EA - Gaps and opportunities in the EA talent and recruiting landscape by Anya Hunt

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Gaps and opportunities in the EA talent & recruiting landscape, published by Anya Hunt on August 26, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Thanks to Niel Bowerman, Habiba Islam, Lee McClenon, Holly Morgan, Steve Thompson, Kathryn Mecrow-Flynn, Ben Snodin and Yonatan Cale for their thoughtful feedback on a draft of this post (though note that they don’t necessarily endorse our views, and all mistakes are our own)! Note that Anya currently manages recruiting for Open Philanthropy, but this post represents only her views and not the views of OP. TL;DR Over the past 6 months or so, we’ve seen an encouraging uptick in conversations and initiatives to solve commonly-felt pain points in EA recruitment. In this post, we: Give an overview of what we see as currently happening in the space in order to try and create common knowledge about what’s happening Share our perceptions of potentially neglected areas of EA recruitment which we would be excited to see more people working on. Where relevant, we outline potential project ideas people could pursue, as well as risks that might come with working on them If, after reading, you’re excited about pursuing any of the project ideas listed in this post or have ideas in a similar vein you’d like to explore further, feel free to DM Anya and she’ll try to help if she can! The EA recruitment landscape today We think one of the best ways the EA movement can add value to the world is by directing talent towards critical, neglected problems. This year, there’s been a notable and exciting increase in energy around outreach to new people who might be interested in EA. And lots of organizations are on the lookout for talented people to fill open roles (e.g. there have been ~2300 roles listed on the 80,000 Hours job board so far in 2022). Earlier this year, Katie spoke to ~20 people working on various EA projects to get a better sense of the current EA community talent and recruitment landscape. Here’s what we observed across the community: Individual organizations trying to hire people. This looks like in-house recruiters and hiring managers recruiting for their own orgs (via e.g. asking other organizations for referrals, scanning public lists for potential talent and conducting cold outreach). This also looks like open roles being publicly advertised in the hopes that the right people will proactively apply (see 80K’s Jobs Board, EA Work Club, the EA Newsletter’s ‘applications due soon’ section, the EA Forum’s Who’s hiring? thread, EA group newsletters, Effective Altruism Job Postings on Facebook, Tom Wein’s list of social purpose job boards). Candidates publicly listing themselves in the hopes of being hired. See the EA Forum’s Who wants to be hired? thread, Pineapple Operations’ PA directory, 80K’s longtermist census). Some candidate-focused matchmaking efforts. E.g. 80K’s career coaching program might include introductions to orgs that are hiring, and some EA groups have career coaches who mostly advise on making career plans but can nudge specific folk to apply to particular roles. A number of organizations and affinity groups maintain CRMs and help direct people towards roles as one of their activities. Many EA groups and community-building orgs do some recruitment (e.g. managing their own CRMs, responding to various organizations’ requests for referrals for individual roles and ‘signposting’ people towards relevant opportunities). Beyond local EA groups, we’re aware of the following organizations who do this : CEA’s Groups team (identifying promising group organizers) and EA Global’s stewardship program (connecting promising EAG attendees to mentors/opportunities) The Global Challenges Project (longtermist-focused outreach to students) EA Consulting Network (outreach to consultants) High Impact Professionals (support for workplace prof...