One thing I keep noticing—both from my own experience and from conversations with others—is how many thoughtful, motivated people are actively trying to orient their careers toward positive impact, and how few clear, viable opportunities there seem to be for them to actually do so.

This doesn’t feel like a lack of interest or effort. Many people are:

• investing significant time in skill-building,
• engaging seriously with cause prioritization,
• applying repeatedly to EA-aligned roles,
• and making real personal tradeoffs to pursue impact.

And yet, a large fraction of this effort appears to stall—not because candidates are obviously unqualified, but because the number of roles is small, the hiring capacity of organizations is limited, or the pathways from “motivated generalist” to “impactful contributor” are unclear or bottlenecked.

This raises a question I haven’t seen discussed enough:

Is this a fundamental structural issue in the EA ecosystem, rather than an individual failure on the part of candidates?

Are there ecosystem-level interventions that could better capitalize on this surplus of motivated human capital?