Hello, my name’s Bella Forristal. I work at 80,000 Hours, as the head of marketing.
I’m interested in animal advocacy, moral circle expansion, and normative ethics.
Previously, I worked in community building with the Global Challenges Project and EA Oxford, and have interned at Charity Entrepreneurship.
Please feel free to email me to connect at bellaforristal@gmail.com, or leave anonymous feedback at https://www.admonymous.co/bellaforristal :)
Thanks for writing this Zach! The broad strokes of the dynamics here are not news to me (I work at 80k which is a project of EV) but lots of the detail was novel and feels good to know.
By my count, animal welfare is 100x more neglected than global health (Edit: global development, not global health — my mistake). I’m unsure how much bigger it is in scale (given that making trades between humans and animals is hard) — but I’d guess it’s very very much larger in scale.
I’m not on the podcast team but just quickly jumping in to say we do release highlights on the 80k After Hours feed! Not sure if they’re planning one for this episode but it’d be a good candidate, I agree!
Edit: sorry, we actually release highlights episodes for every main feed episode — my bad for the misinfo!
Hey Emily, I’m sorry to hear you’ve had trouble figuring out how your broad skill set fits in.
For the roles I’m hiring for right now, specific experience is less relevant than evidence of the most important skills for the role. Copying directly from the job description for the Head of Marketing role, for example:
A strong interest in effective altruism, longtermism, and/or having a big, positive impact in the world — ideally with experience in applying EA principles in real-world decisions
Strong judgement; the ability to consider complex strategic questions evenhandedly, communicate them clearly, and get others on board
(This is just the first two from a longer list!)
When I’m evaluating candidates, I expect these traits to show up in various different ways at different stages of the application. To give some sense, here’s what I’ve written in some of my own documents about how those two traits will show up in the initial application form:
Excitement about the role; they seem EA / longtermist (or say that they are).
Mention interest in EA on the application form (with evidence).Their answers seem thoughtful. Clear communication; lucid, easy-to-engage-with writing.
Does that help give you a sense of the kinds of things I’m looking for that aren’t specific experience?
I’m not sure if this really answers your question, but I hope it’s helpful & let me know if there’s anything else I could share!
Hi Pranshul,
Thanks for your comment, and I’m really glad to hear you’d be excited about working at 80k!
I think being a new high school graduate is not a dealbreaker for us / doesn’t directly rule you out, so you’d be very welcome to put in an application on our website!
However, for full transparency’s sake, I do think I should say that I’d guess it will be a fairly significant downside compared to candidates with more experience, and I’d be somewhat surprised if ended up hiring someone with no prior work experience or tertiary education.
Hey Batur,
Thanks for your detailed & thoughtful questions!
I’ll answer in order:
For the rounds I’m running, I’ll reach out to candidates we’re moving forward with either just before or shortly after applications close on the 18th and 25th August.
I haven’t yet confirmed precisely what all the stages of the application will look like — it’ll probably depend on the applications I get, and might vary a bit from person to person. But to give you a sense, for the last hiring round I ran, we had the initial application (3 substantive questions), then a paid 4 hour work test (doing work similar to what you’d do in the role), then a 30min-1hr interview, then a 3-day in-person work trial (which was also paid, where we could do so legally).
I hope to be able to make offers for the roles I’m hiring for by mid-late September, but it might take longer or shorter than that (depending in part on scheduling for the trial).
Hiring rounds are run by individual hiring managers, and a hiring committee of (usually) 3 people. We do coordinate somewhat (such as by doing this post together!) and if candidates are applying to multiple rounds, we might share details of their application with one another. However, the rounds are mostly quite independent, and e.g. it’s possible we could offer multiple positions to the same person (& it’d be up to the candidate to decide between them). There is an organisation-wide people ops function, but they’re low on capacity at the moment, so this round is mostly being run by the individual teams we’re hiring to.
Teams at 80k are quite independent, but do have some interaction, and it varies quite a bit by team. For example, the marketing team goes to fortnightly web team meetings and weekly web team standups; plus, our work is often completed in collaboration with team leads whose product we are advertising!
The current marketing team is myself and Nik Mastroddi (so, it’s two right now). We’d most like to be able to hire both a new head of marketing and a new marketer, but that might not be possible, so the final team size will depend on how many hires we make and for which roles.
The short-term vision for the team is...hiring! (while maintaining our current channels.) The medium-term vision should be set by whoever is head of marketing, so I can’t say for sure what they would decide. If we don’t hire a new head and I stay in the role, I would likely recommend keeping the team at a size of 3, or perhaps 2 or 4.
