MATS is hiring for a Head of People role, which will be both our first fully dedicated HR/People/People Operations role, as well as part of our leadership team.

There are lots of systems and processes that we want to build and develop, and we are looking for people who have the experience of building the HR parts of an organization. This will be a busy and complex role. The most competitive candidates will have experience helping a tech and/or non-profit organization scale from sub-50 to 100+, as well as more than one experience of building an HR function from scratch. Quoting directly from the job description:

We expect to hire someone who has all of the following:

• Demonstrated experience building or significantly expanding HR/People systems in a growing organization. You have set up people processes where few or none existed before - whether in a startup, a scaling nonprofit, or a fast-growing team within a larger org.
• 5+ years of professional experience in People Operations, HR, or a closely related function. Your title might not have been "Head of People" - but you have owned people systems, not just maintained them.
• Fluency in organizational culture, with a strong grasp of how to align organizational dynamics and operationalize values to foster a positive working environment that motivates and empowers people to do their best - ensuring team members feel MATS is a great place to work and grow.
• Experience directly handling employee relations: workplace conflicts, performance management issues, investigations, accommodations, and separations.
• Strong advisory and coaching skills. You have helped managers navigate people topics - leadership, performance, team dynamics, career development conversations - and you're trusted by people at all levels to handle sensitive matters with discretion and care.
• Advanced understanding of the employee lifecycle and fluency managing people operations: professional development, performance review frameworks, employee handbooks / HR policy suites, onboarding programs, learning and training programs, compensation & benefits structures, etc.
• Working knowledge of employment law sufficient to identify risks and make day-to-day compliance decisions without needing to consult counsel on routine matters.
• Clear, proactive written and verbal communication skills. You can write policies people actually read, deliver difficult messages with empathy and professionalism, and adapt your communication to different audiences.
• A collaborative, low-ego approach. You'll be building alongside a brand-new COO and Recruiting Lead - you need to be comfortable with shared ownership, evolving scope, and an org structure that's in flux.

how come they weren’t reaching out when I was the same old James just a month or two ago

Very relatable. I'm not a funder or a grant maker, but when I've been associated with organizations that are well-known or that have some level of prestige the difference is like night and day. I've been involved in hiring quite a bit as well, which also affects things. People have seen a job title of human resources or people operations and wanted to get inside info about job at orgs. It is unfortunately one of the downsides of being associated with power and resources, or even of being perceived as associated.

Are there specific skills that you see that regular training programs don't do well and might be better suited to offer specifically for our ecosystem?

Hmmm, that is a good prompt. I can't really think of any. I do want to see more EAs know how to manage people, to understand what project management actually is, to understand how to run a meeting, how to develop a team, and so on. But those aren't skills that EA has a comparative advantage in training people. I guess I see so many EAs with alignment and general EA knowledge, but lacking these kinds of general professional skills, and I really want these people (who have devoted so much time and effort to EA) to have better professional competencies. But that is probably less efficient than finding people who already have the experience/skills/competencies. So I guess I've been viewing this more emotionally rather than rationally.

TLDR: Is it good that the EA 'bootcamps' tends to spend resources on thinking about career paths rather than developing useful skills?

I have a vague impression that the various 'bootcamps' around effective altruism tend to focus on  something like "motivation, encouragement, and peer support for thinking about (and planning for) impactful career paths" rather than "gaining skills." I keep thinking that we have plenty of people involved in EA who are onboard with the general ideas and who want to contribute, but who lack specific skills. Is this a good thing?

This is all pretty low confidence/exploratory, as I haven't participated in High Impact Professionals, or CEA's Bootcamps, only read about and heard about them.

I'm mainly thinking about people management, budgeting, project management, and similar general professional skills; of course there is also broadly a need for more specific skills, like AI safety researcher.

As of now, this comment has 13 disagree votes. I'd be interested to hear the reasoning behind those. Is this a disagreement with my claim that "It is very basic professionalism to not hit on, flirt with, or ask out colleagues," or is this a disagreeing with some other aspect of my comment?

EDIT: I made my comment in the context of a small organization, and I now see that my previous comment is over-reaching. The context of flirting with a colleague at a company of 10,000 and and multiple offices/locations is of course very different that flirting with a colleague at a non-profit of only a few dozen people. I still claim that people should not be flirting or hitting on colleagues within a small team, where you see the same people at work every day. But I do understand that the context is different if there is a person that is employed by the same employer and you won't have any projects with that person, or you won't interact with that person as a part of your normal work. I also suspect that I simply have different norms/standards regarding professionalism than many of the commenters here.

Riley also discussed asking me out twice while we were colleagues, once through text and again at a CEA retreat.

In addition to what was written about you and shared, I am shocked that the culture and norms at CEA allowed asking out colleagues. It is very basic professionalism to not hit on, flirt with, or ask out colleagues.

I'm so sorry that you had to endure this, Frances. No one should have such deeply personal information shared non-consensually. I wish that this hadn't happened to you.

MATS is hiring for two roles on the program team. MATS will have more than a dozen employees at EAG San Francisco 2026, so feel free to come talk to use if you are interested in joining the team.

• Program Systems Associate: Build and maintain MATS' internal infrastructure, including databases, data collection forms, and integrations. Refactor legacy systems and collaborate across teams to improve infrastructure and establish best practices. Create ambitious, shared infrastructure for the AI safety talent ecosystem. Requires strong database design skills and a product mindset; software engineering or LLM-assisted coding proficiency preferred.
• Program Talent Manager: Own MATS' full applicant process across 3+ high-volume cycles per year (100+ fellows, 50+ mentors per cohort). Interface with mentors at Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and other organizations to understand talent needs. Design applications, coordinate evaluations, manage reviewers, and prepare applicant shortlists. Develop outreach strategy to attract top talent. Requires strong judgment in evaluating technical/policy candidates and excellent project/stakeholder management; recruiting or structured evaluation experience preferred.

I've seen so many scenarios in which EA folks reinvent wheels that are already very well-established in the broader professional world, or in which people rely on networks of EAs for advice rather than asking a subject matter expert. I've mostly seen this in relation to hiring because that is an area that I've seen internal processes for a few different EA organizations.

More broadly and more informally I've seen people failed to train new managers and fail to adopt project management practices (or to even be aware that they exist). One person mentioned to me that the Project Management Institute sounded fake. I have the vague impression that a lot of people understand project management to be something like "putting tasks in a list and then ticking them off," and simply aren't aware of earned value management, risk management, quality control, and other major areas.

This is vague and handwavy, but it does seem to resonate with a general tendency toward insularity: rather than ask a consultant with many years of experience who is an expert in an area, EAs seem to be happy to ask a friend who has two years of work experience and who did a thing once fairly well.

I'm curious how easy or hard it is to set up some drop shipping. A few items (t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, caps) with a few choices of designs might be feasible, much like the Shrimp Welfare Project Shop, or the DFTBA shop.

A semi-regular reminder that anybody who wants to join EA (or EA adjacent) online book clubs, I'm your guy.

Copying from a previous post:

I run some online book clubs, some of which are explicitly EA and some of which are EA-adjacent: one on China as it relates to EA, one on professional development for EAs, and one on animal rights/welfare/advocacy. I don't like self-promoting, but I figure I should post this at least once on the EA Forum so that people can find it if they search for "book club" or "reading group." Details, including links for joining each of the book clubs, are in this Google Doc.

I want to emphasize that this isn't funded through an organization, I'm not trying to get emails to put on a newsletter, and I'm not selling an online course or push people to buy a product. This is literally just online book clubs: we vote on books and have video chats to talk about books.