Here is the talk:
Nicolae
Karma: 463
80,000 Hours says we need more people — so why do top candidates still struggle to land roles?
Protesting Now for AI Regulation might be more Impactful than AI Governance and Policy Research
Another prominent pledger is Chris Anderson, the head of TED, who took the pledge this year and wrote about it in his new book Infectious Generosity.
Hi Conor,
Many thanks for your intervention, really appreciate it.
To answer your two main points:
- On the “applicants often have great credentials, but still aren’t exactly a fit for the roles, which often require high context and a particular skillset.” I would say that’s just normal hiring dynamics, if you have 300 good applicants, you don’t choose the one who could be great after a couple of months of training, you choose the one who can deliver fastest with minimal supervision. When you have a strong applicant pool, you can afford to be extremely picky and “great credentials” stops being a differentiator. That’s not a moral critique, it’s just how normal competitive markets usually work. But it does mean that from the applicant side, “we need more people” can feel quite misleading, because what they’re experiencing is “we have plenty of applicants, we’re selecting for a very specific profile.”
A useful contrast is COVID-era tech hiring. When things felt GENUINELY URGENT and demand spiked, a lot of companies expanded headcount aggressively and were willing to train or take slightly “unpolished” fits because there was real demand. That’s what REAL URGENCY looks like in labour markets. Standards don’t disappear, but organizations invest in onboarding and accept more variance because capacity matters more than perfect fit. So when people see “urgent, neglected problems” but no comparable willingness to scale via an adjustment period it’s easy to conclude the bottleneck isn’t “we need more people,” it’s “we can be selective because we already have plenty of applicants.”
- On point number 2 regarding management/coordination, I agree that scaling can be hard. But if “we need more people” is true at the cause level and “we can’t absorb more people” is true at the org level, then the bottleneck isn’t just “talent”, it’s management capacity and also organizational design. Then my immediate question is why isn’t more effort and funding going into things like middle management, onboarding, training etc. especially when there is funding available? In other words, if they can’t hire because coordination is too costly, then increasing coordination capacity would be a high-impact intervention.
If the 80,000 Hours cause areas are truly “NEGLECTED AND URGENT” like on a 5–10 year timeline, you would expect hiring to look more agressive like tech during COVID, more roles created, faster scaling, and more willingness to train strong people who aren’t already perfect fits.
Cheers