I’ll leave the two questions about advising to Huon! :)
Hey Vincent! Thanks for your question :)
I think that there are lots of diffuse and hard-to-directly-measure benefits of having employees work from our London office. The main one that I’m especially excited about is the person in this role absorbing — and contributing to — our team culture, which I think is really helpful for keeping us as an organisation aimed at producing the most impactful outcomes.
I’m somewhat unsure this is the right attitude overall, and we are open to remote applicants (& many of the applications we’ve gotten so far are from remote candidates).
Thanks so much for your questions! I’ll answer them in order:
For me, the precise wording of your CV is not at all important. I mostly look at CVs to get a sense of the candidate’s prior experience, so if you wanted to highlight parts of your work experience which seemed relevant, that’d be cool, but it doesn’t seem necessary.
In general, titles at 80k are very much up for negotiation, with a couple of constraints:
We have some words that we use in titles which refer to specific groups, such as ‘director’ or ‘head of’ — and you can’t use them if you’re not a director or a programme lead!
We generally want the title to give a reasonable impression about the kind of work done in the role (so, the head of video couldn’t have the title ‘head of podcast’ or something).
The salary formula has lots of inputs, so it’s not easy to say ‘you’d be paid £x more per year of experience.’ However, to give you a sense, for the ‘marketer’ role, someone with no relevant prior experience would be offered approximately £58,000 per year; someone with four years of relevant prior experience would be offered approximately £65,000 per year; and someone with ten years of relevant prior experience would be offered approximately £76,000 per year.
Here’s another anonymous question I got:
How do you like people to approach their CVs? (Particularly in terms of successful candidates, or even just what gets people through to the next round at least)
e.g. Using the same words as you did in the JD, or different ones? With the I did X by doing Y which led to Z impact formula? And does the latter have to be numbers
Also, is the Head of Video title negotiable?
Lastly, how does the salary scale work e.g. 1y of exp vs 10 years
I’ll respond in a comment!
Thanks for your question and for giving some detail on your situation!
It’s not a hard requirement that the Head of Video be able to spend time in London (though we do prefer it for the same reason we prefer all our staff to be in London — so that they can both absorb and contribute to team culture!).
There is an additional complication about videos, which is that if we’re making videos, we’ll likely need to film them and/or record audio in some particular location. So, it is a requirement that the Head of Video would be able to arrange that happening...somehow!
I’d guess that a Head of Video would want to be physically present for filming, at least some of the time, which would mean that they’d need to arrange it to happen in a location that is accessible to them and to whoever else would be involved in the filming.
I guess it might be hard to do that in the Cotswolds (?) since you might need to arrange travel to the Cotswolds for a bunch of people, but definitely not impossible!
I hope that gives you some more context on how location might constrain applicants to the role, & please feel free to ask followups on Admonymous if anything is unclear!
An anonymous user submitted the following question to me via my Admonymous:
Hey,
I see for the Head of Video role there is a need for significant time to be spent in London. I am disabled and a wheelchair user that is exceptionally interested in the position, but wondered how much time would be needed and what support would possible be available? I live in the Cotswolds currently, and I love the area and lifestyle that offers so would prefer not to move away from here if at all possible. My biggest issue is I do not currently have a wheelchair that makes me entirely independent, I am unable to get it in and out of my car, and public transport is very hit and miss when it comes to accessibility (even when pre-booking!).
Thanks for answering as best you can (I know without specifics and detailed discussion it is hard to give a firm response.)
I’ll leave my response in a reply to this comment.
Hey Helena — thanks for your question!
I’m happy for generalists to apply to the marketer position — I don’t think prior marketing experience is required to excel in the role, so long as you’re excited to learn the relevant skills!
You’re certainly welcome to apply to both! We’ll typically share application materials internally where it seems decision-relevant, but otherwise, the applications are progressed separately.
If I were you, I might spend some time thinking about if one of the roles seems better suited to you based on your skills & the type of work you’re excited about doing. I think they’re quite different ways of working — for example, advisors do a lot of talking to people! Marketers at 80k don’t do nearly as much. Which sounds more energising to you?
Thanks for your question, and for reaching out to me even though you felt hesitant!
You’re right that the job description mentions interest in effective altruism and longtermism, and that our staff often have backgrounds in EA or related areas.
However, I think that if 80k only ever hired people who had previously had roles which were legibly EA — or excluded people who’d ever had a harmful career — we’d likely turn people away who could have been excellent in the role, and we’d be making a mistake. So, I don’t think you should think you’re unqualified if you have either of those traits!
I’d also hope that you wouldn’t encounter any stigma at 80,000 Hours — our staff are, in my experience, empathetic and lovely people — but it’s hard to be very confident without knowing the specific roles in question, or asking my colleagues directly.
