Is EA still 'talent-constrained'?

Thank you for sharing your perspective and I'm sorry this has been frustrating for you and people you know. I deeply appreciate your commitment and perseverance.

I hope to share you a bit of perspective from me as a hiring manager on the other side of things:

Why aren’t orgs leaning harder on shared talent pools (e.g. HIP’s database) to bypass public rounds? HIP is currently running an open search.

It's very difficult to run an open search for all conceivable jobs and have the best fit for all of them. And even if you do have a list of the top candidates for everything, it's still hard to sort and filter through that list without more screening. This makes HIP a valuable supplement but not a replacement.

~

I also think it would be worth considering how to provide some sort of job security/benefit for proven commitment within the movement

'The movement' is just the mix of all the people and orgs doing their own thing. Individual orgs themselves should be responsible for job security and rewarding commitment - the movement itself unfortunately isn't an entity that is capable of doing that.

~

I know one lady who worked at a top EA org for eight years; she's now struggling to find her next position within the movement, competing with new applicants! That seems like a waste of career capital.

Hopefully her eight years gives her a benefit against other applicants! That is, the career capital hasn't been 'wasted' at all. But it still makes sense to view her against other applicants who may have other skills needed for the role - being good at one role doesn't make you a perfect automatic fit for another role.

~

Moreover, I would avoid the expensive undertaking of a full hiring round until my professional networks had been exhausted. After all, if you're in my network to begin with, you probably did something meritorious to get there.

While personal networks are a great place to source talent they're far from perfect - in particular while personal networks are created by merit they are also formed by bias and preferencing 'people like us'. A 'full hiring round' is thus more meritocratic - anyone can apply, you don't need to figure out how to get into the right person's network first.

~

You might like this article: Don't be bycatch.

Two very quick thoughts:

1. I think maybe you and I differ on the number / variety of roles I'd be excited for readers of this Forum to apply to. It might be true that roles at e.g. CEA or 80k get many applicants (I think our record was somewhere around 500 applicants, for a recent advisor round, but I could be wrong), but I bet that there are tons of roles that get very low or zero applications from among readers of this Forum that could nevertheless be very impactful.

As an intuition pump: there are currently 715 jobs on our job board. How many of those are meeting your bar for 'EA-aligned'? I think there's roughly 5-10k people who consider themselves EAs. So even if a very high % of them are currently doing job searches, there's no way that all of these roles have hundreds of EA applicants.

if I ever find myself hiring, I might be tempted to say 'if you’re not confident in your fit, save yourself the trouble; our inbox will be full by lunch.'

The reason I wouldn't do this is that: a) It's very hard to be well-calibrated on whether you're likely to be a good fit. I think some people (certain personality types; women; people from ethnic minorities) are much more likely to "count themselves out," even if they might be a great fit. b) For jobs I've hired for in the past, I'm actually more excited about candidates with excellent transferable skills (high personal effectiveness, organisation, agency, social skills, prioritisation ability, taste, judgement, etc.) versus role-specific skills. But role-specific skills are much more concrete and easier to write about in a job ad. I think language like this might deter some of my favourite candidates!

I strongly agree with @Bella's comment. I'd like to add:

• I encourage job-seekers to not think of EA jobs as the one way to have impact in one's career. Almost all impactful roles are not at EA orgs. On the 80,000 Hours job board we try to find the most promising ones, but we won't catch everything!
• Our co-worker Laura González Salmerón has a great talk on this topic.
• Even if the movement is not talent-constrained, the problems we're trying to solve are talent-constrained. The world still needs way more people working on catastrophic risks, animal welfare, and global health, whether or not there are EA organisations hiring for roles.
• Earning to give remains a wonderful option.

Sure, there can be differences in talent, but the question ought to be... how tangible is this difference and does it justify the cost of hiring? 

One relevant data point is that in last year's Meta Coordination Forum Survey, respondents estimated the gap in value between their first and second most preferred candidate to be:

• Junior staff: median $50,000, mean $88,737
• Senior staff: median $225,000, mean $455,278

However, you can see from the distribution that in many cases valuations are significantly higher than the average.

And note that this is their valuation of the gap between the first and second after they've conducted extensive evaluations. The gap between their most preferred candidate after selection and the candidate they would get after not undertaking such an extensive evaluation process (perhaps their 10th or worse most preferred candidate) could be much higher.

