Last year, I explored building a common application for EA/âAI organizations, in collaboration with a funder in the space.
Specifically, we explored a version that might work like:
Applicants submit one application, and indicate organizations theyâd be happy for application materials to be shared with.
Applicants, based on role type or skills, might get screening interviews /â work tests from the common app system.
When an organization is ready to hire, they can quickly pull from pre-vetted candidates, skipping initial screening (since they have materials from our assessments).
Applicants save time by going through a process once, orgs save time by getting to skip advertising and initial screening windows.
I surveyed several dozen organizations about this idea, and talked to a few organizations directly about it. Hereâs what I found:
Organizations wanted this to exist.
Organizations would be happy to recruit candidates out of a shared hiring pool.
Organizations wouldnât rely heavily on this for applicants.
Organizations were generally unlikely to want this to be the only source of candidates. This means that theyâd still open their own applications anyway.
I think this is primarily due to wanting diverse candidate pools /â seeing value in doing their own advertising.
Organizations also generally wanted candidates to go through their own application process separate from the common appâbasically, organizations perceive themselves as having heterogenous application processes.
On organizational self-reporting, no money would be saved.
While this process seems like it might produce savings, based on the time savings organizations reported this would generate for them, my estimate was that the cost-effectiveness of a funder paying for this service to exist was pretty low.
Basically, the issue is that without targeting a specific job, we end up vetting and screening a lot of people who might not be a good fit for roles in the ecosystem, and who might be quickly passed over by organizations.
My estimate of the time/âcost it would take us to run the program, vs the self-reported time savings from organizations, was that it wasnât cost-effective /â wouldnât really save the ecosystem money.
That being said, the program I explored was more comprehensive than just a common app. The issues I see with a pure common app are:
The organization running it would need to have sufficient credibility for the organizations using it to want to forego their own application processes. I think a random person starting it would have very low credibility. My company, which had run several dozen hiring rounds for many organizations had maybe 50% the credibility necessary. This seems like a hard bar.
Candidates have to trust the centralization â e.g. if the common app service also does vetting (which it doesnât have to do, but which has the most value for the organizations using it), then they have to do a good job, as the stakes are high!
That being said, @Nina Friedrichđž and High Impact Professionals is doing tons of amazing work here, including some partial implementations of some of these ideas â their talent database, with candidate consent, lists organizations that candidates were finalists with, which is really useful for hiring.
RE sharing candidate information: this practice is really widespread in the ecosystem. I get probably 3-5 emails a month asking for referrals for candidates for roles, and typically share silver medalists from our similar hiring rounds who consented to sharing.
I think part of the disconnect is that organizations arenât really optimizing on candidate time â they are optimizing on their own time and needs (whether or not this is a mistake).
Thanks again for writing this up! I think there are huge gains to be made here, and hope my notes on my exploration of it are useful for anyone thinking about it!
The organization running it would need to have sufficient credibility for the organizations using it to want to forego their own application processes. I think a random person starting it would have very low credibility. My company, which had run several dozen hiring rounds for many organizations had maybe 50% the credibility necessary. This seems like a hard bar.
I feel like a service that aspires to eventually be a common app could shift towards that incrementally by offering partly-vetted candidates. Itâs not a fully centralised common app, but gets customers/âsign ups from orgs who just want access to another sour e kf high quality candidates
That might reduce some of the value prop to initial candidates at first, if the service doesnât have many confirmed clients yet, but I suspect that (1) quite a lot would apply anyway, even without confirmed buy in from orgs, if the pitch was done well, (2) there might be other ways to make it appealing, e.g. finding ways to offer some (automated?) feedback.
Thanks for weighing in, Jamie! This is the kind of insight I was hoping for.
I agree with your point about incremental change. A partly-vetted candidate pool as a first step seems like a more viable path to building credibility. I think this can be built on the current systems available in EA. Candidates are usually looking for new opportunities to reach organizations, so I think they would be interested if the time invested is reasonable. Feedback would certainly be a plus, but maybe it could lose value if the automatic feedback is too generic.
Hi @abrahamrowe , would you be willing to share more information on this point?
Organizations wanted this to exist.
Organizations would be happy to recruit candidates out of a shared hiring pool.
Iâm preparing an article with @Anaeli V. đč and others about this and would love some more evidence that organisations are looking for a simplified system.
Could you also clarify this point? Why do you think it would generate no savings despite organisations reporting they would save a lot of time?
