Background in philanthropy, talent, and communications. Co-author of “How to Launch a High-Impact Foundation”. Former charity founder.
Judith Rensing
Karma: 474
Hi Nnaemeka! The short answer is, there is no single ideal candidate; we usually end up with 10-15 quite different folks on the program. That said, there are perhaps ~10 common archetypes, such as “the disgruntled nonprofit worker”, “the medical professional unhappy with how little impact they’re having”, “the consultant who wants to radically switch careers to change the world” etc.
Perhaps more useful for you to develop a sense of your fit for yourself, I’d like to share a recording of a talk I gave on this question 2 years ago: youtube link to 20 minutes 16 seconds in. This both presents some misconceptions, then the top 5 traits, and has some questions for you to ask yourself to explore if this could be you for each trait. Quick overview:
Ambitiously altruistic
Results-focused
Start-up fit
Scientific mindset & good epistemics
Collaborative and ecosystem/community-oriented
In case of doubt I recommend to just apply! :-)
Furthermore, I recommend Probably Good’s nonprofit entrepreneurship career profile, and the adjacent for-profit entrepreneurship profile!
Hi Antonia, I’m not an expert in the animal space, but my soft sense here is:
as Evan wrote, your prior exp is likely more relevant than you think and you should use your CV to explain how in the way Evan mentioned—titles are a bit less important than types of things you did (e.g., I imagine being a vet did involve a bunch of planning and juggling priorities and optimising processes).
The animal welfare space even more so than other spaces does thrive on connections and relationships—going to conferences and connecting e.g. via Hive can be really beneficial both to get information and hear about opportunities
Internships and volunteering are particularly common I’d say and super useful ways to move into the space and new types of roles. Given the effective animal advocacy space is so small, having a great reference from a known org doing a project for them or e.g. organising a meetup or mini-conference can open many doors and puts that recent experience on your CV
Personally, at AIM we get a lot of people with (human medicine) clinical backgrounds. To us, clinical backgrounds generally indicate 1. altruism/impact drive, 2. empathy, 3. ability to juggle and fix difficult, potentially high pressure situations, 4. general competency, from finishing the education and getting the job.
If you haven’t already, it can also be useful to spend a bit of time figuring out what types of roles are a really great fit for you. I’m mentioning this because a lot of the human medicine clinical background folks we get at AIM end up on average being better fits for smaller, more early stage orgs where they can be a generalist, things are pretty urgent, and they see the impact of their work more directly. A “project manager” role at a small org will end up being a very different role, and look for quite different traits and amounts of experience (spoiler: much less), than a “project manager” role in a 50+ people org.
All the best! :-)
Hi Joseph! My take:
Don’t worry too much about it for EAish orgs, as long as your CV is relevant enough to pass the earlier stages, you have a lot of opportunities to demonstrate your fit that goes beyond CV info
If you did something in the meanwhile that you can frame in a way that credibly shows something beneficial or interesting about yourself (e.g., international travel, self-study), I’d probably put it in
If you didn’t, just leave it out. After a couple years in the workforce, people’s stations tend to get too long for the ideal CV length for most roles anyway (ideally 1 page, 2 pages max) and you’ll likely end up leaving out whole irrelevant job stages anyway. For early stages, what’s usually most important is that there is (some) relevant experience in your CV, how much differs for each role and org.
In the later stages, I will probably look at your LinkedIn to see if I can find out what happened during a long gap and if there’s nothing in there I’ll ask about it in the interview. By that stage you’ll already have impressed through things like test tasks so it’s a smaller piece of info unlikely to strongly change my impression unless it’s relevant for the role
If it’s something that could be relevant for a job (such as burnout), what I am then ideally looking for is a sense of “the candidate has reflected on it, understood why it happened, and taken convincing measures to keep it from happening again”, plus hopefully the thing(s) that caused it aren’t things likely to happen in the role you’re applying for
Most of the above may apply a bit less in other EAish orgs, and definitely outside EAish ogs
All the best! :-)
Hey Kyle! I get the impression you’ve thought and perhaps talked to people about this a bunch, so I wonder if you’d be open to sharing your sense of how program officers tend to get hired at non-EA foundations? Informal PM is fine!
Love seeing work going into this! I have a lot of thoughts based on my hiring/talent and EA meta work the last couple years, would be happy to chat, I’ll pm you to book a time.
My top level thought is I’m not sure if 80k is the org to “copy”; maybe it’s something more like copying HIP IAP + EA intro fellowship adapted to the African context, but I’d like to hear where you’re coming from and see if we can land on a common understanding of what the biggest, tractable problem/s and the target audience/s actually are. Also have some thoughts on the ToC
I would just like to say publicly how excited I am about the Founding to Give program and team (Trish & Jacintha) and about how thoughtfully you’re exploring different ways to create a better world through for-profits. I was really excited about the “create BIG company & donate % of big exit” initial plan and I am really excited about the current research and cheap experimentation you’re doing into other ways to do it.
Looking forward to hopefully seeing us EAs engage more with the for-profit space for impact and reading more thoughts / ideas by other folks!
Short and sweet and to the point. I mostly agree—super specific philosophy lingo best belongs in philosophy and not when we’re trying to get stuff done.
