(I am writing this post under a pseudonym because I don’t want potential future non-EA employers to find this with a quick google search. Initially my name could be found on the CV linked in the text, but after this post was shared much more widely than I had expected, I got cold feet and removed it.)
In the past 12 months, I applied for 20 positions in the EA community. I didn’t get any offer. At the end of this post, I list all those positions, and how much time I spent in the application process. Before that, I write about why I think more posts like this could be useful.
Please note: The positions were all related to long-termism, EA movement building, or meta-activities (e.g. grant-making). To stress this again, I did not apply for any positions in e.g. global health or animal welfare, so what I’m going to say might not apply to these fields.
Costs of applications
Applying has considerable time-costs. Below, I estimate that I spent 7-8 weeks of full-time work in application processes alone. I guess it would be roughly twice as much if I factored in things like searching for positions, deciding which positions to apply for, or researching visa issues. (Edit: Some organisations reimburse for time spent in work tests/trials. I got paid in 4 of the 20 application processes. I might have gotten paid in more processes if I had advanced further).
At least for me, handling multiple rejections was mentally challenging. Additionally, the process may foster resentment towards the EA community. I am aware the following statement is super in-accurate and no one is literally saying that, but sometimes this is the message I felt I was getting from the EA community:
“Hey you! You know, all these ideas that you had about making the world a better place, like working for Doctors without Borders? They probably aren’t that great. The long-term future is what matters. And that is not funding constrained, so earning to give is kind of off the table as well. But the good news is, we really, really need people working on these things. We are so talent constraint… (20 applications later) … Yeah, when we said that we need people, we meant capable people. Not you. You suck.”
Why I think more posts like this would have been useful for me
Overall, I think it would have helped me to know just how competitive jobs in the EA community (long-termism, movement building, meta-stuff) are. I think I would have been more careful in selecting the positions I applied for and I would probably have started exploring other ways to have an impactful career earlier. Or maybe I would have applied to the same positions, but with less expectations and less of a feeling of being a total loser that will never contribute anything towards making the world a better place after being rejected once again 😊
Of course, I am just one example, and others will have different experiences. For example, I could imagine that it is easier to get hired by an EA organisation if you have work experience outside of research and hospitals (although many of the positions I applied for were in research or research-related).
However, I don’t think I am a very special case. I know several people who fulfil all of the following criteria:
- They studied/are studying at postgraduate level at a highly competitive university (like Oxford) or in a highly competitive subject (like medical school)
- They are within the top 5% of their course
- They have impressive extracurricular activities (like leading a local EA chapter, having organised successful big events, peer-reviewed publications while studying, …)
- They are very motivated and EA aligned
- They applied for at least 5 positions in the EA community and got rejected in 100% of the cases.
I think I also fulfil all these criteria. Here is my CV roughly at the time when I was doing the applications. It sports such features as ranking 16th out of around 6000 German medical students, and 8 peer-reviewed publications while studying.
Without further ado, here are all the ...
Positions I got rejected from in the last 12 months
I also include the stage that I was rejected at and how much time I had invested in the application process (Mostly work tests, but also researching organisations, adapting personal statements, preparing for interviews. I am counting “lost productivity” here, so I am also counting travel time weighted at around 50%).
Position – how far I got– how much time I invested in the application
Chief of Staff at Will MacAskill’s Office – stage 2/2: didn’t get an offer after 2 days worktrial – 32 h
OpenPhil Research Analyst – stage 2/4 (?): rejected after conversation notes work test – 22 h
OpenPhil biosecurity early career researcher grant – stage 1/1: no grant – 40 h
EA grants evaluator (CEA) – stage 2/X: rejected after first interview – 7 h
FHI Research scholar programme – stage 2/3: rejected after second work test – 50 h
Effective giving uk researcher – Stage 3/3 (?): no offer after what I think was the final interview – 15 h
LEAN manager – Stage 2/?: rejected after work test – 6 h
CEA operations specialist – stage 3/?: rejected after interview – 9 h
CEA local group specialist – stage 2/?: rejected after work-test – 12 h
2x FHI academic project manager (GovAI and research scholar programme) – Stage 2/2: no offer after final interview – 10 h each
Toby Ord research assistant – Stage 2/?: rejected after work test - 12 h
Center for Health Security research analyst – initiative application and interview, but they decided not to hire at all – 10 h
Nuclear Threat initiative researcher – initiative application, never heard back – 1 h
CSER biosecurity postdoc – stage 1/? – 3 h
CSER academic project manager – stage 1/? – 2 h
GPI Head of Research Operations – Stage 4/4: No offer after in-person work trial – 32 h
And here are additional positions I applied for but then did not complete the application process:
COO Ought – stopped following up after first stage because of visa issues – 4 h (but much more if you count me researching said visa issues)
Researcher Veddis – I decided not to go on the final stage work trial – 6 h
Program Manager/Investigator at BERI– I decided not to do the final stage work test – 15 h
I ran my first hiring process to hire someone for an EA role last year and was amazed how long it took me. I’ve hired around 20 times in the past and only spent a couple weeks and 20-40h per role. Last year I spent 8 months and hundreds of hours. I reflected afterwards on why and can list a few hypotheses:
normally rely heavily on gut to build my shortlist. Did not feel comfortable doing this for this role as it felt like there were so many failure modes for a bad hire. Both ways that a hire could go badly and severity of impact for a hire going badly.
normally relying on intuition heavily is highly reversible. Worst case scenario I have to fire the candidate after probation, I’ll never see them again and no one knows them. I’m open with candidates that this is my policy and that they should be careful accepting an offer. In EA I felt like everyone knows everyone and a fired hire could cause significant reputational damage with a one-sided narrative. I don’t endorse this view as rational but the fear was definitely a factor in why I took so long.
I was hiring for a role that defies regular role definition. No one applying to the role had applied to a similar position before let alone worked in one. Potentially this was the largest factor and my other points are moot.
I wasn’t hiring someone to have similar skills to me, instead hiring someone to have the skills I don’t have. Normally I would judge experience, passion, intelligence, lateral thinking ability, ambition and team fit then let a team lead judge specific ability.
many candidates treated the process like a 2 way application the whole way through the process. This three off my intuitions and normally I would have dropped all candidates who weren’t signalling they were specifically very excited about my role. First call excluded.
many candidates’ conversations included career advice from me. This threw off my intuitions but I consider it time well spent in ll the cases where I spent over 2h
I worried a lot about how much time of others I was using. Assuming a candidate spent 4x more time than I did, I used over a thousand hours of people’s time.
ultimately I made offers to two candidates both of which I had had strong gut feelings about very early, which was rewarding but also highly frustrating.
The key thing I intend to change next time is being much faster. I didn’t feel like (for me) the extra process complexity and caution added that much insight and crucially, it threw off my intuition.
The main downside of reduced complexity seems to be the increased chance of a bad hire and the potential damage of firing them. I think next time I will return to my original method and be very transparent with the person I make an offer to that their 3 month probation is not just a formality, pointing them to this article as an explanation to why it’s not worth it for others for me to have a long drawn out process that may only slightly reduce the risk of a bad hire.
Caveat:
** I do not advocate anyone else doing this unless they are confident in their hiring intuitions. I also haven’t tried it yet and it may go terribly. **
Thank you to the OP for posting. Illuminating!
haha - good question. And yes, from notes.