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 they’d 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 won’t only rely on the common app—they’d like easy ways to get candidates, but also want to recruit on their own platforms. For many non-ops roles, they didn’t really want to use it at all. - The common app will get a lot more candidates than organizations get — 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 “if we do this will we spend more time running it than the time savings for organizations” and I think the answer was yes.
RE credibility: - A lot of organizations were worried about centralizing application processing / 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 — 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 candidates’ 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 profile’s 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 candidates’ concerns about the lack of transparency.
@AïdaLahlou 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 HIP’s 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.
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 they’d 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 won’t only rely on the common app—they’d like easy ways to get candidates, but also want to recruit on their own platforms. For many non-ops roles, they didn’t really want to use it at all.
- The common app will get a lot more candidates than organizations get — 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 “if we do this will we spend more time running it than the time savings for organizations” and I think the answer was yes.
RE credibility:
- A lot of organizations were worried about centralizing application processing / 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 — 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 candidates’ 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 profile’s 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 candidates’ concerns about the lack of transparency.
@AïdaLahlou 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 HIP’s 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.