their pipeline, and I wouldn't have applied for most of these positions if they hadn't done so.
• Open Phil also reused my GiveWell tests so I didn't have to write new conversation notes.
• CHAI passed notes from one of my interviews to BERI when I was still applying for the latter role.
• After I volunteered at a CEA event after the operations retreat, they passed my name to MIRI, who hired me to work on operations for some of their retreats, which helped me learn about their open position. These organizations talk to each other, and in my experience, that's been a good thing.
• No cover letters! (I said this once before, but it's worth saying again.)
• Compensation for time spent on work trials! It's possible that orgs should also compensate for interviews, but the work-trial payments put EA leagues ahead of some other industries. I certainly never got paid for any of the cover letters I wrote in college, or the hours of math tests and debate prep I had to do while applying for jobs at investment firms.
• Not having everything be interview-based! I don't interview well, and spent a lot of time in college wondering whether I'd just screwed something up in an interview without noticing. My work trials, on the other hand, are concrete and visible, and if I don't get accepted to a position, there's at least a chance that I can learn something by reviewing my work.

I really wish we (as an EA community) didn't work so hard to accidentally make earning to give so uncool. It's a job that is well within the reach of anyone, especially if you don't have unrealistic expectations of how much money you need to make and donate to feel good about your contributions. It's also a very flexible career path and can build you good career capital along the way.

Sure talent gaps are pressing, but many EA orgs also need more money. We also need more people looking to donate, as the current pool of EA funding feels very over-concentrated in the hands of too few decision-makers right now.

I also wish we didn't accidentally make donating to AMF or GiveDirectly so uncool. Those orgs could continually absorb the money of everyone in EA and do great, life-saving work.

(Also, not to mention all the career paths that aren't earning to give or "work in an EA org"...)

Just want to add my voice to the many who have already said: thank you for sharing this. It must have taken some courage.

My own experience has been similar (though I'm far less qualified than the OP).

I've recently graduated from one of the top ~10 universities worldwide, after investing heavily in EA throughout my studies. While a student, EA was the biggest thing in my life. I read a lot, and several of my EA peers told me I stood out as particularly well-informed about EA topics, especially long-termist ones. Eventually I contributed some of my own research too. I also invested enormous amounts of time in student EA projects. Many people, including ones I thought well-informed about the talent landscape, fully expected that I would go work for an 'EA organisation'. Naively, I believed it too.

Over the last seven months, I've made over 20 unsuccessful job applications (I keep a spreadsheet). This has increased the severity of my depression and anxiety. Over time, I began to shed my identity as an EA, no doubt as a self-defence mechanism. Now I'm very disillusioned about my ability to contribute to the long-termist project.

Just wanted to say I appreciate this post and I feel you. I had a very similar feeling when applying to receive coaching from 80K. I think they've improved their message since I applied, but at the time I didn't fully realize the type of person they were taking was literally the going to Harvard, in the middle of a machine learning Phd type.

I also feel like generally there's a huge under-utilization of talent in EA. I see so many cases of smart, motivated people who may not have literally the best resume ever, but could be extremely helpful *somewhere*. It's strange considering the emphasis on talent constraints.

I don't have an easy solution unfortunately and it does seem to be a really hard problem, but the Teach for America like funnel that I believe Nick Beckstead recommended and was brought up in a recent EA forum post seems really promising to me.

In a similar vein, I don't mean to pick on 80K - of course they do great work - but I'm confused why they don't just hire more career coaches. I realize they want to remain lean and have a really strong team, but I think they only have 2 coaches. That number is going to leave a lot of promising EAs wandering in the dark for a while.

p.s. I also know of an EA that applied to EA orgs for a long time and got rejected by all of them. They now work at one of the FAANG companies.

Some related half-baked thoughts:

[Epistemic status: I appreciate that there are people who've thought about the EA talent landscape systematically and have access to more comprehensive information, e.g. perhaps some people at 80K or people doing recruiting for major EA orgs. I would therefore place significantly more weight on their impressions. I'm not one of these people. My thoughts are based on (i) having talked 10-100 hours with other EAs about related things over the last year, mostly in a non-focussed way, (ii) having worked full-time for 2 EA organizations (3 if one counts a 6-week internship), (iii) having hired 1-5 people for various projects at the Effective Altruism Foundation, (iv) having spent about 220h on changing my career last year, see another comment. I first heard of EA around October 2015, and have been involved in the community since April 2016. Most of that time I spent in Berlin, then over last summer and since October in Oxford.]