As a more general point, it seems worth noting that the costs of sub-optimal hiring can be very high. I wouldn't be surprised if the costs to management and other staff time of even slightly sub-optimal hires would be >60 hours a year, with a long tail of much, much worse outcomes (including potentially just having to rehire), which is high even relative to quite intensive hiring rounds.
 

I wouldn't put much weight on the number of applicants. The job that received 1200+ applicants, I assure you that over 800 and perhaps over 10000 of them were complete nonsense/very low effort applications that have no chance. This is because you get a lot of automated fill outs/copy paste to anything/sites that do this for you. 

I generally recommend against a common "come one, come all" hiring round since I think you get a lot more signal from people you know/their recommendations. I think they seem more meritocratic, but you are often filtering for the skill of resume writing.

Job searches are notoriously difficult for many reasons but I would expect to need to fill out >100 to land a job. That's pretty common in the non-EA world. Don't get discouraged.

To add some thoughts/anecdotes:

• I'm sad this happens. I have had similar and it's hard.
• It seems like orgs and individuals have different incentives here - orgs want the most applicants possible, individuals want to get jobs.
• I have been asked to apply for 1 - 3 jobs that seemed wildly beyond my qualification then failed at the first hurdle without any feedback. This was quite frustrating, but I guess I understand why it happens.
• I like that work trials are paid well
• If we believe the best person for a job might be 5-10x better than the next best, then perhaps it's worth really trying to get that marginal person.
• I wish orgs would publish the number of applicants they have and give more feedback about where one is in regard to the level required to proceed. Giving clear feedback is another kind of pay.
• I feel annoyed when there isn't honesty that, for some, EA can be kind of drudgery. I don't think we should expect doing good to be all sunshine and I have never managed to find EA jobs that were a good fit (10s of applications, I guess?) and I guess I shouldn't expect to, but equally that is an expectation that can be set - some people will find jobs easily, some won't, we don't all have skills that easily map to skills that EA orgs want.
• EA orgs aren't on average great forecasters about the future. Forecasting is really hard. Perhaps they are better than the median person about what skills to get into (AI has seemed like a big win in terms of ways to have impact) but getting any well-paid non-evil job (especially in AI) will likely create skills that are valuable. Down the line this can hopefully be pushed into doing good if now isn't such an easy time for that (and some of the money can too!), so it's worth considering taking lucrative non-evil jobs now and then having more options down the line. I would take this advice weakly.
• I tend to think that one falls in love very hard the first time and EA is a little like that. People have never had a community before and it feels great to be part of something. Many want to do exactly the right thing. The orgs are wise, the leaders hyper-competent. But to me, many EA orgs and leaders seem pretty good, but not superhuman, focused on neglected topics. This is worth bearing in mind while applying. I weakly think that building my own skills is probably going to do more good than working at just the right place or for just the right person. There are a small number of cases where a specific org or person or project seems 10x better than everything else and in that case, I push myself to go for it, but that seems different to applying for "EA jobs" in general. 

A personal and therefore rather limited observation (sample size about 40-50 people in total). Interestingly enough, for all this intensive hiring processes, I’ve happened to come across presumably nice people (in very different EA organisations and across diverse ranges of experience) who are nevertheless spectacularly ineffective, at least using my (probably too high) bar of experience in investments. What surprises me further, such people so far significantly outnumbered highly effective people whom I was fortunate to meet in EA.

I deliberately don’t give examples of ineffectiveness so as not to offend those nice people, but with my 25+ years of working in highly effective business organisations and managing people, believe me – I know what I’m talking about 😉

Hi Siobhan,

I find it helpful to think about the (expected) benefits and costs to decide whether to apply to jobs. One can estimate the benefits of completing the 1st stage from "probability of getting an offer conditional on completing the 1st stage"*"value in $ from getting an offer", and a lower (upper) bound for the cost from "value of my time in $/h"*"hours to complete the 1st stage (all the stages)"^[1]. It is only worth applying if the benefits are larger than the lower bound for the cost. For example, if one thinks there a 1 % chance of getting an offer conditional on completing the 1st stage, considers an offer to be worth 20 k$^[2], values one's time at 20 $/h, and estimates it will take 1 h to complete the 1st stage, and 40 h to complete all the stages, the benefits would be 200 $ (= 0.01*20*10^3), and the cost between 20 (= 20*1) and 400 $ (= 40*10). So the benefits would be 0.5 (= 200/400) to 10 (= 200/20) times the cost, and therefore it seems worth applying.

