80,000 Hours says we need more people — so why do top candidates still struggle to land roles?
I’m trying to reconcile the arguments (and marketing) with the labour market reality because it looks like even if you have strong credentials and career capital you might not find a relevant role because of how ultracompetitive this landscape is, based on discussions with other EA’s and posts on the EA forum attesting how hard it is to land a job.
Every time a new role gets posted on the 80,000 Hours job board it feels like it attracts hundreds of applicants with top, even elite credentials. That doesn’t look “neglected” at the job level at all, it looks more like talent is fulfilled where it’s really necessary. In practice this is really good because it means competent people are working directly on these issues.
So, what’s missing here really? Is “neglected” mostly referring to funding and institutional capacity at the organizational level, while the actual job openings are few, so everyone is trying to get through the same narrow door? Or is it just that lots of people go after the same few EA jobs, so those roles become really hard to get, even if the cause still needs a lot more people and work overall?
At the same time lots of these non-profits and organizations (*not all of them) also have a lot of money and are not at all underfunded, but not so many jobs are being created. For example, The Future of Life Institute received around $665 million worth of crypto from Vitalik Buterin in 2021 but only spent $17 million in 2024 based on their finance page. They did increase their job openings since 2021, but not by the capacity they have.
If these are really “NEGLECTED AND PRESSING WORLD PROBLEMS” that are vital in the next 5-10 years, why not create more roles when you have the necessary funding if there are so many exceptional candidates willing to work? When there’s money available but staffing doesn’t grow much, it starts to feel less like “we urgently need more competent people” and more like “we already have enough staff”, similar to a normal business that simply doesn’t need more people to run.
I’ve also been thinking about incentives at the senior end as well, how do these orgs decide to pay a small number of senior staff extremely well, like for example I’ve seen figures that Eliezer Yudkowsky is compensated $600k at MIRI alone (*just used as an example, don’t have anything against him personally), instead of paying a little bit less and hiring a couple of other strong researchers, if the cause area they are advocating for is really “NEGLECTED AND PRESSING” as in we are already seeing the precipice.
Do they worry that paying a little bit less would make it harder to keep their best contributors and if full-time hires aren’t the best way to scale, why not use more contractors, fellowships, or small grants? Do they sometimes keep teams small because adding more people adds coordination, meetings and review overhead? How do they decide that paying for a small number of senior people is the best use of funds compared to expanding the staff or funding more independent contributors? When money is available what constraints make more hiring the wrong move, if the cause they work on truly is urgent?
And I’m also uneasy about what the implied advice is for people who aren’t in the top few percent of candidates. Is the real funnel basically just a small number who get paid to work on the direct stuff, and the rest are expected to be earning to give, volunteer, do pro-bono contributions, independent research or create their own roles in their spare time? That might be pragmatic, but then it should be said more plainly, because “we need more people working on these neglected issues” reads very differently than “a handful of elite roles exist and they are steadily growing but the majority will just support indirectly.”
Hi Nicolae,
From my perspective as the 80,000 Hours job board manager, two things explain the difference in experience between hiring managers and job applicants:
Applicants often have great credentials, but still aren’t exactly a fit for the roles, which often require high context (whether in EA or in AI safety) and a particular skillset.
“We need more people working on these neglected issues” doesn’t necessarily mean that orgs have the management capacity to absorb more people. You ask “Do they sometimes keep teams small because adding more people adds coordination, meetings and review overhead?”, and I think this underweights just how tricky coordination is. Being able to scale and integrate more talent is very difficult.
More on both of these in my recent blogpost.
I’ll also note that there are lots of impactful roles outside of EA orgs (which are indeed very competitive). For example, we mostly don’t highlight EA orgs in our top career review.
Hi Conor,
Many thanks for your intervention, really appreciate it.
To answer your two main points:
- On the “applicants often have great credentials, but still aren’t exactly a fit for the roles, which often require high context and a particular skillset.” I would say that’s just normal hiring dynamics, if you have 300 good applicants, you don’t choose the one who could be great after a couple of months of training, you choose the one who can deliver fastest with minimal supervision. When you have a strong applicant pool, you can afford to be extremely picky and “great credentials” stops being a differentiator. That’s not a moral critique, it’s just how normal competitive markets usually work. But it does mean that from the applicant side, “we need more people” can feel quite misleading, because what they’re experiencing is “we have plenty of applicants, we’re selecting for a very specific profile.”
A useful contrast is COVID-era tech hiring. When things felt GENUINELY URGENT and demand spiked, a lot of companies expanded headcount aggressively and were willing to train or take slightly “unpolished” fits because there was real demand. That’s what REAL URGENCY looks like in labour markets. Standards don’t disappear, but organizations invest in onboarding and accept more variance because capacity matters more than perfect fit. So when people see “urgent, neglected problems” but no comparable willingness to scale via an adjustment period it’s easy to conclude the bottleneck isn’t “we need more people,” it’s “we can be selective because we already have plenty of applicants.”
