As someone who has led or been involved in many hiring rounds in the last decade, I’d like to affirm most of the points above, e.g.: it’s very hard to predict what you’ll get offers for, you’ll sometimes learn about personal fit and improve your career capital, stated role “requirements” are often actually fairly flexible, etc.
Applicants who get the job, or make it to the final stage, often comment that they’re surprised they got so far and didn’t think they were a strong fit but applied because a friend told them they should apply anyway.
Apply to some roles even if you’re not sure you’d leave your current role anytime soon. Hiring managers often don’t reach out to some of their top prospects for a role because they have limited time and just assume that the prospect probably won’t leave their current role.
If you apply to a role on a whim and then make it past the first stage, you might find that your interest in the role grows as a result, e.g. because it “feels more real” and then you think about what that role would be like in a more concrete way, and because you’ve gotten a positive signal that the employer thinks you might be a fit.
Just getting your up-to-date information in an employers CRM can be valuable. I am constantly trying to help grantees and other contacts fill various open roles, and one of the main things I do is run filters on past Open Phil applicants to identify candidates matching particular criteria. I’ve helped connect several “unsuccessful” Open Phil applicants to other jobs, including e.g. to a think tank role which shortly thereafter led to a very influential role in the White House, and things like that. Of course we also check our lists of past applicants when trying to fill new roles at Open Phil, and in some cases we’ve hired people who we previously rejected for the first role they applied to.
That said, it’s helpful if you keep applying even if your info is already in a particular employer’s CRM, both to indicate interest in a particular role and because your situation may have changed. I often think a prospect won’t be interested in a role because, last I heard, only wanted to do roles like X and Y, or only in domain Z, or only after they finish their PhD, or whatever, and then sometimes I learn that 9mo later they changed their mind about some of that stuff so now they’re open to the role I was trying to fill but I didn’t learn that until after the hiring round was closed.
To support people in following this post’s advice, employers (including Open Phil?) need to make it even quicker for applicants to submit the initial application materials, perhaps by holding off on collecting some even fairly basic information until an applicant passes the initial screen.
To support people in following this post’s advice, employers (including Open Phil?) need to make it even quicker for applicants to submit the initial application materials
From my perspective as an applicant, fwiw, I would urge employers to reduce the scope of questions in the initial application materials, more so than the time commitment. EA orgs have a tendency to ask insanely big questions of their early-stage job applicants, like “How would you reason about the moral value of humans vs. animals?” or “What are the three most important ways our research could be improved?” Obviously these are important questions, but to my mind they have the perverse effect that the more an applicant has previously thought about EA ideas, the more daunting it seems to answer a question like that in 45 minutes. Case in point, I’m probably not going to get around to applying for some positions at this post’s main author’s organization, because I’m not sure how best to spend $10M to improve the long-term future and I have other stuff to do this week.
Open Phil scores great on this metric by the way—in my recent experience, the initial screening was mostly an elaborate word problem and a prompt to explain your reasoning. I’d happily do as many of those as anyone wants me to.
Huge +1 to this post! A few reflections:
As someone who has led or been involved in many hiring rounds in the last decade, I’d like to affirm most of the points above, e.g.: it’s very hard to predict what you’ll get offers for, you’ll sometimes learn about personal fit and improve your career capital, stated role “requirements” are often actually fairly flexible, etc.
Applicants who get the job, or make it to the final stage, often comment that they’re surprised they got so far and didn’t think they were a strong fit but applied because a friend told them they should apply anyway.
Apply to some roles even if you’re not sure you’d leave your current role anytime soon. Hiring managers often don’t reach out to some of their top prospects for a role because they have limited time and just assume that the prospect probably won’t leave their current role.
If you apply to a role on a whim and then make it past the first stage, you might find that your interest in the role grows as a result, e.g. because it “feels more real” and then you think about what that role would be like in a more concrete way, and because you’ve gotten a positive signal that the employer thinks you might be a fit.
Just getting your up-to-date information in an employers CRM can be valuable. I am constantly trying to help grantees and other contacts fill various open roles, and one of the main things I do is run filters on past Open Phil applicants to identify candidates matching particular criteria. I’ve helped connect several “unsuccessful” Open Phil applicants to other jobs, including e.g. to a think tank role which shortly thereafter led to a very influential role in the White House, and things like that. Of course we also check our lists of past applicants when trying to fill new roles at Open Phil, and in some cases we’ve hired people who we previously rejected for the first role they applied to.
That said, it’s helpful if you keep applying even if your info is already in a particular employer’s CRM, both to indicate interest in a particular role and because your situation may have changed. I often think a prospect won’t be interested in a role because, last I heard, only wanted to do roles like X and Y, or only in domain Z, or only after they finish their PhD, or whatever, and then sometimes I learn that 9mo later they changed their mind about some of that stuff so now they’re open to the role I was trying to fill but I didn’t learn that until after the hiring round was closed.
To support people in following this post’s advice, employers (including Open Phil?) need to make it even quicker for applicants to submit the initial application materials, perhaps by holding off on collecting some even fairly basic information until an applicant passes the initial screen.
From my perspective as an applicant, fwiw, I would urge employers to reduce the scope of questions in the initial application materials, more so than the time commitment. EA orgs have a tendency to ask insanely big questions of their early-stage job applicants, like “How would you reason about the moral value of humans vs. animals?” or “What are the three most important ways our research could be improved?” Obviously these are important questions, but to my mind they have the perverse effect that the more an applicant has previously thought about EA ideas, the more daunting it seems to answer a question like that in 45 minutes. Case in point, I’m probably not going to get around to applying for some positions at this post’s main author’s organization, because I’m not sure how best to spend $10M to improve the long-term future and I have other stuff to do this week.
Open Phil scores great on this metric by the way—in my recent experience, the initial screening was mostly an elaborate word problem and a prompt to explain your reasoning. I’d happily do as many of those as anyone wants me to.