After the incredible response to the “really, really hard to get hired” thread, there’s definitely plenty of room for ongoing analysis and advice like this. Love your 3 policy prescriptions.
Although you say that perhaps organisations are ‘too nice’ in not putting people off, and yes candidates can do their own investigation, perhaps by not being more explicit EA orgs are unintentionally doing the opposite of being nice, by contributing to a lot of wasted time and emotional trauma. If an organisation is genuinely never going to higher someone without experience for a particular role, then perhaps the nicest thing would be to write
“We will not consider applicants for this job with less than 2 years experience in x or y orz”
I can imagine a scenario where one line like this could save hundreds of hours of wasted application time, and also save a lot of heartache.
I don’t think many EA organizations have implicit experience barriers of this kind. The roles that have been mostly hotly contested, with the most applicants, really are “generalist” positions (e.g. research associates at GiveWell or Open Phil, where more or less everyone [I think] gets to take the first basic work test, and credentials don’t seem like they matter if your work tests are strong).
Meanwhile, many positions at CEA (where I currently work) are filled by people who’d never done that kind of work in a professional setting before, or who only had experience with some (but not all) aspects of the job. My job is to write and edit, and my only prior “paid” writing/editing experience was in random freelance work here and there plus a few bits of journalism I wrote as a college student in ~2013, adding up to maybe one year of “full-time” experience.
That said, there may be non-experience “barriers” that should come into play earlier, relating to a candidate’s skill in a particular area… but that seems like “raise standards for your initial round of work tests”, not “try to stop people from applying in the first place”.
After the incredible response to the “really, really hard to get hired” thread, there’s definitely plenty of room for ongoing analysis and advice like this. Love your 3 policy prescriptions.
Although you say that perhaps organisations are ‘too nice’ in not putting people off, and yes candidates can do their own investigation, perhaps by not being more explicit EA orgs are unintentionally doing the opposite of being nice, by contributing to a lot of wasted time and emotional trauma. If an organisation is genuinely never going to higher someone without experience for a particular role, then perhaps the nicest thing would be to write
“We will not consider applicants for this job with less than 2 years experience in x or y orz”
I can imagine a scenario where one line like this could save hundreds of hours of wasted application time, and also save a lot of heartache.
I don’t think many EA organizations have implicit experience barriers of this kind. The roles that have been mostly hotly contested, with the most applicants, really are “generalist” positions (e.g. research associates at GiveWell or Open Phil, where more or less everyone [I think] gets to take the first basic work test, and credentials don’t seem like they matter if your work tests are strong).
Meanwhile, many positions at CEA (where I currently work) are filled by people who’d never done that kind of work in a professional setting before, or who only had experience with some (but not all) aspects of the job. My job is to write and edit, and my only prior “paid” writing/editing experience was in random freelance work here and there plus a few bits of journalism I wrote as a college student in ~2013, adding up to maybe one year of “full-time” experience.
That said, there may be non-experience “barriers” that should come into play earlier, relating to a candidate’s skill in a particular area… but that seems like “raise standards for your initial round of work tests”, not “try to stop people from applying in the first place”.