Spitballing here, but have you considered putting some thoughts to this effect on your website? Currently, the relevant part of the 80k website reads as follows.
Why wasn’t I accepted?
Unfortunately, due to overwhelming demand, we can’t advise everyone who applies. However, we’re confident that everyone who is reading this has what it takes to lead a fulfilling, high impact career. Our key ideas series contains lots of our best advice on this topic – we hope you’ll find it useful.
If you’re thinking of re-applying, you can improve your chances by:
Using our planning tool, which we developed to help people think through their own decisions.
You can also get involved in our community to get help from other people trying to do good with their careers.
This is ok as far as it goes, but to me does feel a little like a fake-positive ‘I’m sure you’ll do just fine, whoever-you-are!‘. Pointing out things like the fact that you have very little information to go on, and that you’re optimising for people you can help most rather than making some kind of pure ‘how valuable is this person’ call, seems like it could help soften the blow the margin, though I appreciate it’ll never make that large a difference given the other things you mentioned.
Thanks for this feedback. I had a go at rewriting that our ‘why wasn’t I accepted’ FAQ. It now reads:
Why wasn’t I accepted?
We sincerely regret that we can’t advise everyone who applies. We read every application individually and are thankful that you took the time to apply. It’s really touching reading about people who have come across 80,000 Hours and are excited about using their careers to help others.
We aim to talk to the people we think we can help most. Our not speaking with you does not mean we think you won’t have a highly impactful career. Whether we can be helpful to you sometimes depends on contingent factors like whether one of our advisers happens to know of a role or introduction right now that might be a good fit for you. We also have far less information about you than you do, so we aren’t even necessarily making the right calls about who we can help most.
You’re very welcome to reapply, particularly if your situation changes. If you’re thinking of doing so, it might be worth reading our key ideas series and trying out our career planning process, which we developed to help people think through their career decisions. You can also get involved in our community to get help from other people trying to do good with their careers.
Spitballing here, but have you considered putting some thoughts to this effect on your website? Currently, the relevant part of the 80k website reads as follows.
This is ok as far as it goes, but to me does feel a little like a fake-positive ‘I’m sure you’ll do just fine, whoever-you-are!‘. Pointing out things like the fact that you have very little information to go on, and that you’re optimising for people you can help most rather than making some kind of pure ‘how valuable is this person’ call, seems like it could help soften the blow the margin, though I appreciate it’ll never make that large a difference given the other things you mentioned.
Thanks for this feedback. I had a go at rewriting that our ‘why wasn’t I accepted’ FAQ. It now reads:
Why wasn’t I accepted?
We sincerely regret that we can’t advise everyone who applies. We read every application individually and are thankful that you took the time to apply. It’s really touching reading about people who have come across 80,000 Hours and are excited about using their careers to help others.
We aim to talk to the people we think we can help most. Our not speaking with you does not mean we think you won’t have a highly impactful career. Whether we can be helpful to you sometimes depends on contingent factors like whether one of our advisers happens to know of a role or introduction right now that might be a good fit for you. We also have far less information about you than you do, so we aren’t even necessarily making the right calls about who we can help most.
You’re very welcome to reapply, particularly if your situation changes. If you’re thinking of doing so, it might be worth reading our key ideas series and trying out our career planning process, which we developed to help people think through their career decisions. You can also get involved in our community to get help from other people trying to do good with their careers.