Hi Nnaemeka! The short answer is, there is no single ideal candidate; we usually end up with 10-15 quite different folks on the program. That said, there are perhaps ~10 common archetypes, such as "the disgruntled nonprofit worker", "the medical professional unhappy with how little impact they're having", "the consultant who wants to radically switch careers to change the world" etc.
Perhaps more useful for you to develop a sense of your fit for yourself, I'd like to share a recording of a talk I gave on this question 2 years ago: youtube link to 20 minutes 16 seconds in. This both presents some misconceptions, then the top 5 traits, and has some questions for you to ask yourself to explore if this could be you for each trait. Quick overview:
Hi Antonia, I'm not an expert in the animal space, but my soft sense here is:
as Evan wrote, your prior exp is likely more relevant than you think and you should use your CV to explain how in the way Evan mentioned -- titles are a bit less important than types of things you did (e.g., I imagine being a vet did involve a bunch of planning and juggling priorities and optimising processes).
The animal welfare space even more so than other spaces does thrive on connections and relationships -- going to conferences and connecting e.g. via Hive can be really beneficial both to get information and hear about opportunities
Internships and volunteering are particularly common I'd say and super useful ways to move into the space and new types of roles. Given the effective animal advocacy space is so small, having a great reference from a known org doing a project for them or e.g. organising a meetup or mini-conference can open many doors and puts that recent experience on your CV
Personally, at AIM we get a lot of people with (human medicine) clinical backgrounds. To us, clinical backgrounds generally indicate 1. altruism/impact drive, 2. empathy, 3. ability to juggle and fix difficult, potentially high pressure situations, 4. general competency, from finishing the education and getting the job.
If you haven't already, it can also be useful to spend a bit of time figuring out what types of roles are a really great fit for you. I'm mentioning this because a lot of the human medicine clinical background folks we get at AIM end up on average being better fits for smaller, more early stage orgs where they can be a generalist, things are pretty urgent, and they see the impact of their work more directly. A "project manager" role at a small org will end up being a very different role, and look for quite different traits and amounts of experience (spoiler: much less), than a "project manager" role in a 50+ people org.
Don't worry too much about it for EAish orgs, as long as your CV is relevant enough to pass the earlier stages, you have a lot of opportunities to demonstrate your fit that goes beyond CV info
If you did something in the meanwhile that you can frame in a way that credibly shows something beneficial or interesting about yourself (e.g., international travel, self-study), I'd probably put it in
If you didn't, just leave it out. After a couple years in the workforce, people's stations tend to get too long for the ideal CV length for most roles anyway (ideally 1 page, 2 pages max) and you'll likely end up leaving out whole irrelevant job stages anyway. For early stages, what's usually most important is that there is (some) relevant experience in your CV, how much differs for each role and org.
In the later stages, I will probably look at your LinkedIn to see if I can find out what happened during a long gap and if there's nothing in there I'll ask about it in the interview. By that stage you'll already have impressed through things like test tasks so it's a smaller piece of info unlikely to strongly change my impression unless it's relevant for the role
If it's something that could be relevant for a job (such as burnout), what I am then ideally looking for is a sense of "the candidate has reflected on it, understood why it happened, and taken convincing measures to keep it from happening again", plus hopefully the thing(s) that caused it aren't things likely to happen in the role you're applying for
Most of the above may apply a bit less in other EAish orgs, and definitely outside EAish ogs
Hey Kyle! I get the impression you've thought and perhaps talked to people about this a bunch, so I wonder if you'd be open to sharing your sense of how program officers tend to get hired at non-EA foundations? Informal PM is fine!
Love seeing work going into this! I have a lot of thoughts based on my hiring/talent and EA meta work the last couple years, would be happy to chat, I'll pm you to book a time.
