Thank you, Aaron. This is an important point. I agree that it is worth putting out any work you have made out there. This is exactly the spirit of draft amnesty week! In this case, though, I had only conducted preparatory work to delineate the project. Continuing as if the other paper did not exist was not a realistic path, and my contribution would not have been meaningfully distinct. When I start a research project independently, I do it without much mentorship or institutional feedback, which makes it genuinely hard to assess whether I am working on the right question, using the right methods, or producing something useful to the field.

As someone reviewing applications, how do you evaluate independent research produced outside of a fellowship or academic context? Is there a threshold of rigor or novelty below which it hurts more than it helps to include it? And do you have suggestions for how early-career people in this transition can get lightweight feedback on research directions before investing weeks into a project? I ask because the fellowship application process often requires demonstrating prior work to get the mentorship needed to produce prior work, and I am trying to figure out how to navigate this as efficiently as possible.

Thanks for weighing in, Jamie! This is the kind of insight I was hoping for.

I agree with your point about incremental change. A partly-vetted candidate pool as a first step seems like a more viable path to building credibility. I think this can be built on the current systems available in EA. Candidates are usually looking for new opportunities to reach organizations, so I think they would be interested if the time invested is reasonable. Feedback would certainly be a plus, but maybe it could lose value if the automatic feedback is too generic.

Thank you for sharing this, and congratulations on your new role! I am always glad to hear stories from fellow operations people. I would really like to hear more about your experience in the application process. I am also curious about your Notion database. Did you have labels for the stages you moved through (initial screening, tests, interviews, etc.)? What proportion of EA vs. non-EA jobs did you apply to? How do you keep your motivation after the rejections?

Last week, I wrote a post on finding a job in operations in EA, and I am collecting data points on how EA ops hiring actually works in practice. I would be happy to exchange ideas on how to improve this search for both candidates and orgs. 

Hi @abrahamrowe, 

Thank you very much for your detailed response. Your November post was a great source of inspiration for this, and I believe the community would greatly benefit from a post-mortem of your attempt to build this platform. In the meantime, I would certainly love to have a chat with you about these questions. From what I have seen, you seem to be one of the people in EA who have thought most about the practicalities of a shared application platform. I have also seen mentions of attempts at similar projects in related discussions: have you spoken with those people?

Of course, the organizations would decide whether to work with such a platform, so it makes sense to optimize for them first. I still think there are ways to improve the process for applicants, at least at no cost to the organizations and, to some extent, to their advantage. For instance, it seems that organizations are independently arriving at very similar questions for every operations role, so the shared platform would not reduce the information they get on a candidate compared to the current system. The candidates' answers would also not be any more generic if the questions were the same. In fact, they could rate the answer once, and not have to reread the same essays the next time they publish a different operations role, to which the same people will apply. Regardless, for EA as a whole, it would be valuable to recognise that not losing candidates to demoralization is also in the interest of organizations. This is especially relevant since a lot of resources are spent trying to attract people to EA.

Your point about how reputation would be essential for such an endeavor is an important one; I would really like to work on this, but you are right that I will never succeed without the backing of strongly established EA actors. Through discussions like these, I am hoping to get more people thinking about it until solutions start to emerge.

That said, an alternative I have in mind is something closer to a profile system than a traditional common application. Think of it as a private LinkedIn for operations roles (based on the existing HIP profiles, for instance): candidates fill out a set of standardized prompts, and that profile becomes a reusable asset. Organizations do not have to stop running their own hiring. They could simply include a line in their application that offers the option to link their profile to [platform], the same way candidates can often fill out a form or share their LinkedIn profile and have the form automatically filled with the profile's information. These questions would be complemented by any additional questions not covered by the profile that they would consider relevant. This could potentially save candidates hours of reformatting the same text to slightly different word limits, without taking control of the selection process away from the organization.

I would be excited to see how HIP implements what you mentioned: listing organizations where candidates were finalists. If candidates who reached final rounds had even brief comments on their performance attached to their profile (with consent), that would make the informal referral network you describe (3 to 5 emails per month sharing silver medalists) visible and accessible to candidates, not just to hiring managers who already know each other. This could address many candidates' concerns about the lack of transparency.

@AïdaLahlou also shared with me a draft of her post, with some great ideas on how to share feedback with candidates and evaluate them in different ways. I also think HIP's talent database with finalist history would align with her ideas.

I will be in touch about that call. I think there is a lot to learn from your experience.

Glad you like the idea. Looking forward to reading your draft! 

Also, people have to deal with the whole application process that repeats over and over. To extend your analogy: the customers who drove across town are also being asked to describe, in slightly different words each time, why they like tacos.

I agree, we are constantly being pushed to apply to fellowships or positions that the organizations know are already oversubscribed. In practice, the processes for determining the best candidates are not very good, and if only a tenth of people applied for these roles, the best of that sample would not be noticeably better. But this negligible improvement represents ten times as much time wasted by the community on application processes that go nowhere. And even from the perspective of a single applicant, those processes take a very long time. In fact, I just wrote an essay about how those applications could be greatly simplified. The solutions I suggest would not solve the problem (simplifying the application process will encourage more people to apply), but at least the process would be more respectful of applicants' time.