I wouldn’t put much weight on the number of applicants. The job that received 1200+ applicants, I assure you that over 800 and perhaps over 10000 of them were complete nonsense/very low effort applications that have no chance. This is because you get a lot of automated fill outs/copy paste to anything/sites that do this for you.
I generally recommend against a common “come one, come all” hiring round since I think you get a lot more signal from people you know/their recommendations. I think they seem more meritocratic, but you are often filtering for the skill of resume writing.
Job searches are notoriously difficult for many reasons but I would expect to need to fill out >100 to land a job. That’s pretty common in the non-EA world. Don’t get discouraged.
That one was OpenPhil. Everyone and their cat wants to work at OpenPhil.
I think even once you account for the slush pile, there is still sufficient talent circulating around such that it’s no longer necessary to imply scarcity, nor spend on open rounds for soft skills-based roles. Thanks, I’ll try not to get discouraged. The non-EA world is beckoning…
I know of two others besides myself who are searching in that cause area with at least one of those skills, and we’ve all worked at EA orgs before. I wonder what I’m missing here.
@SiobhanBall We have spoken about this a few times before. But just to clarify it’s not scarcity-baiting. Two statements can be the same organisations are struggling for the right candidates with these skills and talented individuals with these skills still struggle to get roles.
I will lead with data to highlight this. We have published 3,000 jobs from 2021-2024. High impact roles about 380 (defined as OP or EAAWF funded orgs plus skill bottlenecks) Reposting level for the high impact roles are 18%, reposting for all other roles is 2.5%. That is a huge difference. Along with the fact that organisations consistently state themselves they struggle to find the right people at these organisations…
We only analyse at the end of the year 🙂 but I don’t think it will be drastically different. I think another poster mentioned above the number of applications isnt actually a signal of quality and there is still a situation where organisations are struggling to find people at a certain seniority that fit with their culture, have the right mindset, right to work in the region, accept the salary and have the right skills and experience. I don’t think it’s an easy fix although I do agree there are some great candidates who are yet to be hired.
Mmm. Once those great candidates are hired, the talk of gaps will make more sense. Until such time, from the candidates’ perspectives, it doesn’t add up, even if you do assume a generous AI-generated slush allowance in the pool.
I do still think it’s not at all cost effective for orgs run full rounds when there are known good individuals bouncing around waiting for their moment. On the other hand, with OP handing out huge grants with apparently little scrutiny, maybe the 20k price tag isn’t as much as it would be to me. That could just be it.
@SiobhanBall I think your argument doesnt factor in 1) the largest cost to an organisation is actually the wrong hire. It can be 3-5 x the cost of a hiring round. With network based hiring you are increasing the chances of a bad hire 2) the impact of a lower performer on the outcomes of the organisation. These are all mentioned above by @David M. I feel quite strongly it would be bad for the EA or AR movement to go back to network based hiring.
What was the prompt? Mine produced different studies. I’d rather not trade LLM outputs; suffice to say, the evidence is mixed.
3-5x costs?! That’s not just a bad hire. That’s a catastrophic hire!
I’m sure those calamity hires happen sometimes. But you’d only need to network-hire cheaply for 4-6 other roles for every disastrous case to break even on the cost. So unless the calamity hires are occurring more than 15-20% of the time, the savings would offset the outlier risk.
I would change my mind if it could be shown that network hiring increases the chance of a catastrophic result, not by some unknowable margin, but by enough to override its cheapness compared to open hiring.
Well I would also be interested in knowing what yours said, because I’ve never seen research of a good sample size that backs up network based hiring as outperforming hiring rounds. That’s why they exist and in almost every high performing company. How many of the greatest companies in the world do only network based hiring?
But I think you just have very strong priors on this and we are unlikely to agree.
The cost of a bad hire logically are significantly higher, it’s hard to fire people- it takes times from the organisation, it disrupts the team, outputs are poor and ultimately you have to do another hiring round to replace them.
IMHO you are weighting the experience of candidates over the cost to organisations here.
Ask for research on network vs open hiring and there’ll be studies in both directions. I don’t know, I imagine they do both. The context of a greatest company in the world is probably different to a lean EA org.
EA focuses very much on cost effectiveness as a central principle. I think hiring could be better at walking the talk in that regard.
We both have skin in the game here—me as a disenfranchised applicant and you as someone whose org relies on there being talent gaps to fill! Thank you for engaging in good faith.
I would just like to say, that if the movement pivoted towards network based hiring we would heavily benefit from this. So me arguing against is a genuine belief not coming from my own benefit.
I do agree with you that the talent density of the EA AR movement has increased in the last few years and there aren’t enough high impact roles to absorb all the talented people. Which is why we have shifted away from just promoting non profit roles to ETG, giving more broadly and policy work.
I just don’t think the solution is open hiring rounds.
And why we also continue to do the skill bottleneck survey every year despite working consistently with organizations to have more objective data on where they are struggling to find people and I do think talent density is a different problem than skill gaps.
Anyhow thanks for engaging and it’s an interesting post to read and the comments are great.
I wouldn’t put much weight on the number of applicants. The job that received 1200+ applicants, I assure you that over 800 and perhaps over 10000 of them were complete nonsense/very low effort applications that have no chance. This is because you get a lot of automated fill outs/copy paste to anything/sites that do this for you.
