I’m chief of staff to GiveWell’s Chief Research and Program Officer. I previously worked on our recruiting team, and prior to GiveWell taught high school math. I learned about EA in 2014 when I stumbled on Scott Alexander’s blog.
All writing on this account is personal and not endorsed by my employer (the only exception is if I answer questions on GiveWell’s job posts). If you’d like to see more of my personal writing, check out my Substack linked above!
@Ben_West🔸 this is not really a substantive comment, but just wanted to say that this is the only time I’ve seen someone mention Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You (imo one of the all-time great theological tracts) online or in real life—that was pretty exciting. Thanks for writing this; I really enjoyed the read!
One comment on a trivial thing:
You said that Satan’s temptation of Jesus is not typically interpreted as meaning that governments are intrinsically Satanic. I think that’s right. But, I don’t think it’s correct to say that the Bible clearly states that civil authority is intrinsically godly.
Your quote from the Cambridge Bible argues this, but their reasoning proves too much: If God is sovereign, you could use the same argument to say that everything (including sin) is divinely mandated because it’s all created by God. Some Christian theological factions do actually hold that view–for example, by saying that God created sin in order to demonstrate His power and glory– but most do not.
I think the mainstream Christian view, sourced from a variety of Scriptures (but especially from Jesus’ comments on Roman taxes in Mark 12) is something like “civil authorities are somewhat morally neutral; you should default to obeying their commands unless they’re clearly in opposition to God’s commands.”
My best guess is that Tolstoy and many other Christian anarchists would actually agree with the precise logic of that statement, but where they’d differ from mainstream Christians is in the their interpretation of what’s “clearly in opposition to God’s commands”. They’d argue that the set of civil commands that are contrary to God’s commands is just very large—maybe including all civil commands—because such commands enabled the governments in their contexts to do ungodly things.
But, it’s complicated; I think the debate in Christian theological circles about how to understand the morality of institutional behavior is very much alive!
Looking forward to attending!
Hey Clare, quick thoughts:
How do EA hiring processes differ from other organizations? I think the main characteristic of EA hiring that people typically point to is work trial usage—EA-ish hiring processes typically rely on those heavily! But, whether work trial usage differs from other organizations probably depends on the comparators—for example, it’s common for tech companies to also rely heavily on work trials, but it’s uncommon for nonprofits to do so. One other feature of EA-ish hiring processes that I hear people talk about frequently is values alignment, which I’ll very roughly define here as ‘a combination of personal values, attitudes, and habits of work/mind that the organization regards to be crucial to supporting its impact.’ Here, I’m not sure that EA-ish organizations care much more about values alignment than other organizations, but I do believe they often have stranger and harder-to-find values.
Initial format of applications: I don’t know precisely what job you’re referring to here, but that sounds like an interesting question! I think I agree with your intuition that it’s likely providing some indirect information on values alignment, but that’s probably not all—it’s probably also providing some signal on writing ability and how capably one structures one’s thoughts. Sometimes the main value of ‘unusual’ or ‘weird’ application questions is that they force candidates to generate fresh, original thoughts instead of relying on standard, pro forma language.
How much weight on engaging with EA ideas: This question just doesn’t have a universal answer; it will differ markedly by organization and by role within an organization. At GiveWell we have very successful team members with all levels of prior engagement with EA ideas, and the same is true for several other organizations in the EA space that I know well.
What do people get wrong: Hm, I think people probably consistently underestimate the value of being casual, direct, forthcoming, and plain in all aspects of their applications (and especially in their writing). And on work trials, I think people underestimate the value of including meta-commentary on their thinking processes, even if the commentary is rough!
This is a really interesting question! (flagging that I wrote this comment hastily and didn’t edit much—lmk if it would be helpful to clarify anything.)
Bottom line: If you look at Glassdoor applicant reviews and sort by recency, you’ll note that in the last ~year and a half, GiveWell has only received 2-3 negative reviews, which is about 10% of the total reviews. I think that’s a departure from years prior, in which we received many more negative reviews.
I spent a lot of time thinking about Glassdoor shortly after I joined GiveWell (IIRC I was thinking about this in late fall 2023?). My diagnosis was that we were doing a pretty bad job of informing candidates about what to expect from our hiring processes, we were moving too slowly with candidates, and our communications were weak. Here are a few specific things that I think contributed to the improvement in our reviews:
More up-front communication about the requirements of our hiring processes (for example, see this Research Hiring FAQ, and the FAQs on our jobs page). We’ve also added more details about future steps to every stage of our hiring processes.
