Applying to EA orgs? My thoughts as a new recruiter with AIM

In the spirit of Draft Amnesty Week, and in light of Ambitious Impact currently hiring for staff roles - one recruitment manager (or director) and two researchers - I thought I’d share some of my recent reflections on finding impactful careers as a new recruiter in an EA org.

“Why is it so hard to get hired to do good?”

First, I want to validate this point and say that I totally agree; it is (stupidly) hard. I personally applied to 16 EA orgs and spent >100 hours job searching, doing work tests, interviews, etc., before I got this role. This was after having had four EA part-time roles, served on a board of one EA organisation for two years, and been community-building for years. I am not the only person to have this experience, as you can see from a quick search on the EA Forum here, here, and here.

Personally, I’m excited about a world where people approach impact from many angles. It’s easy to get tunnel vision on ‘EA jobs’ - they align with your values and seem like the best way to contribute. But zooming out, the goal isn’t to be hired by an EA org; it’s to have the greatest counterfactual impact. For many people, that might mean roles outside EA, in government, academia, or industry, where their skills fill gaps that EA orgs can’t - or by donating effectively and taking the Giving What We Can pledge to fund more impactful interventions. For a take on this topic that resonates with me, see Lauren Mee’s recent post. 

So…should we give up on getting jobs in EA orgs?

No, I don’t think we necessarily should, and I am not alone in thinking so. I recommend this post for a good write-up to keep you motivated while you’re figuring out where and how you can have the highest counterfactual impact. Resilience paying off is also well exemplified by the founder cohorts of our Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program. Many of the applicants who eventually found a nonprofit were previously rejected before being admitted in a later round. It wasn’t that they weren’t competent. 

My post is aimed at people like myself, who still choose to apply for EA nonprofits because of the counterfactual impact they believe they can have (e.g., as a Recruitment Manager with AIM), but struggle to show their fit.

What are some things you might consider?

There are multiple ways to improve your chances. I will first focus on what you do before you actually hand in your CV, so your experiences or upskilling, because this is what ultimately changed things for me. While there is more to say, I only have one advice I want to double down on: 

• Be strategic in your volunteering, choice of internships, or part-time jobs - not only to improve your hiring prospects, but also to explore where your work can have the greatest counterfactual impact: 
  
  Before being on the other side of the hiring process, I didn’t fully realise how hard it is to tell if someone will be a good fit for a role, and that the best quality of evidence you have is having worked with them. What is kind of nice is that the same argument also holds the other way; you don’t really know how much you’ll enjoy a job until you’ve tried it. So, doing relatively cheap tests like volunteering (or even cheaper tests) that give you a very accurate representation of that type of work can be immensely useful. I think a key thing to keep in mind here is that the same role can look wildly different based on the organisational culture you’re in, so the more you know the specifics before committing your ~1800 hours of yearly work, the better. 

Another area I improved over time is the “technical” improvements, like refining your CV, test tasks, etc. This is a list of some things I now notice with applicants that stand out to me:

• Make it clear that you have thought about what the role entails. If you can connect your experience, translate your skills, or offer up thoughtful reflections, I’d be more likely to notice you. One way I see this done is when applicants answer the interview or application question using stories tied to their experience. A lot of conventional hiring advice is helpful here; personally, I started feeling way more confident going into interviews when I created stories using frameworks like STAR (situation-task-action-result). 
• Focus on the impact. Even when your experience hasn’t involved classic “high-impact” EA work, like in my case, showing the results of what you’ve done with numbers can make your achievements much clearer to an EA audience. What I’ve realised is key here is to be as specific as possible about how you contributed to this happening and to communicate the wins in a way everyone can understand without much domain-specific knowledge.
• Transparent reasoning is highly valued in EA, but I think we could emphasise it even more. If you communicate directly, honestly, and effectively while showing your uncertainties, you are more likely to seem convincing to an EA audience. I prefer an applicant who answers “wrongly”, but can clearly communicate their assumptions, to one who gives a “correct” answer, but whose thinking I don’t understand. Transparent reasoning can be used across the board, from your application to work tests and interviews. I think this is one of the areas I did better in, which resulted in me progressing through some stages, if not all, for the roles I applied to.
• Practise the areas you feel weaker in. For me, one was how I presented myself in certain interviews, where I let the stress get the better of me. I consider myself good at staying calm under pressure, but there was something about some of these interviews that made me struggle. I think what finally helped me improve was forcing myself to do something a bit uncomfortable: practising interviews, both alone and with friends who’d give honest feedback.