My top level thought is I'm not sure if 80k is the org to "copy"; maybe it's something more like copying HIP IAP + EA intro fellowship adapted to the African context, but I'd like to hear where you're coming from and see if we can land on a common understanding of what the biggest, tractable problem/s and the target audience/s actually are. Also have some thoughts on the ToC
I would just like to say publicly how excited I am about the Founding to Give program and team (Trish & Jacintha) and about how thoughtfully you're exploring different ways to create a better world through for-profits. I was really excited about the "create BIG company & donate % of big exit" initial plan and I am really excited about the current research and cheap experimentation you're doing into other ways to do it.
Looking forward to hopefully seeing us EAs engage more with the for-profit space for impact and reading more thoughts / ideas by other folks!
Short and sweet and to the point. I mostly agree - super specific philosophy lingo best belongs in philosophy and not when we're trying to get stuff done.
Very cool, looking forward to both of these, really exciting first guests! I'd love to know whether Peter's engagement with Buddhism has changed his mind on anything - especially but not only on the big question around mindfulness and meditation for and its benefits for the meditator vs external work for others (e.g. campaigning for animals) as they often seem in tension / conflict for time and resources and pursuing a deeper path of enlightenment may take away much of the spirit and fire for changing the world in a more consequentialist sense. It's talked about a bit in "The Buddhist and the Ethicist" but not as head-on as I was hoping
Exciting to see! I'm also glad it's an open RFP, really useful for building a space. Hope it'll yield lots of exciting new projects in the space.
This looks super interesting, I'll think about it for a few days then might sign up. Thanks so much y'all for creating this!
Hi Nnaemeka! The short answer is, there is no single ideal candidate; we usually end up with 10-15 quite different folks on the program. That said, there are perhaps ~10 common archetypes, such as "the disgruntled nonprofit worker", "the medical professional unhappy with how little impact they're having", "the consultant who wants to radically switch careers to change the world" etc.
Perhaps more useful for you to develop a sense of your fit for yourself, I'd like to share a recording of a talk I gave on this question 2 years ago: youtube link to 20 minutes 16 seconds in. This both presents some misconceptions, then the top 5 traits, and has some questions for you to ask yourself to explore if this could be you for each trait. Quick overview:
In case of doubt I recommend to just apply! :-)
Furthermore, I recommend Probably Good's nonprofit entrepreneurship career profile, and the adjacent for-profit entrepreneurship profile!
Hi Antonia, I'm not an expert in the animal space, but my soft sense here is:
All the best! :-)
Hi Joseph! My take:
All the best! :-)
Hey Kyle! I get the impression you've thought and perhaps talked to people about this a bunch, so I wonder if you'd be open to sharing your sense of how program officers tend to get hired at non-EA foundations? Informal PM is fine!
Love seeing work going into this! I have a lot of thoughts based on my hiring/talent and EA meta work the last couple years, would be happy to chat, I'll pm you to book a time.
My top level thought is I'm not sure if 80k is the org to "copy"; maybe it's something more like copying HIP IAP + EA intro fellowship adapted to the African context, but I'd like to hear where you're coming from and see if we can land on a common understanding of what the biggest, tractable problem/s and the target audience/s actually are. Also have some thoughts on the ToC
I would just like to say publicly how excited I am about the Founding to Give program and team (Trish & Jacintha) and about how thoughtfully you're exploring different ways to create a better world through for-profits. I was really excited about the "create BIG company & donate % of big exit" initial plan and I am really excited about the current research and cheap experimentation you're doing into other ways to do it.
Looking forward to hopefully seeing us EAs engage more with the for-profit space for impact and reading more thoughts / ideas by other folks!
Short and sweet and to the point. I mostly agree - super specific philosophy lingo best belongs in philosophy and not when we're trying to get stuff done.
Very cool, looking forward to both of these, really exciting first guests! I'd love to know whether Peter's engagement with Buddhism has changed his mind on anything - especially but not only on the big question around mindfulness and meditation for and its benefits for the meditator vs external work for others (e.g. campaigning for animals) as they often seem in tension / conflict for time and resources and pursuing a deeper path of enlightenment may take away much of the spirit and fire for changing the world in a more consequentialist sense. It's talked about a bit in "The Buddhist and the Ethicist" but not as head-on as I was hoping