Roman—I love the post and the visualization. Makes me excited for all that might be coming out of the first Generator cohort.
One addition to suggest for your top-level funnels would be well-publicized hiring rounds. I’m a mid-career generalist working for a non-aligned legacy grantmaker, and though both EA generally and AI safety specifically had been vaguely on my radar for years, the trigger for me to get serious about it and eventually complete my first BlueDot intensive was actually a recent CG hiring round for GCR grantmakers that I saw on LinkedIn. CG pays quite competitively, and their job postings tend to get serious traction with the LinkedIn nonprofit-world algorithm.
From there, I realized that my college classmate, @Sam Anschell, is working at CG, and I reached out to him to learn more about the position. Sam served as your “Noah Birnbaum,” and, along with warm encouragement to apply, he also shared links to 80K Hours, Probably Good, and High-Impact Professionals.
Once CG rejected me (for obvious lack of field signal), I started to dig into those links that Sam sent me and got a better sense of what the field looks like, the urgency of the problem, where I might be able to help, and how I could increase my legitimacy on future job applications. If Sam hadn’t followed up with those resources (and continued to message with me as I started to engage), I would say very little chance that I took any of those subsequent actions.
EA-aligned orgs tend to value pre-existing context quite highly in applicants, and why shouldn’t they? When CG rejected me, they sent a lovely, detailed message with feedback, but they missed an obvious chance to send out those career pivot resources. Barring any HR compliance issues that I haven’t thought of, one low-hanging method to capture more of those job-applicant rain drops would be to encourage employers to modify their boilerplate rejection letter to include links to resources and encouragement to engage in advance of potential future hiring rounds.
Also, one suggestion for the visualization site- when you hover on a falling raindrop, freeze the text so you can actually read it, or list the various people profiles in another area so it’s not as frenetic an experience to try and read them all.
To give credit where credit is due, I have seen some organisations starting to provide rejection letters (at least at first round) which point candidates towards existing resources and courses that could help them gain more context. I agree this is a good practice and should be encouraged.
Roman—I love the post and the visualization. Makes me excited for all that might be coming out of the first Generator cohort.
One addition to suggest for your top-level funnels would be well-publicized hiring rounds. I’m a mid-career generalist working for a non-aligned legacy grantmaker, and though both EA generally and AI safety specifically had been vaguely on my radar for years, the trigger for me to get serious about it and eventually complete my first BlueDot intensive was actually a recent CG hiring round for GCR grantmakers that I saw on LinkedIn. CG pays quite competitively, and their job postings tend to get serious traction with the LinkedIn nonprofit-world algorithm.
From there, I realized that my college classmate, @Sam Anschell, is working at CG, and I reached out to him to learn more about the position. Sam served as your “Noah Birnbaum,” and, along with warm encouragement to apply, he also shared links to 80K Hours, Probably Good, and High-Impact Professionals.
Once CG rejected me (for obvious lack of field signal), I started to dig into those links that Sam sent me and got a better sense of what the field looks like, the urgency of the problem, where I might be able to help, and how I could increase my legitimacy on future job applications. If Sam hadn’t followed up with those resources (and continued to message with me as I started to engage), I would say very little chance that I took any of those subsequent actions.
EA-aligned orgs tend to value pre-existing context quite highly in applicants, and why shouldn’t they? When CG rejected me, they sent a lovely, detailed message with feedback, but they missed an obvious chance to send out those career pivot resources. Barring any HR compliance issues that I haven’t thought of, one low-hanging method to capture more of those job-applicant rain drops would be to encourage employers to modify their boilerplate rejection letter to include links to resources and encouragement to engage in advance of potential future hiring rounds.
Also, one suggestion for the visualization site- when you hover on a falling raindrop, freeze the text so you can actually read it, or list the various people profiles in another area so it’s not as frenetic an experience to try and read them all.
Great stuff!
To give credit where credit is due, I have seen some organisations starting to provide rejection letters (at least at first round) which point candidates towards existing resources and courses that could help them gain more context. I agree this is a good practice and should be encouraged.
Thanks for the lovely comment :) and the feedback/information!