While this process seems like it might produce savings, based on the time savings organizations reported this would generate for them, my estimate was that the cost-effectiveness of a funder paying for this service to exist was pretty low.
I see and agree with your point regarding credibility. Would you mind sharing why you think your organisation didnât achieve the necessarily credibility in the eyes of recruiters, and what do you see as conducive to reaching the necessary credibility?
RE Organizations want this to exist: - I think that something like 20ish organizations reported that they would use a common app system, at least for operations roles (I think they were much less likely to use it for other kinds of roles, but it was dependent on seniority, etc).
RE it not creating savings: - I asked organizations about various ways that this would save them time. In total, my estimate was a common application + pre-vetting would save organizations 500-1350 hours per year (based on their reports on how theyâd use it and how much time they spend on hiring). - A common app alone might be half that? So 250-675 hours per year? - My estimate is that it would have cost more hours than this to run well.
I think the primary reasons for this are: - Organizations wonât only rely on the common appâtheyâd like easy ways to get candidates, but also want to recruit on their own platforms. For many non-ops roles, they didnât really want to use it at all. - The common app will get a lot more candidates than organizations get â it both makes it easier to apply to jobs, so will increase applications, and makes is more generic, so more people will feel qualified to apply.
Note that I looked at this from the perspective of âif we do this will we spend more time running it than the time savings for organizationsâ and I think the answer was yes.
RE credibility: - A lot of organizations were worried about centralizing application processing /â decision making because it creates a single point of failure. - If you are also vetting applications, the above is worse + they have to trust you in the first place to do the vetting. - The organizations who would have trusted us to do the vetting tended to be groups who had worked with us before on hiring and had a good experience.
Happy to have a call to talk about learnings from this, since as far as I know, my project was the closest the ecosystem has gotten to having a common app! Overall, I agree with the sense of there being lots of inefficiency in the hiring ecosystem â the complicated thing to me feels like candidates often want to solve for the problem of the candidate experience being bad, while the organizations want to solve for the problem of the organization experience being bad, and the causes of those problems are somewhat different.
Thank you very much for your detailed response. Your November post was a great source of inspiration for this, and I believe the community would greatly benefit from a post-mortem of your attempt to build this platform. In the meantime, I would certainly love to have a chat with you about these questions. From what I have seen, you seem to be one of the people in EA who have thought most about the practicalities of a shared application platform. I have also seen mentions of attempts at similar projects in related discussions: have you spoken with those people?
Of course, the organizations would decide whether to work with such a platform, so it makes sense to optimize for them first. I still think there are ways to improve the process for applicants, at least at no cost to the organizations and, to some extent, to their advantage. For instance, it seems that organizations are independently arriving at very similar questions for every operations role, so the shared platform would not reduce the information they get on a candidate compared to the current system. The candidatesâ answers would also not be any more generic if the questions were the same. In fact, they could rate the answer once, and not have to reread the same essays the next time they publish a different operations role, to which the same people will apply. Regardless, for EA as a whole, it would be valuable to recognise that not losing candidates to demoralization is also in the interest of organizations. This is especially relevant since a lot of resources are spent trying to attract people to EA.
Your point about how reputation would be essential for such an endeavor is an important one; I would really like to work on this, but you are right that I will never succeed without the backing of strongly established EA actors. Through discussions like these, I am hoping to get more people thinking about it until solutions start to emerge.
That said, an alternative I have in mind is something closer to a profile system than a traditional common application. Think of it as a private LinkedIn for operations roles (based on the existing HIP profiles, for instance): candidates fill out a set of standardized prompts, and that profile becomes a reusable asset. Organizations do not have to stop running their own hiring. They could simply include a line in their application that offers the option to link their profile to [platform], the same way candidates can often fill out a form or share their LinkedIn profile and have the form automatically filled with the profileâs information. These questions would be complemented by any additional questions not covered by the profile that they would consider relevant. This could potentially save candidates hours of reformatting the same text to slightly different word limits, without taking control of the selection process away from the organization.
I would be excited to see how HIP implements what you mentioned: listing organizations where candidates were finalists. If candidates who reached final rounds had even brief comments on their performance attached to their profile (with consent), that would make the informal referral network you describe (3 to 5 emails per month sharing silver medalists) visible and accessible to candidates, not just to hiring managers who already know each other. This could address many candidatesâ concerns about the lack of transparency.
