It seems like there is a big discrepancy between the amount of applications different EA orgs get.
What advice would you give to an EA org to help them get more or better applications?
Context:
Josh You:
”A couple of years it seemed like the conventional wisdom was that there were serious ops/management/something bottlenecks in converting money into direct work.”
Abraham Rowe’s response:
”We haven’t had ops talent bottlenecks. We’ve had incredibly competitive operations hiring rounds (e.g. in our most recent hiring round, ~200 applications, of which ~150 were qualified at least on paper), and I’d guess that 80%+ of our finalists are at least familiar with EA (which I don’t think is a necessary requirement, but the explanation isn’t that we are recruiting from a different pool I guess).
...
We spend a lot of time resources on recruiting, and advertise our jobs really widely, so maybe we are reaching a lot more potential candidates than some other organizations were?”
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/D499oMCiFiqHT92TT/we-re-rethink-priorities-ask-us-anything?commentId=WNxy2mh4KM656qzHY
My advice here is not going to be about listing a ton of places to widely post your job ad—while we do that, I really think it only accounts for maybe ~10% of our hiring success. I think ~90% of our strongest applicants come from either the 80K jobs board or from us deliberately reaching out to people and inviting them to apply.
Since you can’t really do anything about the 80K jobs board (they don’t accept solicitations), the single best thing IMO that you can do is proactively identify high-potential candidates and invite them to apply. Also, reach out to a group of diverse other people you respect and whom you think are good judges of talent and ask them who they think are the high-potential candidates and then invite those candidates to apply.
Another important factor: Hiring remotely gives us (Rethink Priorities) access to a much bigger talent pool than organizations that don’t, but of course there’s trade-offs there. That might explain another large portion of how we can get so many applicants.
Lastly, I think it’s also worth investing a lot of time in creating a genuinely good workplace and then telling people about it so they know you have one. You can advertise all you want but people still have to choose to apply and they’ll only apply to good places.
These three things matter much more than just posting everywhere.
Consider where EAs are and post in those places. Whether on twitter, the EA jobseekers slack, newsletters, etc etc.
If you’re hiring software developers, then this