One can estimate the probability of getting an offer from "offers for similar roles"/"applications for similar roles". If one has never got an offer for a similar role, and has progressed at most to the Nth last stage, the probability of getting an offer can be calculated from ("probability of progressing to the Nth last stage" = "number of times one has progressed to the Nth stage applying for similar roles"/"applications for similar roles")*("probability of getting an offer conditional on completing the Nth last stage" = 1/"expected number of candidates in the Nth last stage"^[3]).

1. ^{^}

   This is a lower bound because one would still need more time to complete subsequent stages.

2. ^{^}

   For example, 5 months until getting a new job with 2 k$/month more of net earnings relative to the current job.

3. ^{^}

   Even better, "probability of getting an offer conditional on completing the Nth last stage" = "expected value (E) of the reciprocal of the best guess distribution for the number of candidates in the Nth last stage", as E(1/X) is not equal to 1/E(X), but I do not think it is worth being this rigorous.

Love the post @SiobhanBall! 

Very interesting to read through the comments - honestly I'm a bit surprised not to see a lot more replies along the lines of "yes 100% agree!" (maybe a bias sample group as people active on the EA forum are more likely to be within EA orgs?)

For some context, I've worked as a recruiter in the EA space and as an independent consultant for EA & adjacent orgs on hiring practices. I actually wrote my master's thesis specifically on how early stage impact orgs (primarily EA orgs) hire, the challenges they face, and how it could be improved. On top of that, I've also been in the trenches applying for roles in and outside of EA for years

My observations and takeaways largely align with yours. You're not alone.

This isn't an issue just limited to the EA space though, it's a disconnect broadly across sectors. Employers claim they can't find talent, talent claims they can't land any jobs. The talent market is largely inefficient; supply and demand are often not aligned, there are significant information gaps, and it's usually an issue that is deprioritized.

All that to say, there are real problems. I'm not sure the impact of that problem or the scope. But I'd be very interested in trying to find and implement solutions. 

From my work, I believe the more effective lever for a real solution path falls among the organizations themselves as they have much more control over their hiring & sourcing practices, and are consistent demand actors in the talent market place rather than job-seekers who are (ideally) only temporary supply actors until they find a job.

If you or anyone reading is also interested in the solution space to the various challenges at the intersection of talent and impact, I'd be happy to be in touch!

Thanks for this valuable datapoint, Siobhan. Your 25 applications competing with up to 1,200+ others suggests a potential epistemic disconnect between EA's "talent-constrained" narrative and current reality.

This gap might arise from legacy framing (what was true in EA's early days persists, even as funding becomes the tighter constraint), organizational incentives (competitive hiring boosts prestige and applicant quality), ego protection (those who endured grueling processes need to believe their roles are uniquely high-impact), and information asymmetry (without published metrics, the community can't update on aggregate data). While technical AI safety roles might remain genuinely bottlenecked, generalizing from exceptions distorts the broader picture.

If this disconnect exists, the costs multiply: wasted human capital that could be earning-to-give or building skills elsewhere; reputational risks as rhetoric diverges from reality; and missed opportunities for orthogonal impact in other institutions where competition is lower but leverage might be higher.

Potential improvements include transparency first (organizations publishing basic metrics like applicants/hires and time-to-fill to enable evidence-based updating), reframing career advice (explicitly elevating earning-to-give and paths outside traditional EA organizations as equally valid), and coordinating rather than competing (e.g., via "impact portfolios" where community members diversify across approaches).

In this 80k podcast episode from 2020 Bejamin Todd was already nuancing the claim that EA is "talent constrained".

TL;DR : EA had moved in 2020 from funding-constrained to talent-constrained to specific skills-constrained. Meaning that it is no longer hard to find generally talented, motivated people, what's hard is to find people with concrete experience/talent/career capital in the niche you are hiring for.

This also follows from logic (but correct me if I'm wrong): given that EA works on the most neglected issues, there are few positions in a given cause area because the world is not spending enough money solving it. Now, through the efforts of 80k, CEA and others (e.g. this one that I took part in), many people are now applying. So if we continue to hear that EA is "talent-constrained", this must mean that it is constrained for the specific talents it needs. (Talent, should then not be taken as "workers" as we have come to understand it in current use of English. It means actual talent at some concrete thing).

