Our advice for people seeking EA jobs

Many people who get involved in effective altruism (EA) also want to work in EA organizations. The problem is, getting a job within EA can be hard. You may well have experienced this yourself; people often report applying for dozens of roles within EA orgs, and receiving nothing but rejections. 

This isn’t too surprising. There are fewer roles in EA than there are members of EA, and EA roles also get applications from people outside the community. Even if we assume that everyone who’s interested in EA has the experience and skillset to do high-impact work, many people just aren’t going to get jobs in EA orgs.

At the same time, EA orgs still struggle to find people for some roles, and often decide not to hire anyone if they don’t find the right person. In other words, there’s untapped absorbency within EA that could probably be filled if candidates could present their strengths more legibly to EA orgs, or were more aware of how to become better candidates for these roles. Perhaps more importantly, there are also many impactful opportunities outside of EA that people should likely pursue, but often don’t.

The upshot is that there are two things people can do to better pursue an impactful career.

The first is that you can improve your chances of getting an EA role. There are quite a few best practices in job-seeking that many EA job seekers don’t follow. Some of these are unique to EA, but most are good practices in any field.

The second is that you can and should pursue roles outside EA. It’s often underappreciated just how many good roles there are in the wider world. If your goal is to have an impact, rather than specifically work in EA, your option space is likely quite a bit broader than you may have considered.

The tips below are intended to help you improve your chances of landing an impactful role you’re happy with, drawing on our general advice on getting a job, write-ups from EA orgs, common pain points we see among our advisees, and our own experience running hiring rounds. 

Position yourself better for EA jobs

Get the basics right in the hiring process

Like any employer, EA orgs want to be confident you can do the job. Competitiveness is far from unique to EA; desirable roles outside EA often get hundreds of applicants, just as EA roles do. But because EA orgs are often small (typically <20 people), a bad hire can be especially costly. You need to make it clear to an organization not just that you’re talented, but that you have the skills and experience needed to be a good fit for the particular role you’re applying for. 

This point is really important, and often underappreciated by applicants. EA orgs sometimes differ in their hiring conventions from other kinds of orgs, but it’s worth noting that much of EA hiring isn’t that distinctive, and following standard best practice still matters a lot. This means all the things you’d expect: making sure you’re taking time to create a good resume, writing strong cover letters and answers to application questions, and performing well in interviews. There’s too much advice to cover here (our how to get a job guide is worth reading for more detail), but some of the most important tips include:

• Tailor materials like resumes and cover letters to each role, showing why you’re excited about that specific role and frontloading your most relevant experience, not necessarily your most impressive.
• Respond to application questions thoughtfully and honestly, and check your writing for typos/errors.
• Practice answers to common or expected interview questions ahead of time, making sure to research the org you’re applying to.
• Set time aside to perform well in work tests, and pay attention to instructions such as word counts or time limits (you’d be surprised how many people don’t!). 

It’s worth reflecting on your previous rejections to diagnose what might have been going wrong and work out which of these areas to focus on improving. One of the most useful signals is how far you tend to get in the process.

If you’re reaching interviews and work tests but still getting rejected, then your applications are probably strong, but you likely need to work more on your interview technique or how you handle work tests. 

But if you’re not getting interviews at all, there are two other likely explanations. The first is that you’re a strong candidate, but it isn’t coming across in your initial application materials. It’s worth taking the time to review and improve them, ideally with feedback from someone whose judgment you trust.

The second possibility is that you may be applying for roles you’re not competitive for yet. If you’re a new grad without much of a track record, or much cause-area experience, you might be underestimating how talented the applicant pool often is, and need to gain some more relevant skills and experience before you’ll be seriously considered for the roles you’re applying for. Think about whether it’s worth taking some time to develop before applying again, honestly evaluating your experience against the role descriptions and working out what you might be missing. The truth is that, unfortunately, you’ll sometimes just need to spend time getting better at the work you want to be hired for (and demonstrating it), whether that’s through volunteering, starting projects, or entering fellowships and bootcamps. Alongside this, it’s also worth considering whether there are more junior roles available, that could be a more attainable target for now.

Build your network and visibility

Finding and applying to roles is just one part of the job hunt. As with any field, many EA roles are filled, or at least shortlisted, through existing connections, and a fair number of roles are never listed publicly. This means that if you’re only ever applying cold, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage. 

The upside is that EA is pretty small. If a handful of people at relevant orgs come to see you as competent and aligned, it’s likely you’ll be a name that comes up often when roles open. We’ve written on networking more generally elsewhere, but here are some of the best ways to get involved in the EA community:

• Attend EA events if you’re able. They have a strong focus on 1:1 meetings, and many orgs attend them in part to find candidates for their open roles.
• Spend time in EA “hubs” — these are places with large local EA communities, often with regular community events. If travel isn’t feasible, the EA Anywhere Slack and other online EA spaces are good alternatives.
• Consider participating on the EA Forum. The Forum is regularly read by people in EA orgs, so thoughtful posts have a strong chance of reaching someone relevant. Do note that this is a double-edged sword; low-quality contributions can hurt as much as good ones help.
• Apply for career advising and mentoring from orgs including 80,000 Hours, Animal Advocacy Careers, BlueDot, and of course, us (Probably Good). Beyond the advice itself, advisers also often follow up with connections and relevant roles.

Bear in mind that with any networking, it’s important to approach it as a sincere effort to meet and connect with people who have similar goals and interests to you, and not just as opportunities to get hired. It feels far more natural this way, and people can often tell if you’re talking to them just because you want something from them.