That said:
I do think that knowledge of (and even experience in) “EA meta” or “community-building” is a useful trait, for the roles I’m hiring for. That’s because 80k is an EA meta organisation — we’re engaged in the project of trying to get people to work on the world’s most pressing problems — so that knowledge would be directly relevant.
I also think that the strongest candidates for these roles will be really excited about 80,000 Hours’ mission, and using their talent and effort to help us do more of what we do :) At bare minimum, they need to be willing to spend the coming months/years working towards our mission, and ideally, they should think that sounds like among their top options for ways to spend their time at work. So, if you’re on the fence about whether you support EA-style approaches to doing good (I’m a bit unsure from what you wrote?) then you might want to spend some time working out what you think before applying to roles like these. If you’re feeling confident, but just haven’t acted on it much yet — there’s no time like the present! :)
Hope that helps — feel free to reply here with an anonymous Forum account if you’d like, or to reply on my Admonymous again.
An anonymous user submitted the following question to me via my Admonymous:
Hey Bella,
The role sparked my interest when I saw it on LinkedIn a week ago, but candidly I am a bit hesitant about submitting an application.
There seems to be a heavy emphasis on participation and previous involvement in effective altruism. I am only tepidly familiar with the concept through references in popular media, and perhaps appropriately, was introduced several years ago through the 80,000 Hours book giveaway. I aspire to do good, and leave a net positive impact on the world – but I haven’t necessarily lived the creed. I have in fact worked in careers and industries topping the list of “10 most harmful careers” – marketing in harmful industries like gambling, AI etc., prioritising career growth and often, renumeration, over other aspects more personally relevant to me.Looking at the team makeup of 80,000 hours on LinkedIn, it seems like It seems like interest and previous engagement or studies in ethics, moral philosophy, volunteerism, or in related fields (charity, giving etc.) are weighed considerably (and potentially more important than classical marketing experience – which you alluded to in the role description). I do think the role itself is a neat challenge and great opportunity, but I fear the stigma in having been in a harmful career makes it more difficult to transition to a EA career, and (particularly for this role), doesn’t make me a viable candidate.
I understand roles at this organisation are at the helm of a very unique discipline and field where passion and engagement are particularly important. You can be earnest and candid in your response. I think that is fair.
I’ll leave my response in a reply to this comment.
Hey Tamar! Huon’s already answered for advising, but for the other rounds: we’re happy to try to rush applications if there’s a particular reason e.g. a deadline you have coming up for another job. However, like Huon, I’d be very surprised if we were able to make an offer before applications are closed, since it’s not enough time to do an in-person work trial. Hope that helps!
I find most poetry on these themes to be hard to engage with sincerely. This one felt, somehow, better and more appropriate than other similar poems, and I really enjoyed reading it. Thanks for sharing!
Yeah, I agree that many animals can & will make tradeoffs where there’s a chance of death, even a high chance (though I’m not confident they’d be aware that what they’re doing is taking on some chance of death — I’m not sure many animals have a mental concept of death similar to ours. Some might, but it’s definitely not a given.).
I also agree that animals engage in self-destructive behaviours, e.g. feather pulling, chewing/biting, pacing, refusing food when sick, eating things that are bad for them, excessive licking at wounds, pulling on limbs when stuck, etc etc.
I’m just not sure that any of them are undertaken with the purpose/intent to end their own life, even when they have that effect. That’s because I’d guess that it’s kind of hard to understand “I’d be better off dead” because you need to have a concept of death, and not being conscious, plus the ability to reason causally from taking a particular action to your eventual death.
To be clear, I’ve not done any research here on animal suicide & concepts of death, & I’m not all that confident, but I overall think the lack of mass animal suicides is at best extremely weak evidence that animal lives are mostly worth living.
the revealed preference of living things is nearly always to live
That’s because almost no living things have the ability to conceive of, or execute on, alternative options.
Consider a hypothetical squirrel whose life is definitely not worth living (say, they are subjected to torture daily). Would you expect this squirrel to commit suicide?
(I didn’t read all the comments so someone else might have said this already)
I think this post is admirable for trying to persuasively correct a mistake you see people making — but I end up disagreeing because of equivocation between end factory farming and end factory farming within our lifetimes.
I think the goal is to end factory farming, & my sense is most of the harms you’re worried about only accrue when people have an unrealistic sense of how likely that is overall (not guaranteed) & how soon that might happen (maybe not for a very long time, or perhaps ever).
See some (limited) discussion of this in 80k’s new factory farming article which I was reading earlier today by coincidence.