Put differently, is there anything that you think aspiring hires might want to start working on to be better suited to join/support RP over the next few years?
I’ll let my colleagues answer the object-level question/might answer it myself later if I get better ideas later, but broadly I would somewhat caution against having a multi-year plan to be employed at Rethink Priorities specifically (or at any specific organization). RP hiring is pretty competitive now and has gotten more competitive over time[1], and also our hiring processes are far from perfect so even very good researchers (by our lights) may well be missed by our hiring process.
That said, some of the answers to James Ozden’s question might be relevant here as well.
[1] We’re also scaling pretty quickly to hire more people, but EA community building/recruitment at top universities have also really scaled up since 2020, and it’s unclear how these things shake out in terms of how competitive our applications will be in a few years.
I agree, but would want to clarify that many people should still apply and very many people should at least consider applying. It’s just that people shouldn’t optimise very strongly for getting hired by one specific institution that’s smaller than, say, “the US government” (which, for now, we are 😭).
I’ll let my colleagues answer the object-level question/might answer it myself later if I get better ideas later, but broadly I would somewhat caution against having a multi-year plan to be employed at Rethink Priorities specifically (or at any specific organization). RP hiring is pretty competitive now and has gotten more competitive over time[1], and also our hiring processes are far from perfect so even very good researchers (by our lights) may well be missed by our hiring process.
That said, some of the answers to James Ozden’s question might be relevant here as well.
[1] We’re also scaling pretty quickly to hire more people, but EA community building/recruitment at top universities have also really scaled up since 2020, and it’s unclear how these things shake out in terms of how competitive our applications will be in a few years.
I agree, but would want to clarify that many people should still apply and very many people should at least consider applying. It’s just that people shouldn’t optimise very strongly for getting hired by one specific institution that’s smaller than, say, “the US government” (which, for now, we are 😭).
Thanks for the clarification! Definitely encourage people to apply.
We’ve also moved paid work trials to earlier and earlier on in the process, so hopefully applying is not a financial hardship for people.