There’s been a lot of handwringing about people’s obsession with getting the relatively few jobs at the relatively few explicitly EA-branded organizations. The discussions have been interesting, but they tend to miss the essential reason for this phenomenon in my experience: when you’re an EA applicant, EA orgs may like you more than non-EA orgs do. A lot more.
Personally, I never felt much pressure, or even necessarily desire, to work only at explicitly EA organizations. I want to work as an analyst or researcher in an EA or EA-adjacent cause area, but that hardly restricts me to EA organizations! Outside the EA-sphere, there are think tanks, philanthropic foundations, consultancies that work in the public interest, and departments of government, among others, that I would be delighted to work for. Over the past ~year, while looking for my first job out of grad school, I have submitted 32 applications to non-EA organizations, alongside 6 applications to EA orgs.
And how is that working out for me?
Of the 6 applications to EA orgs, 5 got back to me asking for at least one interview or test task, and 4 asked me to do multiple rounds of interviews and/or test tasks. Typically, they expressed enthusiasm about me as an applicant, seemed genuinely sorry to be unable to hire me right then, and encouraged me to try again in the future. This is sweet of them, but it’s a disheartening experience overall.
Meanwhile, of 32 applications to non-EA orgs, 3 got back to me asking for at least one interview or test task, and exactly 1 asked me to do multiple rounds of interviews and/or test tasks.* Typically, I got no response of any kind. Sometimes form rejections drift in, pursuant to applications I submitted months ago. This is disheartening in a totally different way.
(*From my perspective, even this exception proves the rule: the one non-EA application that got me multiple rounds of consideration was when I applied specifically to the Charity Navigator subteam that used to be ImpactMatters; a previous application to Charity Navigator as a whole got no response. But from a more neutral, preregistration-demanding perspective, you should probably ignore this line of argument.)
Obviously, I have limited access to the reasoning behind the hiring decisions here. But for what it’s worth, here’s my personal speculation as to what’s going on:
At this time in my life, my CV consists of (a) academic accomplishment in formal, abstract fields, and (b) some student jobs, a couple of which reflect my longstanding interest in effective altruism. From the perspective of an EA org, this shows a reasonable amount of competence and commitment, enough that they’re happy to toss me a test task and see how I do. But to a mainstream org in a similar cause area, I just seem like kind of a weird fit. Why is someone who studies “category theory” and “formal semantics” applying for this job in policy/development/climate/etc? They don’t have a test task culture, and they do have a stack of candidates whose degrees are in policy/development/climate/etc, so they simply go with one of them.
I’m not saying it’s easy to get a job at an EA org; it’s definitely not, and I haven’t. But for some of us, getting a job anywhere else can feel even harder.
Thank you for writing this. I think this points to an important point/risk/trade-off for people who take an EA path in their careers. EA can be really interdisciplinary, in a way that may not be legible outside EA. This is tricky for career planning.
Why I Apply to EA Orgs
There’s been a lot of handwringing about people’s obsession with getting the relatively few jobs at the relatively few explicitly EA-branded organizations. The discussions have been interesting, but they tend to miss the essential reason for this phenomenon in my experience: when you’re an EA applicant, EA orgs may like you more than non-EA orgs do. A lot more.
Personally, I never felt much pressure, or even necessarily desire, to work only at explicitly EA organizations. I want to work as an analyst or researcher in an EA or EA-adjacent cause area, but that hardly restricts me to EA organizations! Outside the EA-sphere, there are think tanks, philanthropic foundations, consultancies that work in the public interest, and departments of government, among others, that I would be delighted to work for. Over the past ~year, while looking for my first job out of grad school, I have submitted 32 applications to non-EA organizations, alongside 6 applications to EA orgs.
And how is that working out for me?
Of the 6 applications to EA orgs, 5 got back to me asking for at least one interview or test task, and 4 asked me to do multiple rounds of interviews and/or test tasks. Typically, they expressed enthusiasm about me as an applicant, seemed genuinely sorry to be unable to hire me right then, and encouraged me to try again in the future. This is sweet of them, but it’s a disheartening experience overall.
Meanwhile, of 32 applications to non-EA orgs, 3 got back to me asking for at least one interview or test task, and exactly 1 asked me to do multiple rounds of interviews and/or test tasks.* Typically, I got no response of any kind. Sometimes form rejections drift in, pursuant to applications I submitted months ago. This is disheartening in a totally different way.
(*From my perspective, even this exception proves the rule: the one non-EA application that got me multiple rounds of consideration was when I applied specifically to the Charity Navigator subteam that used to be ImpactMatters; a previous application to Charity Navigator as a whole got no response. But from a more neutral, preregistration-demanding perspective, you should probably ignore this line of argument.)
Obviously, I have limited access to the reasoning behind the hiring decisions here. But for what it’s worth, here’s my personal speculation as to what’s going on:
At this time in my life, my CV consists of (a) academic accomplishment in formal, abstract fields, and (b) some student jobs, a couple of which reflect my longstanding interest in effective altruism. From the perspective of an EA org, this shows a reasonable amount of competence and commitment, enough that they’re happy to toss me a test task and see how I do. But to a mainstream org in a similar cause area, I just seem like kind of a weird fit. Why is someone who studies “category theory” and “formal semantics” applying for this job in policy/development/climate/etc? They don’t have a test task culture, and they do have a stack of candidates whose degrees are in policy/development/climate/etc, so they simply go with one of them.
I’m not saying it’s easy to get a job at an EA org; it’s definitely not, and I haven’t. But for some of us, getting a job anywhere else can feel even harder.
Thank you for writing this. I think this points to an important point/risk/trade-off for people who take an EA path in their careers. EA can be really interdisciplinary, in a way that may not be legible outside EA. This is tricky for career planning.