Clearly signaling throughout the hiring process that we don’t plan to provide evaluative feedback to candidates, and that candidates should not expect this.
Changing the tone/voice of our candidate communication. This is hard to describe clearly, but I think we’ve moved substantially away from language that felt cold/distant/corporate and toward language that feels personal/inviting/warm, without necessarily changing the factual content of the communication.
Moving faster with candidates. This was mostly accomplished by hiring dedicated recruiting staff. Before we had dedicated recruiting staff, we often (and fairly!) received the critique that our hiring processes moved very slowly. Now our hiring processes move quickly—it’s rare for us to take more than a week to get back to candidates at any stage, and we sometimes make same-day decisions on initial applications.
I also echo much of what @PhilZ said in his response to your question, especially: It’s very difficult to get information about the extent to which Glassdoor (or similar) reviews deter strong candidates from applying. This is painful; I wish we had better information.
Last thing—wanted to quickly note current Glassdoor data (which I think is somewhat different than what you describe):
Right now GiveWell has a 4.5 overall rating. Glassdoor notes this is higher than companies of a similar size and in the same industry, but we probably shouldn’t put too much stock in either the base or comparative information—the former is based on 9 reviews, and the latter is based on comparison to companies that probably have very different hiring processes than GiveWell.
The “interview ratings” tab shows 40% positive, 28% neutral, and 32% negative.
Regarding argument 3, wanted to note that GiveWell funded a large survey in 2019 to learn about the preferences of its beneficiaries (general commentary, dedicated page, blog post). The learnings from that study changed GiveWell’s moral weights, and they’ve funded more work on understanding beneficiary preferences since then.
There are many more cases of GiveWell considering local insights, cross-context applicability of programming, etc. I’m commenting quickly so not going to pull examples at the moment, but I think it’s pretty easy to look at ~any grant writeup and see evidence of this.
I’m focusing on GiveWell in this comment because I think GiveWell is implicitly the target of many critiques of “EA” global health and development funding. I’d retract the comment if it became clear that such critiques weren’t referring to GiveWell.
And, this comment isn’t intended to address the question of whether GiveWell and other EA-ish funders should do more to listen to beneficiaries and learn from local experts (personal opinion: they should), but I think some of the quoted critiques in argument 3 above are false if taken literally. Such critiques are consistently confusing to me; I’m not sure whether to interpret them as bad faith, imprecise, or as operating from very different basic views on moral philosophy and ethical obligation.
(commenting in personal capacity)
Rarely.* If we think we have a good shot of hiring someone through a closed hiring round, we typically wouldn’t open a public round. I think the only exception to this would be a situation where we’re inventing a new role that’s relatively unique to GiveWell. In cases like that, we might have one or more potential internal candidates, but we’ll likely feel uncalibrated on what strong candidates look like because we lack comparators for the role. So, we might still launch a public round so that we can obtain more comparators and avoid missing strong external talent.
*can’t speak for all orgs
Hey Richard :)
% of roles filled through applications: Can’t speak for all orgs, but at GiveWell a substantial majority of roles are filled through applications. We’ve previously made a small number of opportunistic hires, but not recently.
reasons hires didn’t work out: By policy, my org just doesn’t share detailed commentary on this sort of thing in any venue, even in most internal settings. But, I think the big-picture reasons for most staff departures at my org are fundamentally quite normal (growth opportunities, personal/family life demands, performance issues, etc.). When relevant, we use performance data to reassess our calibration on past hiring rounds and make changes for future rounds.
Hey hey, thanks for participating! Your questions:
General take: Pitching (along with all kinds of cold messages) is probably underrated, but I think it takes careful thought and hard work to get right.
Make it work by: Understanding your target very well and saying legible things about the value you can add.
Mistake: Being overconfident!
Low confidence tip (would be curious if others disagree): At bigger organizations, it might be more effective to pitch program/research staff instead of recruiting staff. The former group is more likely to have insight into poorly formed staffing needs that haven’t yet developed into full hiring rounds.
