We have a sense of this from questions we asked before (though only as recently in 2019, so they don’t tell us whether there’s been a change since then).
At that point 36.6% of respondents included EA non-profit work (i.e. working for an EA org) in their career plans. It was multiple select, so their plans could include multiple things, but it seems plausible that often EA org work is people’s most preferred career and other things are backups.
At that time 32% of respondents cited too few job opportunities as a barrier to their involvement in EA. This was the most commonly cited barrier (and the third most cited was it being too hard to get an EA job!).
These numbers were higher among more engaged respondents.
I think these numbers speak to EA jobs being very hard to get (at least in 2019).
Number of applications people are writing could be interesting to some degree, though I think there are a couple of limitations. Firstly, if people find that it is too hard to get a job and drop out of applying , this may make the numbers look better without the number of people who want a job and can’t get one decreasing, and even without it becoming appreciably easier for those still applying for jobs. Secondly, if there are fewer (more) jobs for people to apply to this may reduce (increase) the number of applications, but this would be actually be making it harder (easier) for people to get jobs.
To assess the main thing that I think these numbers would be useful for (how competitive jobs actually are), I think hiring data from orgs would be most useful (i.e. how many applicants to how many roles). The data could also be useful to assess how much time EAs are spending applying (since this is presumably at some counterfactual cost to the community), but for that we might simply ask about time spent on applications directly.
We have a sense of this from questions we asked before (though only as recently in 2019, so they don’t tell us whether there’s been a change since then).
At that point 36.6% of respondents included EA non-profit work (i.e. working for an EA org) in their career plans. It was multiple select, so their plans could include multiple things, but it seems plausible that often EA org work is people’s most preferred career and other things are backups.
At that time 32% of respondents cited too few job opportunities as a barrier to their involvement in EA. This was the most commonly cited barrier (and the third most cited was it being too hard to get an EA job!).
These numbers were higher among more engaged respondents.
I think these numbers speak to EA jobs being very hard to get (at least in 2019).
Number of applications people are writing could be interesting to some degree, though I think there are a couple of limitations. Firstly, if people find that it is too hard to get a job and drop out of applying , this may make the numbers look better without the number of people who want a job and can’t get one decreasing, and even without it becoming appreciably easier for those still applying for jobs. Secondly, if there are fewer (more) jobs for people to apply to this may reduce (increase) the number of applications, but this would be actually be making it harder (easier) for people to get jobs.
To assess the main thing that I think these numbers would be useful for (how competitive jobs actually are), I think hiring data from orgs would be most useful (i.e. how many applicants to how many roles). The data could also be useful to assess how much time EAs are spending applying (since this is presumably at some counterfactual cost to the community), but for that we might simply ask about time spent on applications directly.