I generally recommend against a common “come one, come all” hiring round since I think you get a lot more signal from people you know/their recommendations. I think they seem more meritocratic, but you are often filtering for the skill of resume writing.
Job searches are notoriously difficult for many reasons but I would expect to need to fill out >100 to land a job. That’s pretty common in the non-EA world. Don’t get discouraged.
That one was OpenPhil. Everyone and their cat wants to work at OpenPhil.
I think even once you account for the slush pile, there is still sufficient talent circulating around such that it’s no longer necessary to imply scarcity, nor spend on open rounds for soft skills-based roles. Thanks, I’ll try not to get discouraged. The non-EA world is beckoning…
PS, As a specific example of the scarcity-baiting: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/animal-advocacy-careers_3-career-path-in-focus-activity-7350927244191576065-Lwdz?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAACCDb2oBVyFGrMG4W_uNnRXDDAk0Tt5jLTE
I know of two others besides myself who are searching in that cause area with at least one of those skills, and we’ve all worked at EA orgs before. I wonder what I’m missing here.
@SiobhanBall
We have spoken about this a few times before. But just to clarify it’s not scarcity-baiting.
Two statements can be the same organisations are struggling for the right candidates with these skills and talented individuals with these skills still struggle to get roles.
I will lead with data to highlight this. We have published 3,000 jobs from 2021-2024. High impact roles about 380 (defined as OP or EAAWF funded orgs plus skill bottlenecks) Reposting level for the high impact roles are 18%, reposting for all other roles is 2.5%. That is a huge difference. Along with the fact that organisations consistently state themselves they struggle to find the right people at these organisations…
Hi Lauren, fair point. What’s been the re-posting rate in 2025?
We only analyse at the end of the year 🙂 but I don’t think it will be drastically different. I think another poster mentioned above the number of applications isnt actually a signal of quality and there is still a situation where organisations are struggling to find people at a certain seniority that fit with their culture, have the right mindset, right to work in the region, accept the salary and have the right skills and experience. I don’t think it’s an easy fix although I do agree there are some great candidates who are yet to be hired.
Mmm. Once those great candidates are hired, the talk of gaps will make more sense. Until such time, from the candidates’ perspectives, it doesn’t add up, even if you do assume a generous AI-generated slush allowance in the pool.
I do still think it’s not at all cost effective for orgs run full rounds when there are known good individuals bouncing around waiting for their moment. On the other hand, with OP handing out huge grants with apparently little scrutiny, maybe the 20k price tag isn’t as much as it would be to me. That could just be it.
@SiobhanBall I think your argument doesnt factor in 1) the largest cost to an organisation is actually the wrong hire. It can be 3-5 x the cost of a hiring round. With network based hiring you are increasing the chances of a bad hire 2) the impact of a lower performer on the outcomes of the organisation. These are all mentioned above by @David M. I feel quite strongly it would be bad for the EA or AR movement to go back to network based hiring.
What was the prompt? Mine produced different studies. I’d rather not trade LLM outputs; suffice to say, the evidence is mixed.
3-5x costs?! That’s not just a bad hire. That’s a catastrophic hire!
I’m sure those calamity hires happen sometimes. But you’d only need to network-hire cheaply for 4-6 other roles for every disastrous case to break even on the cost. So unless the calamity hires are occurring more than 15-20% of the time, the savings would offset the outlier risk.
I would change my mind if it could be shown that network hiring increases the chance of a catastrophic result, not by some unknowable margin, but by enough to override its cheapness compared to open hiring.
Well I would also be interested in knowing what yours said, because I’ve never seen research of a good sample size that backs up network based hiring as outperforming hiring rounds. That’s why they exist and in almost every high performing company. How many of the greatest companies in the world do only network based hiring?
But I think you just have very strong priors on this and we are unlikely to agree.
The cost of a bad hire logically are significantly higher, it’s hard to fire people- it takes times from the organisation, it disrupts the team, outputs are poor and ultimately you have to do another hiring round to replace them.
IMHO you are weighting the experience of candidates over the cost to organisations here.
Ask for research on network vs open hiring and there’ll be studies in both directions. I don’t know, I imagine they do both. The context of a greatest company in the world is probably different to a lean EA org.
EA focuses very much on cost effectiveness as a central principle. I think hiring could be better at walking the talk in that regard.
We both have skin in the game here—me as a disenfranchised applicant and you as someone whose org relies on there being talent gaps to fill! Thank you for engaging in good faith.
I would just like to say, that if the movement pivoted towards network based hiring we would heavily benefit from this. So me arguing against is a genuine belief not coming from my own benefit.
I do agree with you that the talent density of the EA AR movement has increased in the last few years and there aren’t enough high impact roles to absorb all the talented people. Which is why we have shifted away from just promoting non profit roles to ETG, giving more broadly and policy work.
I just don’t think the solution is open hiring rounds.
And why we also continue to do the skill bottleneck survey every year despite working consistently with organizations to have more objective data on where they are struggling to find people and I do think talent density is a different problem than skill gaps.
Anyhow thanks for engaging and it’s an interesting post to read and the comments are great.