• I echo the impression that several people I've talked to - including myself - were or are overly focussed on finding a job at a major EA org. This applies both in terms of time spent and number of applications submitted, and in terms of more fuzzy notions such as how much status or success is associated with roles. I'm less sure if I disagreed with these people about the actual impact of 'EA jobs' vs. the next best option, but it's at least plausible to me that (relative to my own impression) some of them overvalue the relative impact of 'EA jobs'. E.g. my own guess is that a machine learning graduate course is competitive with most 'EA jobs' one could do well without such an education. [I think this last belief of mine is somewhat unusual and at least some very thoughtful people in EA disagree with me about this.]
• I think several people were in fact too optimistic about getting an 'EA job'. It's plausible they could have accessed information (e.g. do a Fermi estimate of how many people will apply for a role) that would have made them more pessimistic, but I'm not sure.
• I know at least 2 people who unsuccessfully applied to a large number of 'EA jobs'. (I'm aware there are many more.) I feel confident that they have several highly impressive relevant skills, e.g. because I've seen some of their writing and/or their CVs. I'm aware I don't know the full distribution of their relevant skills, and that the people who made the hiring decisions are in a much better position to make them than I. I'm still left with a subjective sense of "wow, these people are really impressive, and I find it surprising that they could not find a job". This contributes to (i) me feeling more pressure to perform well in and more doubtful about the counterfactual impact of my current role because I have a visceral sense that 'the next best candidate would have been about as good as I or better' / 'it would in some sense be tragic or unfair if I don't perform well' (these aren't endorsed beliefs, but still affect me) , (ii) me being more reluctant to introduce new people into the EA community because and I don't want them to make frustrating experiences, (iii) me being worried that some of my friends and other community members will make frustrating experiences [which costs attention and life satisfaction but also sometimes time e.g. when talking with someone about their frustration - as an aside, I'd guess that the burden of emotional labor of the latter kind is disproportionately shouldered by relatively junior women in the community]. (None of these effects are very large. I don't want to make this sound more dramatic than it is, but overall I think there are non-negligible costs even for someone like me who got one of the competitive jobs.)
• I agree that identifying and promoting impactful roles outside of EA orgs may be both helpful for the 'EA job market' and impactful independently. I really like that the 80K job board sometimes includes such roles. I wonder if there is a diffusion of responsibility problem where identifying such jobs is no-one's main goal and therefore doesn't get done even if it would be valuable. [I also appreciate that this is really hard and costs a lot of time, and what I perceive to be 80K's strategy on this, i.e. focussing on in-depth exploration of particularly valuable paths such as US AI policy, seems on the right track to me.]
• I think communication around this is really hard in general, and something that is particularly tricky for people like me and most EAs that are young and have little experience with similar situations. I also think there are some unavoidable trade-offs between causing frustration and increasing the expected quality of applicants for important roles. I applaud 80K for having listened to concerns around this in the past and having taken steps such as publishing a clarifying article on 'talent constraints'. I think as a community we can still do better, but I'm optimistic that the relevant actors will be able to do so and certain that they have good intentions. I've seen EA leaders have valuable and important conversations around this, but it's not quite clear to me if anyone in particular 'owns' optimizing the EA talent landscape at large, and so again wonder if there is a diffusion of responsibility issue that prevents 'easy wins' such as better data/feedback collection from getting done (while also being open to the possibility that 'optimizing the EA talent landscape' is too broad or fuzzy for one person to focus on it).

Thanks for this, we can clearly do better. Some ideas:

• When you recruit as an org, be 100% transparent on the number of applicants you have for a given position, so that people don’t overestimate their chances.
• As a community, let's do more to promote the creation of more impactful orgs (e.g. through communications and increased funding for early-stage initiatives)
• Scale existing orgs by following best practices so that they can recruit more. Get experienced mentors on board if needed.
• Stop talking as if there was a binary divide between what is “EA” and what is “non-EA”. This is a spectrum, and we should promote way more than just the usual ~20 EA orgs as good career options (it seems we are getting better at this, but there's still a long way to go).
• Make it easier for EAs to collaborate on projects (e.g. by creating an online project platform), so that they can still have an impact even when they can’t or won’t be hired in an org. This could also boost the creation of new orgs that could then hire later on.

