David, I think that you've hit the nail on the head. I imagine how I would react if a job posting said "the majority of successful candidates grew up in families with either wealth or income in the top quartile of their home country," and I know even though that is predictive of success (and it might be a useful data point for estimating how likely m own application would be to succeed). I wouldn't want to see it as a candidate. We could substitute in something less controversial, such as height, and I think that my preference to not see it would remain the same.

Ben West recently mentioned that he would be excited about a common application. It got me thinking a little about it. I don't have the technical/design skills to create such a system, but I want to let my mind wander a little bit on the topic. This is just musings and 'thinking out out,' so don't take any of this too seriously.

What would the benefits be for some type of common application? For the applicant: send an application to a wider variety of organizations with less effort. For the organization: get a wider variety of applicants.

Why not just have the post openings posted to LinkedIn and allow candidates to use the Easy Apply function? Well, that would probably result in lots of low quality applications. Maybe include a few question to serve as a simple filter? Perhaps a question to reveal how familiar the candidate is with the ideas and principles of EA? Lots of low quality applications aren't really an issue if you have an easy way to filter them out. As a simplistic example, if I am hiring for a job that requires fluent Spanish, and a dropdown prompt in the job application asks candidates to evaluate their Spanish, it is pretty easy to filter out people that selected "I don't speak any Spanish" or "I speak a little Spanish, but not much."

But the benefit of Easy Apply (from the candidate's perspective) is the ease. John Doe candidate doesn't have to fill in a dozen different text boxes with information that is already on his resume. And that ease can be gained in an organization's own application form. An application form literally can be as simple as prompts for name, email address, and resume. That might be the most minimalistic that an application form could be while still being functional. And there are plenty of organizations that have these types of applications: companies that use Lever or Ashby often have very simple and easy job application forms (example 1, example 2).

Conversely, the more than organizations prompt candidates to explain "Why do you want to work for us" or "tell us about your most impressive accomplishment" the more burdensome it is for candidates. Of course, maybe making it burdensome for candidates is intentional, and the organization believes that this will lead to higher quality candidates. There are some things that you can't really get information about by prompting candidates to select an item from a list.

From my own experience as an applicant for EA organizations, I'd estimate that maybe 50% to 60% of the work sample tests or the tasks that I've been assigned have either requested or required that I complete it in one sitting.

And I do think that there is a lot of benefit in limiting the time candidates can spend on it, otherwise we might end up assessing Candidate A's ten hours of work and Candidate B's three hours of work. We want to make sure it is a fair evaluation of what each of them can do when we control for as many variables as possible.

This is an aspect that I don't think of as often, but I do think it is very important. Some people have several hours free and can set aside three uninterrupted hours to focus on a single task. But not everyone can. I'm especially thinking of people who have children and work commitments. So in a sense it is unintentionally exclusionary.

To a certain extent, probably every hiring rounds is unintentionally exclusionary to varying extents, but I think that requiring candidates to spend three hours of uninterrupted time is a type of unintentionally exclusionary that can be relatively easily avoided. It is filtering out candidates based on something that is unrelated to how well/poorly they would perform on the job.

I've offered to review resumes previously, and if you'd like to send me a message I'd be happy to offer feedback. Heck, if you want to schedule a call to do a mock interview, or very informal advice/coaching/discussion relating to career and job applications (or even just to vent and express your feelings) I'd be happy to lend a hand. I can't offer any specific insider information for hiring rounds, but I can share plenty of broad/general information about how hiring rounds function and different factors or scenarios that might cause your application to be rejected.

Increase the required time-commitment as the application progresses.

I am a big fan of this concept. I'd estimate that between 25% and 50% of the hiring rounds from EA organizations that I've been involved in (as a candidate) have requested that I spend 2-3 hours of time as the second stage of the hiring round (the first stage is submitting an application). That strikes me as too big of an ask to occur that early in the process. I'd suggest proportional reciprocity (I concept I made up, which maybe someday I'll share a post on), and how there should be a gradual escalation of commitment, rather than a sudden/steep escalation.

I have several different Google Docs with rough drafts of posts that maybe I'll someday get around to relating to hiring rounds: actionable feedback, inviting candidates to apply, avoiding bad questions, validity, good and bad phrasing for rejecting candidates, letting people know what criteria they will be evaluated on, etc. None of them are fully fleshed out, but if anyone wants to see and comment on the rough drafts and the brainstorm versions, please let me know.

I'm happy to chat informally with anyone planning or designing a hiring round that wants to get input, ask for suggestions, or generally bounce around ideas.

I'd also re-focus on effective at what? What is the goal or objective of these free hugs? Once you know that, then you can more easily estimate how effective free hugs are compared to other interventions.

revealing scores useful to candidates for some other reason not covered by that

Honestly, I hadn't even thought of encouraging them to apply for future roles. My main thought regarding feedback is to allow them to improve. If you assess my work and then tell me the ways in which it falls short, that allows me to improve. I know that to work on. An example would be something like "Although your project plan covered a lot of the areas we requested, you didn't explain your reasoning for the assumption you made. You estimated that a [THING] would cost $[AMOUNT], but as the reader I don't know where you got that number. If you had been transparent about your reasoning, then you would have scored a bit higher." or "We were looking for something more detailed, and your proposal was fairly vague. It lacked  many of the specifics that we had requested in the prompt."

Regarding "disheartening people," I once got feedback for a hiring round and the organization shared what scores I got, and even shared scoring info for the other (anonymized) candidates. It was the best and most accurate data I have ever been given as feedback.

I scored very low, much lower than I had expected. Of course I felt sad and frustrated. I wish that I knew more details about their scoring methodology, and part of me says that it was  an unfair process because they weren't clear on what I would be evaluated on. But I draw a analogies to getting rejected from anything else (such as a school application or a romantic partner): it sucks, but you get over it eventually. I felt bad for a day or two, and then the feelings of frustration faded away.

Using the analogy of hunger, here is one way that I am currently thinking about it: giving a willing stranger a hug is like giving a willing stranger a candy bar; they get some nourishment, but if they are chronically food insecure this won't solve that longer-term problem. It won't help them get regular/consistent access to meals that they can afford. So in that sense it is like a band-aid: it is treating the symptom, but it is not addressing the cause.

If someone is suffering from a consistent and pervasive lack of human touch, such as "skinship hunger," a hug might feel nice for a few seconds, but when the hug is finished that person's situation (lacking human touch) remains unchanged. I suppose you could create some kind of program in which they spend 60 minutes with a professional cuddler every week, but I honestly don't see that as being cost competitive if the goal is to get QALYs at the best price.

But if you just want to estimate it then you could put together a simple Fermi estimate: what are the costs to giving free hugs, and what are the benefits, and then figure out how much value do you please on each of those.