So, if I put it abrasively: most of us are not "talented" enough at what is needed. Again this is not too surprising, given the widely accepted claim that talent follows a pareto distribution, with a small number of workers being 10x more productive than the average, as well as the survey results mentioned above. However this should not be discouraging: upskilling is possible. In fact, if I continue my logic, it should be a priority of the community to do this: if we have many "generally talented" enthusiastic people, then we need to turn these into people with the specific skills needed.

On an individual level, this means we should aim to increase our demonstrable skills in the areas mentioned above. Notably, leadership seems to be a bottleneck. One way that was suggested to me is to do skilled volunteering (useful post here). If the volunteering is just outside your current capabilities, it can help you grow wile providing value. Arguably though, this is harder to do with 'leadership' than with other skills as it needs more consistent effort.

On a community level, maybe this means we should invest in upskilling. There are many incubators by now, though those are mostly geared towards founding.

Which brings me to the third "lesson": there should be more people founding startups and the like, in order to turn more funding into more positions. Given all those incubators, this is indeed already happening. But, as a mid-career working parent, I know very well that grants and start-ups are not for everyone. So maybe there should be additional effort to turn mid-career people into the talent that is needed, while providing at least a little bit of income stability. It seems like a hard puzzle to me. Income stability is very costly... but maybe worth it if indeed the community needs specific skills so badly. I would love to hear if there is work in this direction.

I can relate to that. In the past 2 years, I applied for almost 50 positions at 30 EA-aligned organizations, with no success. (Yet, I have 3 PhD's, am president and co-founder of EA Belgium) Especially the remote jobs are extremely competitive.  

This was so amazing to read - thank you for sharing. Sometimes it honestly feels a bit like gaslighting to be told to “pursue a high-impact career,” when in reality the applicant pool is massive and competition is intense. I subscribe to several newsletters and jobs boards, and then see the same roles and fellowships posted across Slack channels and LinkedIn, which means hundreds if not thousands of people are looking at the same opportunities.

Like many others, I often get the generic “too many applicants to provide individual feedback” email, which makes it hard to know where I stand or how to improve. It would be so valuable to have something more personal that helps place you and gives direction - especially since many of us are working full time and trying to transition careers. Treating job applications like full-time work just isn’t realistic for everyone.

The next step is usually applying for career mentoring or consults, but even there, it’s common to get rejected multiple times before getting a breakthrough. So even the pathway into high-impact jobs can feel like rejection after rejection.

I hope you find a good job soon.

If it helps at all, I solidly reckon that leadership skill development remains one of the best ways to get to the most impactful jobs later in your career, and that most leadership skill development can take place just fine outside of EA.

Thanks for these interesting thoughts, I agree with lots of what you say!

A few comments:

• I think many organisations do use their network and things like the HIP database to find candidates. People are still often hired directly without public hiring rounds, and semi-private hiring rounds (reaching out directly to people identified in these ways and only inviting those to apply) are also quite common, but still can be very elaborate (significant lower number of applicants so lower effort for the hiring organisation, but still a similar effort for applicants.)
• Many organisations believe that hiring the right people is extremely important, and that it is worth the effort to conduct elaborate public hiring rounds, particularly for senior roles, presumably because they think there is a chance of finding a better candidate this way. (Sometimes, even if they have an internal candidate they could promote to the job, they still prefer to do a public hiring round to see if there is someone better out there.) Also, EA orgs have often very high expectations for their roles and sometimes have to readvertise roles even if the first round received lots of applications - so it seems they still feel they are talent-constrained (at least for the level of talent they are looking for).
• If was very confused by the sentence "Once someone has beaten the substantial odds and passed the rigorous testing to get in to the movement..." (as their is really not a very high bar to get 'into the movement), but based on the example you mention, I think you more mean something like "once someone has been hired for a permanent full-time role at a top EA organisation" in which case I agree with the problem you are describing. I don't really see a good solution for this, though. Organisations want to hire the best people they can, whether they are already in the movement or not. However, I think people who are attracted to the movement should be made aware of these cases and that there is no employment guarantee in EA.