Additional loose thoughts:
I can’t speak for all organizations (seriously! this is something I’d expect to wildly vary across org type and size), but at my organization (GiveWell) it’s currently unlikely that any cold pitch for full-time employment or a contract would be successful. I receive lots of pitches, and I typically ignore or decline them. That’s because at our current size and level of specialization:
We think pretty carefully about headcount planning and post any full-time hiring needs quickly. If we don’t have a role posted on our job board, the most likely reasons for that role’s absence are (1) we just don’t have the hiring need or (2) we aren’t interested in accepting applications from the public.
Volunteers and contractors have very high management and training overhead relative to the value they produce.
External people are unlikely to have a good grasp of our highest-priority needs.
I can imagine a cold pitch that would be useful, but it would need to be related to a hiring need that met some of these criteria: (1) it’s pretty complex and hard to describe legibly to external folks, (2) it requires very high context on our work and we think it would be difficult to find the right person with an external search, (3) Neither of the previous conditions apply, but we just don’t have time to design a job application process at the moment.
The biggest mistake I think pitchers make is being very confident about their ability to provide value without really understanding the organization they’re pitching—that’s a big turnoff! Fwiw, this is a failure mode for all kinds of cold messages.
This message is very light on advice for making pitching work (sorry), but that’s only because I haven’t experienced many successful pitches. I hope these thoughts were useful, and good luck!
Hey Siobhan, totally makes sense that you feel individualized feedback would be the most useful thing for you. I’m sorry that we’re unlikely to provide that as part of this AMA! Fwiw, my personal reasoning for not responding to requests for feedback is:
It’s difficult to give useful, quick, and legible feedback on application materials / resumes to people I don’t know well. I usually need lots of interpersonal context and careful thought to do that.
I have limited free time to devote to the AMA, and I’d like to focus my time on answering other questions that I expect to be useful to both the question-asker and other readers.
Giving pre-application feedback to people who might apply to an organization where I work can create (and has created, in the past) awkward, unpleasant interpersonal/social dynamics. I’m not saying that would happen in your or any other particular case, just that it’s a type of risk that exists and that I’d prefer not to incur.
In general, I think it’s ~always ok to cold message individual people and ask for their advice. In fact, I’d encourage you to do that: cold messages are probably under-sent, and they’ve been very useful for my career journey. But, I don’t want to offer a blanket guarantee that I or others will respond to all requests for individualized feedback (regardless of whether the requests are made in private or public) because in some cases people will wish to decline the requests for valid personal reasons.
Notwithstanding the above, all of us are doing this AMA because we want to be helpful—so we really hope you’ll ask any other questions that would be useful!
hey geoffrey, here are a few drafty thoughts that boil down to “You should probably invest a bunch of time before giving up” and “It’s hard to get useful data from rejections”:
Like Dee, I spent months and hundreds of hours applying to ~80 jobs before I found my current role. If I were job hunting right now, I would probably invest a similar or greater amount of effort. My impression from many conversations in my personal life is that more people under-apply than over-apply. There’s almost certainly some amount of effort that’s too much, but I’d guess most people won’t hit it.
Tbc, I’m not making the claim that you should unreflectively apply to any job that you see—you shouldn’t do that! But if you’re doing a lot of reflection and generally think you’re pointed in the right direction, I think the marginal job application is positive EV. Dee’s four questions and resources above are a great start for thinking carefully about the general direction of your search!
I think you should be pretty careful about updating your beliefs about the relevance of any particular rejection to your job hunt because:
Rejections are statistically more likely than not. Rejections from even a high number of jobs don’t necessarily imply that your general job hunt is poorly designed. I don’t know how to put precise numbers on this, but if you have e.g. a 1% chance of getting any particular job, being rejected from 20+ shouldn’t be intellectually dismaying at all (although it’s of course very emotionally discouraging). And, a 1% chance is probably too high—for most jobs I manage, more than 100 applicants seem plausibly qualified at application review.
Some rejections happen because of communications/legibility issues, not because of real lack of fit. Here’s a personal anecdote: I once learned a year after the fact that I was rejected at the application review stage from one organization because my short answers showed insufficient evidence of alignment with effective altruism. That surprised me because at that time of my application I had been involved with EA for nearly a decade, but didn’t know I needed to signpost that on my application. Tbc, I’m not saying that the lesson here is “always say how much you love EA on your applications,” or “you should assume that organizations are wrong to reject you,” or “the organization was correct to evaluate candidates in that way”, just that: It’s relatively easy for a failure mode to happen where candidates and organizations lack shared understanding about (1) what qualities the org is searching for and (2) how candidates ought to display their possession of those qualities. Hiring teams spend a lot of time thinking about how to avoid that sort of failure mode, but it’s impossible to completely eliminate it.
