Having some experience with hiring, it might be some consolation that you did actually provide value to the EA orgs you applied to by giving them:
more practice hiring
more exposure to candidates to figure out who they want
a better intuitive grasp of the talent landscape
It’s unfortunate that this has such a large opportunity cost and that you bore so much of it, but the unfortunate reality on the hiring side for any org is that we often need to interview additional candidates we know we won’t hire because if we don’t we won’t know enough to trust the people we do hire are the right people. Of course we don’t know which candidates we will and won’t hire in advance (otherwise if we already knew it would be extremely unfair to everyone to do the interviews), but at least in this case your interview time helped EA focused organizations gain that knowledge rather than other orgs who you may be less aligned with values on and so less value their institutional learning from additional interviews that don’t result in hires.
Having some experience with hiring, it might be some consolation that you did actually provide value to the EA orgs you applied to by giving them:
more practice hiring
more exposure to candidates to figure out who they want
a better intuitive grasp of the talent landscape
It’s unfortunate that this has such a large opportunity cost and that you bore so much of it, but the unfortunate reality on the hiring side for any org is that we often need to interview additional candidates we know we won’t hire because if we don’t we won’t know enough to trust the people we do hire are the right people. Of course we don’t know which candidates we will and won’t hire in advance (otherwise if we already knew it would be extremely unfair to everyone to do the interviews), but at least in this case your interview time helped EA focused organizations gain that knowledge rather than other orgs who you may be less aligned with values on and so less value their institutional learning from additional interviews that don’t result in hires.