@AĂŻdaLahlou also shared with me a draft of her post, with some great ideas on how to share feedback with candidates and evaluate them in different ways. I also think HIPâs talent database with finalist history would align with her ideas.
I will be in touch about that call. I think there is a lot to learn from your experience.
Thanks so much for sharing!
Last year, I explored building a common application for EA/âAI organizations, in collaboration with a funder in the space.
Specifically, we explored a version that might work like:
Applicants submit one application, and indicate organizations theyâd be happy for application materials to be shared with.
Applicants, based on role type or skills, might get screening interviews /â work tests from the common app system.
When an organization is ready to hire, they can quickly pull from pre-vetted candidates, skipping initial screening (since they have materials from our assessments).
Applicants save time by going through a process once, orgs save time by getting to skip advertising and initial screening windows.
I surveyed several dozen organizations about this idea, and talked to a few organizations directly about it. Hereâs what I found:
Organizations wanted this to exist.
Organizations would be happy to recruit candidates out of a shared hiring pool.
Organizations wouldnât rely heavily on this for applicants.
Organizations were generally unlikely to want this to be the only source of candidates. This means that theyâd still open their own applications anyway.
I think this is primarily due to wanting diverse candidate pools /â seeing value in doing their own advertising.
Organizations also generally wanted candidates to go through their own application process separate from the common appâbasically, organizations perceive themselves as having heterogenous application processes.
On organizational self-reporting, no money would be saved.
While this process seems like it might produce savings, based on the time savings organizations reported this would generate for them, my estimate was that the cost-effectiveness of a funder paying for this service to exist was pretty low.
Basically, the issue is that without targeting a specific job, we end up vetting and screening a lot of people who might not be a good fit for roles in the ecosystem, and who might be quickly passed over by organizations.
My estimate of the time/âcost it would take us to run the program, vs the self-reported time savings from organizations, was that it wasnât cost-effective /â wouldnât really save the ecosystem money.
That being said, the program I explored was more comprehensive than just a common app. The issues I see with a pure common app are:
The organization running it would need to have sufficient credibility for the organizations using it to want to forego their own application processes. I think a random person starting it would have very low credibility. My company, which had run several dozen hiring rounds for many organizations had maybe 50% the credibility necessary. This seems like a hard bar.
Candidates have to trust the centralization â e.g. if the common app service also does vetting (which it doesnât have to do, but which has the most value for the organizations using it), then they have to do a good job, as the stakes are high!
That being said, @Nina Friedrichđž and High Impact Professionals is doing tons of amazing work here, including some partial implementations of some of these ideas â their talent database, with candidate consent, lists organizations that candidates were finalists with, which is really useful for hiring.
RE sharing candidate information: this practice is really widespread in the ecosystem. I get probably 3-5 emails a month asking for referrals for candidates for roles, and typically share silver medalists from our similar hiring rounds who consented to sharing.
I think part of the disconnect is that organizations arenât really optimizing on candidate time â they are optimizing on their own time and needs (whether or not this is a mistake).
Thanks again for writing this up! I think there are huge gains to be made here, and hope my notes on my exploration of it are useful for anyone thinking about it!
I feel like a service that aspires to eventually be a common app could shift towards that incrementally by offering partly-vetted candidates. Itâs not a fully centralised common app, but gets customers/âsign ups from orgs who just want access to another sour e kf high quality candidates
That might reduce some of the value prop to initial candidates at first, if the service doesnât have many confirmed clients yet, but I suspect that (1) quite a lot would apply anyway, even without confirmed buy in from orgs, if the pitch was done well, (2) there might be other ways to make it appealing, e.g. finding ways to offer some (automated?) feedback.
Thanks for weighing in, Jamie! This is the kind of insight I was hoping for.
I agree with your point about incremental change. A partly-vetted candidate pool as a first step seems like a more viable path to building credibility. I think this can be built on the current systems available in EA. Candidates are usually looking for new opportunities to reach organizations, so I think they would be interested if the time invested is reasonable. Feedback would certainly be a plus, but maybe it could lose value if the automatic feedback is too generic.
Hi @abrahamrowe , would you be willing to share more information on this point?
Iâm preparing an article with @Anaeli V. đč and others about this and would love some more evidence that organisations are looking for a simplified system.
Could you also clarify this point? Why do you think it would generate no savings despite organisations reporting they would save a lot of time?
I see and agree with your point regarding credibility. Would you mind sharing why you think your organisation didnât achieve the necessarily credibility in the eyes of recruiters, and what do you see as conducive to reaching the necessary credibility?
