Just under 800 people applied. I split the pile with a colleague, which gave me 400 resumes and 1200 short-answer questions to read.1
To get this done within the week, while also doing the rest of my job, I had to spend less than five minutes per person. And we only had time to grade a few dozen work tests, so we had to cut over 90% of the applicants. These numbers aren’t unusual for an open hiring round.
I just cannot believe that this is right. IMHO we delude ourselves that we’re being fair and effective, while in reality we’re putting a lot of energy, hard-work and resources into applying for jobs (800 people did this for one job !!! - think about how many hours that is—and they all had to answer 3 short-answer questions with enough care and attention. For many of them, that application process was probably at least half a day of work. So, 1-2 years of “EA work” went into just applying for this one role. Surely there were more valuable ways the EA movement could have used all this energy and creativity ???
I was just reading this post, How to become a better applicant in one week, from 80,000 Hours, and was struck by this paragraph:
Here’s what my previous hiring round was like:
Just under 800 people applied. I split the pile with a colleague, which gave me 400 resumes and 1200 short-answer questions to read.1
To get this done within the week, while also doing the rest of my job, I had to spend less than five minutes per person. And we only had time to grade a few dozen work tests, so we had to cut over 90% of the applicants. These numbers aren’t unusual for an open hiring round.
I just cannot believe that this is right. IMHO we delude ourselves that we’re being fair and effective, while in reality we’re putting a lot of energy, hard-work and resources into applying for jobs (800 people did this for one job !!! - think about how many hours that is—and they all had to answer 3 short-answer questions with enough care and attention. For many of them, that application process was probably at least half a day of work. So, 1-2 years of “EA work” went into just applying for this one role. Surely there were more valuable ways the EA movement could have used all this energy and creativity ???