I think there are probably a few things that some EA orgs could improve and I hope to write a post about it soon. In the meantime, it might be useful to explain where some of these high numbers come from:
1. Un-timed work test (e.g. OpenPhil research analyst):
I think most EA orgs underestimate how much time a work test takes. Take for example the conversation notes test of OpenPhil’s application procedure. In the email instructions to the test, you will find the following line: “Historically, we think people have spent 2-8 hours on this assignment. ” But there is no indication of how much time you should/are allowed to spend. And since everyone knows that the process is really competitive, and your results keep on improving if you invest more time, many people invest a lot of time. I spent 16 hours on the task. I asked three other people how much time they had spent, and it was 8 h, 16 h, and 24 h.
2. Research proposals (e.g. FHI research scholar programme, OpenPhil biosecurity early career researcher grant):
Writing a research proposal just takes a lot of time. I spent 30 hours on my proposal for FHI. I know of 4 other people who applied. These are the times they spent on the proposal (full-time): one day, one week, one week, several weeks.
3. Trying to be really well prepared (my own fault, no one forced me to do that):
Knowing that the positions are competitive, I would often spend several hours preparing for (later-stage) interviews. E.g. when applying for the CEA local group specialist role, I spend 4-5 hours reading and thinking about CEA’s strategy in movement building.
4. Travel time:
As stated in the post, I counted travel time at 50%. And Oxford is really far off :-)
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So depending on how exactly Wave’s application process looks like, I might potentially have spent more than 10 hours on it as well :-)
Two additional possible reasons:
Many people in EA community believe it is easier to get a job at an EA organisation than it really is. People working at EA organisations, sometimes in senior positions, were surprised when they heard I didn’t get an offer (from another organisation). I’d guess around half the organisations I applied to were “surprised about the very strong field of applicants”. Past messaging about talent constraints probably also plays a role. As a result, career advice in the EA community can be overly optimistic, to a point where more than one person seriously encouraged me to apply for the COO position at OpenPhil (a position which went to the person who led the operations for Hillary Clinton’s election campaign(!)). At least a year ago, when I was talking to dozens of people for career advice, I got the impression that it should be comparatively easy to get hired by an EA organisation.
This one is weirdly specific and only a minor point (so this comment should not be misconstrued as “the two main reasons people apply for (too) many positions at EA organisations”). I don’t know if this applies to many people, but I got quite a few heavily personalised invitations to apply for positions. I think I *heavily* over-weighted these as evidence that I would have a good chance in the application process. By now I see these invitations as very weak evidence at best, but when I got my first ones, I thought that means I’m half-way there. This was of course naive (and of course I wouldn’t think it means anything if I get a personal letter from a for-profit company). But I am not alone in that. I recently talked to a friend who said “By the way, I got a job offer now. Well, not really a job offer, but it is really close”. All they had gotten was a *very* personalised, well written invitation to apply. But I would guess quite a few people had gotten one (me included). One easy way for EA organisation to avoid inducing this undue optimism would be to transparently state to how many people they send personalised invitations to.
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(PS: Your point 1 and 2 applied to me very much, but I didn’t get the impression of points 3-5 being the case (I didn’t think people consistently recommended EA orgs over other options))