- On point number 2 regarding management/coordination, I agree that scaling can be hard. But if “we need more people” is true at the cause level and “we can’t absorb more people” is true at the org level, then the bottleneck isn’t just “talent”, it’s management capacity and also organizational design. Then my immediate question is why isn’t more effort and funding going into things like middle management, onboarding, training etc. especially when there is funding available? In other words, if they can’t hire because coordination is too costly, then increasing coordination capacity would be a high-impact intervention.
If the 80,000 Hours cause areas are truly “NEGLECTED AND URGENT” like on a 5–10 year timeline, you would expect hiring to look more agressive like tech during COVID, more roles created, faster scaling, and more willingness to train strong people who aren’t already perfect fits.
Cheers
I feel like even if this is largely true, it doesn’t negate the part of the OPs point of which is something like there a mismatch with communicating “the world needs you working on AI” and “there don’t seem to be enough jobs for half of good people that want to work on AI”
On your second point “We need more people working on these neglected issues” doesn’t necessarily mean that orgs have the “management capacity to absorb more people”.
if that’s true then in practical sense do we actually need more people working on these neglected issues? Or do we need more jobs first before we push for more people? Or like the OP suggested could there be more junior hires then effort building people up through the system?
And are orgs like 80,000 hours being honest enough about the job market in their communication?
Imagine I’m running a vegan restaurant. I’ve started serving my customers jackfruit tacos. They really like the tacos. So I run a giant advertising campaign all over the city telling people about my tacos. Come the weekend, my restaurant is flooded with customers. But after the first 50 customers, I run out of jackfruit, and the rest of the customers don’t get to try the tacos. How do you think those customers would feel about my restaurant?
How would you feel, if you drove across town to try some jackfruit tacos which you learned about in an advertisement, and the restaurant was all out? You’d probably feel a sense of disappointment, and conclude that the restaurant is not very well run. If I told you “well the advertisement was technically right, the tacos are truly delicious” you’d probably be even more annoyed.
If you advertise EA as a place where talented people are needed in order to make the world a better place, and talented people arrive in EA, and they don’t feel at all needed… they might not come back. Even if it’s true in some technical sense that more people are needed in the abstract. Same way you might not come back to my vegan restaurant, even if it’s technically true that the tacos are delicious. Replies like this miss the point, and give you a reputation for callous mismanagement. Eventually you burn through your entire potential customer base.
That doesn’t necessarily mean you need to stop advertising. Just give people an accurate idea of what to expect, instead of hiding behind “it was technically correct”. If the advertisement says “Jackfruit tacos available for first 50 customers”, you won’t be as annoyed if they are all out by the time you arrive.
Also, people have to deal with the whole application process that repeats over and over. To extend your analogy: the customers who drove across town are also being asked to describe, in slightly different words each time, why they like tacos.
Quite possibly they infer this must be the most exciting new product, feel FOMO, and arrive even earlier the next day? Restaurant behaviour is weird—see for example how long lines are seen as a sign of success rather than mispricing.
I think, realistically, EA hasn’t bottlenecked by talent for a long time—at least not in a raw numbers sense
My thoughts, linked to what Conor said, are that many orgs (even with funds) don’t hire more because they aren’t confident in their ability to manage them or scale internal functions quickly, which is a downstream issue of some epistemic issues in EA hiring.
In essence, the types of people EA orgs say they need (experienced managers, senior leaders etc) struggle to get into EA roles because many EA orgs place disproportionate weight upon EA (or cause specific) credentials over non EA experience—to the extent that candidates with a couple years in EA type roles can end up outcompeting people with a good deal more experience in higher responsibility non-EA positions.
Projects like HIP are doing their very best to address this, but the issue at its core (at least to me) seems to stem from the thinking around hiring.
*Seems I’m being down voted on this one, my thoughts are drawn from a lot of convos with mid career folks from HIP, but I’m open to counterarguments and alternative explanations
Seems to me that a lot of EA experience could actually be a negative, if it worsens organizational groupthink.
Google VP of people operations in 2013
In general EA orgs seem really overconfident to me about the quality of their candidate evaluation metrics. How many of these metrics have proven external validity? Seems kinda pointless to put a ton of effort into optimizing a metric, if you don’t even know if it corresponds to what you actually want...
I find myself wondering if EAs have been doing the same thing forever and they typically just replicate what they’ve seen before 😁
Just a note that in 2013, Google’s headcount was a little less than 50,000 people, so we are talking about a completely different scale from any EA or EA-adjacent organization. When you are hiring at scale, you can afford to take more risks on any given hire.
