Struggling to Transition into an EA-Aligned Job — Seeking Advice
Hi all,
I’d like to ask for some perspective from the EA community.
For the past 6+ months, I’ve been applying for roles within the Effective Altruism ecosystem. I come from a strong operations/executive background (executive-level roles, reputation for reliability, and solid references). I don’t have a college degree, but that hasn’t stopped me from landing high-level jobs in the past. I’ve also tailored my resume and application materials to highlight relevant EA skills and values.
So far, I’ve submitted dozens (probably over 100 at this point) of applications, resulting in 3 interviews, but have received no offers. Whenever I ask for feedback, I’m told that there’s nothing wrong with my resume or interviewing skills. This leaves me in a confusing spot: if I’m qualified, professional, and aligned with the mission, what am I missing?
At the same time, I often see posts and programs encouraging people to transition into EA-aligned careers, which makes me wonder why it feels so difficult to actually break in.
I don’t want to come across as ungrateful or entitled. I’m deeply motivated to contribute meaningfully to this community and the causes it champions, and I know the competition is strong. I just want to better understand the dynamics at play and whether I should be approaching this differently.
Some questions I’d love input on:
Are there common but invisible pitfalls that applicants run into when trying to transition from outside of EA?
Should I be focusing more on “EA-adjacent” roles rather than roles within the core ecosystem?
Are the recruitment advertisements and career transition programs geared more toward people with elite academic backgrounds (e.g. Ivy League, PhDs), and if so, is a strong corporate/operations background not enough?
Is it normal for even highly qualified applicants to spend many months (or more) applying before finding a fit?
Any advice, stories, or reality-checks would be hugely appreciated.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Just quickly noting the Forum hosted two AMAs recently that might be helpful to browse through (or still engage with!). One was with career advisors, one with recruiters.
Good luck with your job search Taylor and thank you for trying to find an impactful job and for posting here asking for advice!
Thank you, Joris. I think I’ve skimmed them before but I’ll go back and take a deeper look. I appreciate it!
EA-”branded” jobs are often heavily oversubscribed by people who’ve spent years hanging around EA. Make of it what you will—EAs tend to stick hard to other EAs if they can, and there’s a lot of ingroup bias. EAs are also really awkward about this whole ingroup bias thing, so I’m not surprised it didn’t get mentioned.
There’s also an issue (from a community perspective) where EA organisations can overpromote applications to their roles because they’re (overly?) interested in maximising to find the best applicant because of mindsets core to how EA operates—maximisation, heavy-tailed distributions, etc. Which means a whole load of talented people get encouraged to apply and then rejected, constantly.
It’s a fair fact that without any track record of successful EA work, you’re heavily selected against in extremely competitive applications rounds. So if you’re really motivated, my advice is: get that track record. Which is hard, given you can’t get an EA role. But there’s stuff you can do on your own initiative.
I noticed I’m getting disagree-voted despite my caveating, so I’ll add on: it’s actually a very reasonable thing to do as an EA organisation to concentrate one’s hiring focus on people with a demonstrated track record of successful EA (or “high-impact”) work in the skill area you’re hiring for. It’s about the most valuable signal one can pick up from someone’s prior record.
Put it this way, I don’t think the issue is that you don’t have a uni degree. I don’t think that’s what EAs care about. EAs tend to mostly not buy into traditional markers of status where more direct proxies for impact are available.
Anyone who disagrees is welcome to give their own take on good advice for someone who’s been EA jobhunting for months with what’s presumably an in-demand EA skill area and is somewhat bewildered by the inexplicable levels of rejection they face.
For instance, it could be about work test performance—EA jobs often disproportionately use and value work tests—but I didn’t pick that up from the query.
I really appreciate these comments, thank you. It does seem like every org I’ve applied to mentions an epic story of past EA accomplishments under each staff member’s bio, as though the entire team has been part of the ecosystem for a decade before joining. Which is of course something to be proud of and motivates me to be part of the team, but adversely does make it seem like I don’t fit in, and like there’s no way they’d let me start my EA career journey there.
I’ve started an EA group in my community since there’s not much going on in this area, maybe once that’s grown a bit and I can put it on my resume, I’ll see a difference.
As for work tests, despite their length, I don’t mind them. I get excited for opportunities to prove myself outside of my resume and interview, and have only received a rejection as a direct result of a work test once so far. Sometimes it feels like the work tests are my best hope since my resume might not make me appear as a perfect candidate.
Thank you again for commenting!
If I were you, I’d put it on your resume right now, along with putting in that you founded the group. EA likes the word “founder”. You can talk at interview about the challenges you’ve faced founding a group and how you’ve dealt with them using your skillset.
I was going to wait until the website was up so I’d have some proof, but if it could make all the difference, I’ll put it on there now. Thank you again!!
I’ll make the same offer Joseph did; I’d be happy to talk to you in depth about this post, review a resume, and try to be otherwise helpful. I’ve run some hiring processes, failed some applications, and had a lot of conversations with people in similar positions (thanks to this post).
What you write aligns with the challenges we see from our advisees, and based on your profile, you may be a good fit for our career advising program if you are open to working on AI Risk reduction.
For people we have helped in our program, we typically see transition timelines of 6-18 months, but just today I talked with someone for whom it took two years. My colleague Moneer wrote about his experiences in getting into a position, which included taking 170 actions (like applications, 1-1s, projects). This can seem like a lot, but it comes down to 3 per week on average over a year.
You don’t have to have an academic background to succeed (I never went to university myself), but regardless of your qualifications, be prepared for it to take time to find a position. In our advising, we emphasize the importance of building networks, conducting informational interviews, and getting more information on how to position oneself as a promising candidate.
That being said, you might be able to have a higher counterfactual impact if you find a position that is not in one of the well-known orgs—I would keep that in mind.
Thank you so much, Patrick! I just applied to the career advising program. Reading Moneer’s post was also motivating. This was exactly the kind of reality check and information I needed.
If you want, I’d be happy to have a conversation, give you feedback, review your resume, etc. I’ve been involved in hiring for quite a few years, including at multiple EA organizations. I also know from personal experience how rough it is to send out many, many applications without success.