I think there will be many challenges and difficulties in creating something like this, but at it’s core it has value. Thus, my overall perspective is quite positive, but there are also a plethora of areas that can cause this to not function well.
The issue/problem that comes to my mind most readily is that different organizations are looking for different things, and different roles require different things. Thus, while some information about an applicant may be relevant for all job applications (name, email address, most recent few job titles, what locations the applicant is and isn’t willing to live in, etc.), the majority of what an organization wants to know in order to make a hiring decision will be unique/distinct to the organization or to the role.
Some of this could probably be address easily by having a core part of the application which is applicable to a wide variety of roles, and org specific part of the application which is different for each organization, and a role specific part of the application which is specific that the role that the organization is hiring for. Thus, if John Doe is applying to be a recruiter at Open Phil, and a recruiter at The Centre for Effective Altruism, and an operations associate at The Centre for Effective Altruism, then he would end up filling out and submitting:
core/general information
organization specific information for Open Phil
role specific information for recruiter
organization specific information for CEA
role specific information for operations associate
role specific information for recruiter
After submitting this information the individuals in charge of hiring for each role would choose whether or not to contact him for additional information. This is roughly parallel to the Common App for college applications.
That is one way to look at this that organizations look at different aspects to hire the best fit candidate. Another way is that the constraint is that there is not really anyone sincerely interested in working for that specific organization in a particular capacity. This is what I am trying to address: by filling an application people should better define their interests, and these, alongside with their skills/background, should be readily available for organizations (who may thus start looking to hire a specific skillset), plus funds that may be seeking people to advance projects, and people looking to just contract others for some tasks or for collaborators. So, it can be argued that this can help organizations find what they are looking for.
Yes, that makes sense. That would be many organization-specific parts, but that can be done relatively easily, maybe adding a few questions per organization, and people can choose which ones to fill. Role-specific parts can be relatively more challenging as the application would have to keep changing but that is also possible.
Then, this person would be only marginally better off than if he filled 3 applications and just copied-pasted the organization-specific for CEA (and filling name and e-mail, .. takes almost no time). The improvement here is if he fills the role-specific info for recruiter only once. Of course, a recruiter at CEA is different from recruiter at OpenPhil but if there is just one/few common questions about a recruiter then he can get to a better-fit role because he cannot be tailoring answers based on role descriptions/etc. - I actually wonder if then people would be more sincere or more biased in a different way (e. g. try to optimize for attention).
I think there will be many challenges and difficulties in creating something like this, but at it’s core it has value. Thus, my overall perspective is quite positive, but there are also a plethora of areas that can cause this to not function well.
The issue/problem that comes to my mind most readily is that different organizations are looking for different things, and different roles require different things. Thus, while some information about an applicant may be relevant for all job applications (name, email address, most recent few job titles, what locations the applicant is and isn’t willing to live in, etc.), the majority of what an organization wants to know in order to make a hiring decision will be unique/distinct to the organization or to the role.
Some of this could probably be address easily by having a core part of the application which is applicable to a wide variety of roles, and org specific part of the application which is different for each organization, and a role specific part of the application which is specific that the role that the organization is hiring for. Thus, if John Doe is applying to be a recruiter at Open Phil, and a recruiter at The Centre for Effective Altruism, and an operations associate at The Centre for Effective Altruism, then he would end up filling out and submitting:
core/general information
organization specific information for Open Phil
role specific information for recruiter
organization specific information for CEA
role specific information for operations associate
role specific information for recruiter
After submitting this information the individuals in charge of hiring for each role would choose whether or not to contact him for additional information. This is roughly parallel to the Common App for college applications.
That is one way to look at this that organizations look at different aspects to hire the best fit candidate. Another way is that the constraint is that there is not really anyone sincerely interested in working for that specific organization in a particular capacity. This is what I am trying to address: by filling an application people should better define their interests, and these, alongside with their skills/background, should be readily available for organizations (who may thus start looking to hire a specific skillset), plus funds that may be seeking people to advance projects, and people looking to just contract others for some tasks or for collaborators. So, it can be argued that this can help organizations find what they are looking for.
Yes, that makes sense. That would be many organization-specific parts, but that can be done relatively easily, maybe adding a few questions per organization, and people can choose which ones to fill. Role-specific parts can be relatively more challenging as the application would have to keep changing but that is also possible.
Then, this person would be only marginally better off than if he filled 3 applications and just copied-pasted the organization-specific for CEA (and filling name and e-mail, .. takes almost no time). The improvement here is if he fills the role-specific info for recruiter only once. Of course, a recruiter at CEA is different from recruiter at OpenPhil but if there is just one/few common questions about a recruiter then he can get to a better-fit role because he cannot be tailoring answers based on role descriptions/etc. - I actually wonder if then people would be more sincere or more biased in a different way (e. g. try to optimize for attention).