I agree, we are constantly being pushed to apply to fellowships or positions that the organizations know are already oversubscribed. In practice, the processes for determining the best candidates are not very good, and if only a tenth of people applied for these roles, the best of that sample would not be noticeably better. But this negligible improvement represents ten times as much time wasted by the community on application processes that go nowhere. And even from the perspective of a single applicant, those processes take a very long time. In fact, I just wrote an essay about how those applications could be greatly simplified. The solutions I suggest would not solve the problem (simplifying the application process will encourage more people to apply), but at least the process would be more respectful of applicants’ time.
Some lose thoughts around this:
1) There are not enough people is correct if you understand it as “enough people with the right fit, for the jobs currently on offer”—so there can be thousands of candidates, but only a small percentage fit the very specific criteria.
2) I doubt there is a good way to communicate this and not deter candidates, and therefore lose the chance to find those great people the charities need.
3) The current problem is the lack of good training programs in impact-focused thinking, so it’s hard for people with tons of experience and great credentials to get to the required EA-ness stage (impact-focused mindset, landscape familiarity) quickly enough to get the positions on offer, when they join EA.
4) Yes, most of us should be doing earning to give, because there is not enough opportunities, why some of us, that can handle the stress and pressure of launching new projects, should create opportunities for ourselves.
5) Noone have mentioned that an organization can only scale if it’s cost-effective, and to keep being cost-effective, it can’t just absorb talent because we want to have jobs. Too many hires and you’re spending much more than you’re creating in impact, which should not be the case.
6) The other thing is that scaling is very hard, and we don’t have a lot of expertise in the movement on how to do it right, while remaining cost-effective. So this expertise is developing slowly, but not fast enough to create many opportunities.
7) Another bottleneck is people management experience. This is also a lacking skill in EA, so I can see why people will be slow and careful about hiring to ensure a good culture fit and maintain equilibrium within teams.
8) You are right that insane salaries should be used differently; there should be no insane salaries in our movement, CEOs/directors should not be paid much, much more than other people in the team. I think this is the case in charities I worked/work for, like Ambitious Impact, Rethink Priorities. There are no huge gaps between employees and leadership, as we all create the impact together.
9) There are some organizations trying to address talent gaps, e.g., IAPS has fellowships, AIM has research fellowships, AIM has an incubation program, RP is fiscally sponsoring new impactful projects that people want to launch. AIM helped create “Effective Spenden”—like orgs in various countries. This is all absorbing some talent, but obviously not enough.
10) This is why I think we need to birng back earning to give, but ensure earning to givers have local communitis, where they can meet with like-manded individuals, and this is proerly fostered, so that they feel needed, they have connection with the impact they are creating etc.
Broadly agree but:
Aren’t we mitigating this with things like MATS and BlueDot et al? These should be producing useful hires at a high rate so training isn’t the issue it seems
I don’t know, as I’m not very familiar with EA’s AI side. I guess, for AI, the pathway is very specialized and only for extremely skilled individuals who can get into these highly competitive programs and become the very best in them. There is a huge chunk of EAs interested in working in other cause areas, and for that, I am unsure whether we have anything good. I’d love AIM to create this kind of program, but it’s not its role in the ecosystem. We have EA courses run by CEA, but I’ve heard many complaints about the recent ones, so I am not optimistic they’ll add much value, especially for experienced professionals who want to switch careers, rather than very EA-ingrained students, for whom they will be easier.
The simple answer to your question about the noteworthy salaries at core EA orgs: Symbolic Capitalism.
A truly EA approach to EA work would be everything is carried out with very reasonable wages in the lowest cost labour markets in the world, across every level of an organization, because even paying outright for staff members to undertake whatever specific niche skill training might be needed for a role would still never add up to even close to the entry level salaries at some of these US- and UK-based places.
$600k is not “extremely well” for the Bay Area, given the high taxes and ridiculous cost of living there. But the obvious next question is: why are so many EA organisations located in extremely-high-cost cities?
I don’t think it’s an EA-specific problem, because many other non-profits are also located in high-cost locations. For policy / lobbying / campaigning organisations there is an obvious reason to be close to the centres of power in capital cities, but that doesn’t apply to direct-work orgs.
Median household (not personal) income in the bay area is well under $200,000, so I disagree that $600k is not doing “extremely well”.
However, I personally believe that most EA executives earning in the mid six figures could easily earn even more if they were to move to the private sector.
I would define “extremely well” relative to the extremes of the income distribution rather than the median. However, according to https://statisticalatlas.com/metro-area/California/San-Francisco/Household-Income the “mean of top 5%” income is $563k so $600k would count as “extremely high” by my definition too.
Perhaps that also answers my other question. The reason so many orgs are based in high-cost cities is that there are lots of workers who are willing to eat that cost themselves, taking a big hit to everything I would include in a “quality of life” metric in order to get something that can only be had in the big city.