~80% of the applications are speculative, from people outside the EA community and donāt even really understand what we do...
Out of interestādo you folks tend to hire outside the EA community? And how much does EA involved-ness affect your evaluation of applications?
I ask as I know some really smart and talented people working on development outside of EA who could be great founders, and Iād like to know if itās worth encouraging them to apply.
We have had founders from outside the EA community. āEA-nessā isnāt something we explicitly filter for, rather we look for traits such as being impact-focused, ambitiously altruistic, having strong epistemics etc. Those traits are, on average, more common in EA candidates, but if someone who is not part of the EA movement has those traits they will do well in our process. The only exception was when we had a year on EA meta charities, then being involved and knowledgeable about EA was necessary.
The people that Steve refers to in the quoted sentence are more āspammyā people- those who just seem to apply to every job, or who obviously donāt know what we do, eg., they think we are a grantmaker and they want to get funding for their very non-effective project.
So in your example of people from the international development community, if they have all the traits that matter but are just not a part of the EA community, I think they would make great candidates.
Out of interestādo you folks tend to hire outside the EA community? And how much does EA involved-ness affect your evaluation of applications?
I ask as I know some really smart and talented people working on development outside of EA who could be great founders, and Iād like to know if itās worth encouraging them to apply.
We have had founders from outside the EA community. āEA-nessā isnāt something we explicitly filter for, rather we look for traits such as being impact-focused, ambitiously altruistic, having strong epistemics etc. Those traits are, on average, more common in EA candidates, but if someone who is not part of the EA movement has those traits they will do well in our process. The only exception was when we had a year on EA meta charities, then being involved and knowledgeable about EA was necessary.
The people that Steve refers to in the quoted sentence are more āspammyā people- those who just seem to apply to every job, or who obviously donāt know what we do, eg., they think we are a grantmaker and they want to get funding for their very non-effective project.
So in your example of people from the international development community, if they have all the traits that matter but are just not a part of the EA community, I think they would make great candidates.