I am sorry that you have to deel with kind of frustration. At Successif we have done double blind work tests for the first round of the hiring interviews for advisor applications and had good results.
On the other hand we recently hired for an operation associate and didn’t do this. I’ve become less excited about written work tests given LLM capabilities and I think work tests can cover only parts of what I’m looking for. I’d rather have people describe what they did before in their application so I can talk with them about the details in the interview.
In this case we hired someone with several years of experience doing the kinds of things we were looking for in a another organization without having been involved in EA. I don’t know how representative that is, but I do nudge organizations to hire for experience before alignment when asked.
I can’t comment on your situation as there is not enough information but if people ask me about operations roles I typically recommend to upskill outside the impact space in organizations which can provide mentorship and good operational procedures—something which is sadly sometimes missing in our space. In terms of counterfactuals I would suspect that we are sometimes seeing negative values by only hiring within the community and often very small ones for many of the competitive operation positions. For our recent hiring round we received 70 applications in four days before closing the applications. We had many brilliant and purpose driven people apply who were affected by USAID cuts.
So what could you do in addition to upskilling? Volunteer roles can be a great way to get into roles which will never be publicly announced. Similarly networking, doing small scale side projects, being around people in organizations and helping them (for example helping the local or national community) can help to stand out.
Sometimes it can also be the most impactful thing to have a solid career, donate a be the person to help others in the community. Imagine a strong hub of people in Rome* doing impactful work together because you were there to consistently support them and fill the gaps in the local space. This could be awesome.
*I don’t know anything about EA in Rome so only speculating
I am sorry that you have to deel with kind of frustration. At Successif we have done double blind work tests for the first round of the hiring interviews for advisor applications and had good results.
On the other hand we recently hired for an operation associate and didn’t do this. I’ve become less excited about written work tests given LLM capabilities and I think work tests can cover only parts of what I’m looking for. I’d rather have people describe what they did before in their application so I can talk with them about the details in the interview.
In this case we hired someone with several years of experience doing the kinds of things we were looking for in a another organization without having been involved in EA. I don’t know how representative that is, but I do nudge organizations to hire for experience before alignment when asked.
I can’t comment on your situation as there is not enough information but if people ask me about operations roles I typically recommend to upskill outside the impact space in organizations which can provide mentorship and good operational procedures—something which is sadly sometimes missing in our space.
In terms of counterfactuals I would suspect that we are sometimes seeing negative values by only hiring within the community and often very small ones for many of the competitive operation positions. For our recent hiring round we received 70 applications in four days before closing the applications. We had many brilliant and purpose driven people apply who were affected by USAID cuts.
So what could you do in addition to upskilling? Volunteer roles can be a great way to get into roles which will never be publicly announced. Similarly networking, doing small scale side projects, being around people in organizations and helping them (for example helping the local or national community) can help to stand out.
Sometimes it can also be the most impactful thing to have a solid career, donate a be the person to help others in the community. Imagine a strong hub of people in Rome* doing impactful work together because you were there to consistently support them and fill the gaps in the local space. This could be awesome.
*I don’t know anything about EA in Rome so only speculating