More emotional data point that I wish I'd seen people expressing when I was new:

If you are excited about EA, relatively new, and eager to get involved in a way that looks something like "make this my career" rather than "make this a notable interest in my life," I think you should expect to feel a ton of significant pain, and reflect carefully on if that's worth it for you.

My experience trying to "break in" to the EA movement's professional class has at times made me feel like a worse person, less connected to my work, less confident in my ability to try my best, and basically more deeply miserable than any other professional situation I've been in by far. Other people I've met have described similar emotional experiences, or said their friends have had them.

If you've always had an easy/nice time at work, it can be hard to appreciate how bad this can feel up front.

I am not convinced that even people who succeed are particularly happy. I suspect it is happier on balance to have an ordinary job, read interesting things about altruism online, occasionally give talks at your local college, and give away 10% of your income to a highly effective charity.

If you don't have a strong reason to believe you have an advantage here, and you're not willing to substantially reduce your personal wellbeing for at least a year, I suggest being very wary of "all hands on deck" sorts of messaging and to put as few of your eggs in the "maybe I'll be a professional EA" basket as possible.

I really appreciate you writing this. You are not the first person to consider doing so and I applaud you for actually doing it.

People interested in this topic should read this post about how EAF ran their hiring round. They seem to have a good setup: only 25% of applicants were asked to take a work test, and only 25% of those tested were invited to a work trial (the other 64 of 68 were estimated to have invested <10 hours).

I'd love to see other organizations within the EA community publish similar numbers, though I understand that it can be tricky (e.g. someone might learn they were the only person interviewed who didn't make it to the next stage).

Great post. I'm sure writing this must have been tough, so thanks very much for sharing this.

I wonder how much of the interview/work stuff is duplicated between positions - if there's a lot of overlap, then maybe it would be useful for someone to create the EA equivalent of TripleByte - run initial interviews/work projects with a third party organization to evaluate quality, pass along to most relevant EA jobs.

Thank you and respect for having written this. I really appreciate this, particularly you being open about this having been mentally challenging for you and the concrete data on time cost you provide.

Thanks for sharing this; strong upvoted! As someone running hiring rounds for EA orgs, this helped me better understand the perspective of applicants.

Meta note: I believe this is now the most upvoted EA forum post of all time by a wide margin. Seems like it struck a chord with a lot of people. It's probably worthwhile for people to write follow-up posts exploring issues related to human capital allocation, since it is a pretty central challenge for the movement. Example prompts:

• Brainstorming Task Y for someone with an absurdly impressive resume.
• Does the high difficulty of getting a job at an EA organization mean we should stop promoting EA? (What are the EA movement's current bottlenecks?)
• Consequentialist cluelessness and how it relates to funding speculative projects and early-stage organizations (some previous discussion here).

As an employer, I still think about this post three years after it was published, and I regularly hear it referenced in conversations about hiring in EA. The experiences in it clearly resonated with a lot of people, as evidenced by the number of comments and up votes. I think it's meaningfully influenced the frame of many hiring rounds at EA organizations over the past three years.

CEA run the EA community fund to provide financial support EA community group leaders.

The key metric that CEA for evaluating the success of the groups they fund is the number of people from each local group who reach interview stage for high impact jobs, which largely means jobs within EA organisations. Bonus points available if they get the job.

This information feels like a relevant piece of the puzzle for anyone thinking through these issues. It could be (that in hindsight) CEA pushing chapter organisers to push people to focus on jobs in EA organisations in many ways might not be the best strategy.

I'm sorry to see so many orgs take 10+ hours to get you only partway through the process, let alone multiple 40+ hour processes. This is especially glaring compared to the very low number of orgs that rejected you in under 5 hours.

It sounds like many of these orgs would benefit (both you and themselves!) from improving their evaluations to reject people earlier in the process.

My team at Wave's current technical interview process is under 10 hours over 4 stages (assuming you spend 1 hour on your cover letter and resume); the majority of rejections happen after less than 5 hours. The non-technical interview process is somewhat longer, but I would guess still not more than 15 hours and with the majority of applications being rejected in under 5 hours (the final interview is a full day).

Notably, we do two work samples, a 2hr one (where most applicants are rejected) and a 4-5hr one for the final interview. If I were interviewing for a non-technical role I'd insert a behavioral interview after the first work sample as well. These shorter interviews help us screen out many candidates before we waste a ton of their time. It's hard for me to imagine needing 8+ hours for a work sample unless the role is extremely complex and requires many different skills.