Many rejections happen because of organization-specific idiosyncrasies, not because of lack of fit with a general type of work. For example, my org might reject someone from a research role because there’s a specific, weird professional trait that’s important in our specific work environment and we don’t think it’s easily trainable. But that doesn’t indicate that (1) the candidate isn’t good at research in general, (2) the candidate couldn’t do a different job at our organization, (3) the candidate shouldn’t pursue work that they consider impactful and motivating.
In most cases, you will not receive informative feedback with a rejection. Because of that it’s just really hard to know if and how you should update your general approach to your job hunt.
Agree with the above—fwiw I and hiring managers I work with have solicited applications and hired candidates based on seeing their personal writing here and elsewhere. That’s definitely not a sure-fire path to getting hired and you shouldn’t Goodhart it, but if you have the urge to write and are holding yourself back for any reason, I’d endorse you pushing through it. As @Mjreard notes, this sort of writing is a hard-to-fake signal of intellectual investment and productivity, and hiring managers are hungry for such signal.
JP, thanks for your work on the forum and digests! Wishing you all the best in what’s next. :)
Hi Marna, your questions (and sorry for the delay on this; I didn’t see your post until today):
In the last two years, for junior hiring rounds across our teams, we’ve...
received in the range of thousands of applications per round. Application volume is usually somewhat lower for more senior roles.
made 3 to 5 hires per round. This isn’t always apparent from our people page because new junior hires sometimes take on different job titles at the beginning of their employment or shortly thereafter.
We last hired Research Analysts in 2022, but the job duties and team placement of that role were different than the role of the same name advertised above. We last opened a Content Editor hiring round (the role most similar to this one) in 2023. From that round we made 4 hires, all of whom are on our staff today.
We don’t plan to share information about passthrough rates for each stage of the hiring process, except to say that passthrough rates generally increase with each stage.
Hi Chinwe, yes! From the JD:
We may employ staff internationally on a case-by-case basis. We require that employees either work in time zones shared by the continental U.S. or, if working outside those time zones, be willing to work hours that are compatible with regular meetings scheduled around U.S. time zones.
We currently have many non-US employees, and we’re happy to bring on more.
Bruno, it was really great to meet you at EAG!! Thank you for the work you’re doing in Brazil :D
To extend your comment about lower standards for EA criticism, I thought the remainder of Venkatasubramanian’s quote was quite interesting (bolding mine):
″...Terminator, blah blah blah,’” Venkatasubramanian said. “I think it’s important to ask, what is the basis for these claims? What is the likelihood of these claims coming to pass? And how certain are we about all this?”
EA community members have written quite a bit about the basis, likelihood, and certainty of their claims about AI risk. The arguments aren’t very difficult to find either—particularly for journalism professionals (who I think spend quite a bit of time digging around for information on the views of their subjects?).
I wonder if either of these things are happening:
The reporter or the outlet or both don’t like EA, so they’re not doing basic due diligence to sense-check their bias.
The reporter could have attempted basic due diligence but mainly encountered sources that have a very negative take on EA. This seems reasonable because most easily-accessible articles about EA are negative. (Source: I just Googled “effective altruism AI” and the first result is this Wired article with a very negative take on EA and AI. There are a few top-level results from 80K and EA.org, but most of the remaining first-page results from MSM sources are skeptical or negative takes on EA.)
Either way, EA’s public image (specifically regarding AI) is not ideal. I like your suggestion about making a greater effort to visibly signal cooperativeness!
GiveWell has internal documentation about our compensation philosophy. I’m not going to quote it directly, but the gist is: “We don’t want to overpay because that would be financially irresponsible and we don’t want to underpay because that would inhibit our ability to execute our mission.” Like Coefficient Giving (see Sam Anschell’s comment), we benchmark our compensation to organizations that we think (1) do similar work and (2) try to hire similar talent. Our policy as written doesn’t consider the spillover effects of our approach to compensation (e.g. its effects on the optimality of talent allocation between impact-focused organizations).
It’s also worth noting that the unique setup of our retirement benefits (we increase salaries in lieu of offering e.g. a % match on 401k contributions) makes total compensation a better cross-org comparator than salary. But, I’m just making a pedantic point here, not trying to sneakily imply that GiveWell’s total compensation isn’t higher than many impact-focused organizations—it is!