Some half-baked thoughts from my manager

I ran this article by my manager (Ben Williamson, AIM’s Director of Recruitment) for some additional takes, which I’ve included below…

The good applicant doom loop

Orgs have differing hiring processes, but some key traits and skills matter regardless of what the job is. The independent assessment of multiple hiring managers can be surprisingly similar. This can result in some applicants getting stuck in a bit of a ‘good applicant doom loop’ - good enough to pass through many organisations’ initial selection processes, but lacking a certain skill or trait that is getting them rejected at late stages across the board. 

This is a particularly painful place to get stuck in, given you invest substantial time in many orgs’ application processes with no payoff. In this way, just sending out more applications is not the answer; it’s just going to result in more test tasks to complete.

Some rough examples of gaps that can get people stuck at this stage: 

• Inexperience. Where someone is perhaps fresh out of university with limited other work experience. Lots of orgs are excited about their knowledge, work ethic, etc., but each is unwilling to take the risk on how well this person will adapt to full-time work without a reference or a prior job to demonstrate aptitude
• Abrasiveness. Candidates who come across poorly in interviews and/or are seen as a potential conflict risk. This may be picked up on from a candidate being defensive when challenged on an answer, frustrated at being cut off in an answer by the interviewer, or having very strong takes on what they want from their colleagues: “I can’t stand people who aren’t on time; it drives me up the wall working with people who are very slow to reply to emails”. Orgs are broadly very conservative about taking on staff with any kind of signal of a likelihood that they might cause internal conflict or struggle to get on with their team.
• Poorly presented experience. If I had a penny for every terribly presented CV I’ve seen where someone’s experience is hard to parse because of very dense text, inconsistent formatting, and so on… well, I’d have a lot of pennies. You might be tanking your applications broadly for something as simple as your CV being painful to read at a stage where hiring managers are often very time-pressed and looking for reasons to rule out candidates. An alternative version of this is where candidates fail to mention experience that’s highly relevant to that specific role, often a problem for more mid-career professionals who are (correctly) trying to reduce a 3-4 page work experience section down to a more readable ½-1 page. I had one candidate reach the final interview for the Charity Entrepreneurship program, get rejected in part due to a lack of perceived startup experience, and then, in our feedback call, flag that they had run a small startup that they’d failed to flag in their CV or interview answers.

How to solve for this? 

• Get 2 or 3 people you know to look at your CV and make it pretty.
• Practice interviewing with a couple of friends - communication and interpersonal issues can be picked up just as well by people you know as a hiring manager. Everyone comes across a little differently in an interview than they do normally.
• Ask for very short (10-15 min) feedback calls with hiring managers where you get to a late stage. Most orgs are hesitant to put feedback in writing in fear of saying something that gets pulled out of context and used to paint their processes as biased, unfair, etc. - a short video call avoids this bottleneck to receiving feedback.

Some miscellaneous thoughts

• Vary the types of places and roles that you apply to. You might think you’re a great researcher (and maybe you are!), and hiring managers may generally disagree. Varying the type of role you apply for - more junior/senior, M&E or strategy rather than desk research, EA vs non-EA orgs, etc. - is more likely to get you to meaningfully different outcomes in getting hired than continuing to apply to the same type of job.
• Think seriously about where you could upskill and creatively about how you could do this. I see far too many applications to the Charity Entrepreneurship program from people who have never attempted anything entrepreneurial, despite a professed enthusiasm for being an entrepreneur.
• Aim to be a spikier candidate - i.e., someone with some chance of being a fantastic hire, but lower confidence of being an average hire. If you’re getting to the mid-stages of many processes, there’s a chance you’re seen as a ‘good but not great’ candidate across the park. I see many very well-meaning, well-intentioned applicants like this - clearly value-aligned with AIM but without any standout traits that get me excited about their potential as a founder. Like with dating, it’s better to be a perfect fit for one role than a decent fit for every role: it’s much better to be a 2/10 for 5 hiring managers, and a 10/10 for 1 hiring manager, than a 6/10 for every process you go through. Don’t just aim to tick the boxes in your application submissions; highlight what makes you more unique in terms of your experience, knowledge, or approach to working. Can you bring a novel angle to the test task you’ve been presented, that might fall flat, but might also make you stand out?
• Go work outside of EA. There are so many impactful jobs outside of the EA ecosystem, where you can do immense good in the world and build very valuable skills. Getting an impactful job should be the goal, rather than a job in EA. These two things are correlated, but do not nearly entirely overlap.