Thanks in advance for your help! :D
RE Organizations want this to exist:
- I think that something like 20ish organizations reported that they would use a common app system, at least for operations roles (I think they were much less likely to use it for other kinds of roles, but it was dependent on seniority, etc).
RE it not creating savings:
- I asked organizations about various ways that this would save them time. In total, my estimate was a common application + pre-vetting would save organizations 500-1350 hours per year (based on their reports on how theyâd use it and how much time they spend on hiring).
- A common app alone might be half that? So 250-675 hours per year?
- My estimate is that it would have cost more hours than this to run well.
I think the primary reasons for this are:
- Organizations wonât only rely on the common appâtheyâd like easy ways to get candidates, but also want to recruit on their own platforms. For many non-ops roles, they didnât really want to use it at all.
- The common app will get a lot more candidates than organizations get â it both makes it easier to apply to jobs, so will increase applications, and makes is more generic, so more people will feel qualified to apply.
Note that I looked at this from the perspective of âif we do this will we spend more time running it than the time savings for organizationsâ and I think the answer was yes.
RE credibility:
- A lot of organizations were worried about centralizing application processing /â decision making because it creates a single point of failure.
- If you are also vetting applications, the above is worse + they have to trust you in the first place to do the vetting.
- The organizations who would have trusted us to do the vetting tended to be groups who had worked with us before on hiring and had a good experience.
Happy to have a call to talk about learnings from this, since as far as I know, my project was the closest the ecosystem has gotten to having a common app! Overall, I agree with the sense of there being lots of inefficiency in the hiring ecosystem â the complicated thing to me feels like candidates often want to solve for the problem of the candidate experience being bad, while the organizations want to solve for the problem of the organization experience being bad, and the causes of those problems are somewhat different.
Hi @abrahamrowe,
Thank you very much for your detailed response. Your November post was a great source of inspiration for this, and I believe the community would greatly benefit from a post-mortem of your attempt to build this platform. In the meantime, I would certainly love to have a chat with you about these questions. From what I have seen, you seem to be one of the people in EA who have thought most about the practicalities of a shared application platform. I have also seen mentions of attempts at similar projects in related discussions: have you spoken with those people?
Of course, the organizations would decide whether to work with such a platform, so it makes sense to optimize for them first. I still think there are ways to improve the process for applicants, at least at no cost to the organizations and, to some extent, to their advantage. For instance, it seems that organizations are independently arriving at very similar questions for every operations role, so the shared platform would not reduce the information they get on a candidate compared to the current system. The candidatesâ answers would also not be any more generic if the questions were the same. In fact, they could rate the answer once, and not have to reread the same essays the next time they publish a different operations role, to which the same people will apply. Regardless, for EA as a whole, it would be valuable to recognise that not losing candidates to demoralization is also in the interest of organizations. This is especially relevant since a lot of resources are spent trying to attract people to EA.
Your point about how reputation would be essential for such an endeavor is an important one; I would really like to work on this, but you are right that I will never succeed without the backing of strongly established EA actors. Through discussions like these, I am hoping to get more people thinking about it until solutions start to emerge.
That said, an alternative I have in mind is something closer to a profile system than a traditional common application. Think of it as a private LinkedIn for operations roles (based on the existing HIP profiles, for instance): candidates fill out a set of standardized prompts, and that profile becomes a reusable asset. Organizations do not have to stop running their own hiring. They could simply include a line in their application that offers the option to link their profile to [platform], the same way candidates can often fill out a form or share their LinkedIn profile and have the form automatically filled with the profileâs information. These questions would be complemented by any additional questions not covered by the profile that they would consider relevant. This could potentially save candidates hours of reformatting the same text to slightly different word limits, without taking control of the selection process away from the organization.
I would be excited to see how HIP implements what you mentioned: listing organizations where candidates were finalists. If candidates who reached final rounds had even brief comments on their performance attached to their profile (with consent), that would make the informal referral network you describe (3 to 5 emails per month sharing silver medalists) visible and accessible to candidates, not just to hiring managers who already know each other. This could address many candidatesâ concerns about the lack of transparency.
@AĂŻdaLahlou also shared with me a draft of her post, with some great ideas on how to share feedback with candidates and evaluate them in different ways. I also think HIPâs talent database with finalist history would align with her ideas.
I will be in touch about that call. I think there is a lot to learn from your experience.