Very cool, looking forward to both of these, really exciting first guests! I’d love to know whether Peter’s engagement with Buddhism has changed his mind on anything—especially but not only on the big question around mindfulness and meditation for and its benefits for the meditator vs external work for others (e.g. campaigning for animals) as they often seem in tension / conflict for time and resources and pursuing a deeper path of enlightenment may take away much of the spirit and fire for changing the world in a more consequentialist sense. It’s talked about a bit in “The Buddhist and the Ethicist” but not as head-on as I was hoping
I loved TEAMWORK in its early days and I’ve been visiting it whenever I am in Berlin and highly recommend it—it’s a great community space!
I don’t know what to say, this is so incredibly sad. The times I ran the volunteer moderation team with her at an early EAGxVirtual were a great experience—she was so uplifting, friendly, supportive, and fun to work with. I thought I saw a post of hers a couple of weeks ago that she was going to start an internship in government (I could be wrong about this) and I was so glad to see that. I think I may also have seen a post in which she mentioned struggling with her mental health (I could also be wrong about this, I can’t find any of this now) and I can’t believe I didn’t reach out, although it may not have made a difference. I am devastated and so, so sorry. All my love to her close friends and family, and so much sadness for the wonderful person she was that had to suffer so much.
This is so exciting to see, I can’t wait to hear about how it went!
+1, I think that’d be at the top of my requests! This looks great though, happy to see this new board :-)
Hey Muloongo! I’m currently AIM’s Director of Recruitment and your post just made my day. I’m really happy to hear how helpful you’ve been finding the task, the process, and the resources—and thank you for letting us know! I truly wish you all the best and can’t wait to see the impact you’ll have / keep having in your career. The Zambian community you mention starting in your other post sounds really exciting!
Thanks a lot for writing this up, Sam! Interesting data point on what an entry-level job in aid policy grantmaking can look like.
The AIM burgundy red is basically the same as the old CE red for easier re-identification; the other colours we slowly added on last year and this year and what can I say, we do like us some magical, natural, but clearly distinct colours for our different programs :)
Hi Sentient Toucan (lovely name!),
in short, we do in fact cap the number of people in some ways, and there will be more than these four charities, and/but/also we are quite creative if we should be so lucky as to get too many people! I’ll go into more detail:
First, there are in fact two caps on the number of people in each IP cohort:
Most importantly, there is a pragmatic cap in that we do see clear tiers between the people we make offers to and the people who are close but not quite there in terms of a sufficient likelihood to launch one of the top charities we are looking to launch (like LEEP, FEM, Fortify Health etc.).
Secondly, we usually have a soft cap in that we think there is an ideal number of participants in a cohort. Given our experiments in the last years with both large and small cohorts, we currently believe it to be around 12-14 people.
Thirdly, there are many smaller, softer factors and heuristics that might lean us towards accepting or rejecting a candidate in any given round—e.g., if we have 2 animal ideas and there are 3-5 similarly strong animal candidates and a slightly weaker candidate, we might lean towards letting in the latter person as well.
Secondly, we currently expect to have at least five ideas for this Feb—March 2024 cohort (the four mentioned above, one passing over from the current IP, and perhaps one or two more we are currently considering adding). We usually don’t add “considered ideas” to the pool after deciding they didn’t make the cut as there was usually a reason they were considered, not recommended—that is, the research team looked into them and decided that they were in a lower tier than the ideas we do recommend.
Thirdly, given our past experience, that means the ideal cohort for that round would be 12-14 people. Usually about 90% of incubatees in each cohort end up founding charities while about 10% don’t find their ideal co-founder and/or idea match and/or decide this career path is not quite the right fit for them at this time.
However, if there were more than 12-14 candidates during the application process that we would be super excited to have on the program, we would find a way to make it work. We are quite pragmatic and creative.
Hope this helps!
Hi Lizka, I’ve clarified at the top of the application form that it is for both the 2023 and 2024 programs. Thanks for your comment!
I wholeheartedly agree with the key statement and goals of this post, thank you for writing this up!
One thing I think could be really useful to see (perhaps for this post, or perhaps this is coming in a future post?) would be even just a simple sample M&E system with a Theory of Change, a Framework, and Evaluation questions for a particular project. It could make it easier to understand at a glance what the type of thing is that it would be great for a project or org to have and a sample template could easily be copied and adapted by readers in 80⁄20 fashion.
I’m looking forward to the next post(s?).
Hi there, thanks for your question! As Talent Systems Specialist, I’m happy to answer them:
The main benefit will be going through the earlier stages sooner. Acceptance letters will be sent out by mid-May at the latest, but earlier for people who make it to the final stages sooner (i.e., apply earlier and send in their test tasks etc. earlier). I can’t say anything more precise than that as the total time we need to process all candidates through the entire application round will still depend largely on how many applications we get and how high the quality of the pool is—this varies from round to round from ~700-3000 initial applications.
This is correct—we always recruit for two program rounds during each application round (so there is some flexibility for candidates and for us to recommend a particular program cohort and cause area combination to each future incubatee). We are usually looking for cohorts between 8-20 people (ideally 14-16) and have already accepted 3, so there are between 5 and 17 spots left for the July/August 2023 cohort and 8-20 for Feburary/March 2024. However, if we find someone who we think is a great fit and their test tasks and interviews are really exciting, we will never not accept them. Amazing founders are our bottleneck!
Would love to see you put in an application if you’re interested!
All the best,
Judith
This looks super interesting, I’ll think about it for a few days then might sign up. Thanks so much y’all for creating this!