Thank you for taking the time to write this post, Tobias.
It resonated a lot with me and as I've recently been thinking (and experiencing!) how privileged I am. I'm spending the winter in a warm place and there are a lot of homeless people here. One way I deal with this emotionally is that I give them 50ct-1€ every time I see a homeless person. This money does not come out of my normal donation budget and it makes me feel like I can make a slight difference in somebodys day. I know it's not the "EA thing" to do, but as others said in the comments, there is no need to be sticking to EA principles 100% of the time.
I'm so glad a project like Magnify Mentoring exists and am really happy to hear that you got funding to run another round. Back in 2020 my mentor helped me navigate my applications to different EA orgs and it was soo helpful!
I now have my first mentee and it's a very rewarding thing to give back to the community.
As always, thank you so much for your effort and engagement, Kathryn + others!
Especially for ops roles, I've been surprised by people not actually following the instructions correctly (especially related to re-naming the work test document in a specific way, or making sure you're using the correct view settings).
Another extreme example would be for candidates to just copy and paste LLM answers and only slightly formatting them - oftentimes the answers are way too long and not relevant for the specific task.
As Eli said, making sure you have few typos, consistent formatting and answering the questions correctly, being clear on your uncertainties and making comments how you made a decision or what you'd do if you had more time etc.