Understand differences in EA hiring

As we mentioned, hiring preferences in EA can differ from those in other fields in ways that are worth knowing about. Specifically, EA orgs often have distinctive expectations around three things: alignment, context, and communication style. For most orgs, these are taken as signals that you’ll be a good fit for a role specifically within the EA sphere, beyond the more general skills and credentials you have.

It’s worth caveating that these apply to varying degrees across orgs and roles. For instance, they’re likely more important for research roles, where an EA approach might differ substantially from the norm, but less important in operations roles, where best practices are similar inside and outside EA. So, take these as general pointers rather than universal truths.

Alignment: This is the extent to which you share EA’s basic approach to doing good. In short, this likely means having an analytical, fairly hard-headed approach to prioritization, and being comfortable reasoning in terms of frames like counterfactual impact and scope sensitivity. This isn’t about ideological conformity; orgs aren’t looking for people who agree with them (or EA) on everything. It’s more that a lot of EA work relies on this style of reasoning, so if you don’t share it (or only understand it superficially), hiring managers will worry you might struggle to make judgment calls that align with the organization’s goals. 

Context: This concerns whether you know enough about an org’s work to do the job well — and in the case of EA orgs, this means knowing about the ecosystem the org operates in. The first part of this is familiarity with EA itself, including the general landscape, the main orgs, and the major funders. A lot of work in EA benefits from understanding where your org fits into the movement, so orgs may be put off if it seems like you’re not very knowledgeable about it, even if you’re aligned in your values.

The second is context on the specific cause area the org works in; general EA engagement is rarely enough. An EA animal welfare org will want someone who doesn’t just know EA, but is also highly familiar with the specific animal welfare ecosystem within EA, and likely also the wider animal welfare movement.

Communication style: EA also has fairly distinctive communication norms, as well as unique terminology and jargon. These norms differ quite a bit from those at most corporate orgs or mainstream nonprofits, so you’ll want to approach your applications and interviews quite differently for an EA role than you would for other roles. Most notably, EA orgs tend to particularly value openness about your reasoning and your confidence in your views. In practice, that means flagging your uncertainties, reservations, and any important cruxes in your beliefs.

What you can do

If you’re not already engaged with EA and familiar with various parts of the movement, you’re likely at a disadvantage for lots of roles at EA orgs (whether fairly or not). If you’ve been rejected for roles that seem like a clear fit for you, this could partly explain why. 

There are a few relevant takeaways from this, all of which can be incorporated into your applications and interviews either implicitly (by helping you better understand norms) or explicitly (by providing things you can mention in resumes and applications): 

• If you’re still new to the space, we’d recommend structured opportunities like CEA’s intro program or High Impact Professionals’ career accelerator. 
• The EA Forum is well worth checking regularly, both to understand the general EA landscape and current work within different cause areas, and to get a feel for EA’s unique communication norms.
• Embrace uncertainty in your communications where it’s warranted; EA orgs are particularly sensitive to unjustified confidence in views. Bear this in mind if you’re asked to reason through something, which is common in EA applications, interviews, and work tests. This piece on ‘reasoning transparency‘ is well worth reading as an introduction to this style of communication.
• Seek out relevant orgs and familiarize yourself with their work. You want to build a solid understanding of whichever orgs you’re applying to, as well as the broader field they work in. 

Look outside EA for impactful roles

Though it’s worth taking steps to improve your competitiveness for EA roles, also remember that getting a job at an EA org isn’t the same as getting an impactful job. EA is a great source of high-impact jobs, but it doesn’t have anything close to a monopoly on impact. 

This is obvious on the surface: a top US government job with significant policy influence in a high-priority cause area would outstrip pretty much any EA role in its potential for impact. But the point isn’t just that there are occasional high-leverage roles outside EA, it’s that if you’re only looking within EA orgs, you’re probably narrowing your options dramatically. 

Why? It’s primarily because EA is tiny. 80,000 Hours estimated there were around 650 people working in EA back in 2021. We’d guess this number is quite a bit higher today, but it’s still really small compared to the total number of jobs available that have some relevance to top cause areas. The same is true of funding: EA spending has peaked at around $1 billion in a year, and even though that looks likely to grow substantially soon, it’s a small slice of the money flowing into most of the causes EA cares about. There’s a whole world of work out there in nonprofits, think tanks, governments, universities, international institutions, and even for-profit companies, all of which can have meaningful influence over important problems.

To be clear, the average job within EA is likely much more promising than an average role in non-EA organizations and institutions. EA has a particularly tight focus on scale-sensitive impact, which involves prioritizing important causes and funding cost-effective solutions — far more so than most other organizations working nominally on similar problems. EA also has a larger footprint in some causes than it does in others. Its influence is strong in AI safety, where a sizable share of the most important orgs are EA-linked, but much smaller in global health.

By and large, however, most of the action within high-priority causes happens outside the EA ecosystem entirely. Even on a rough outside view, there are just so many non-EA roles working on problems roughly resembling EA priorities that, even if only a small fraction are exceptional, there are likely more great opportunities outside EA than within EA. If you’re not taking the time to investigate these roles, you’re almost certainly doing yourself a disservice.

Expand your job search

To be clear, we’re still excited about great people applying for EA jobs. EA orgs need great people, even in areas that aren’t seen as especially bottlenecked. However, we think most people would benefit from a both-and approach: continue pursuing EA roles, but invest serious effort in opportunities outside the EA ecosystem, too. As a rough rule of thumb, if EA orgs represent over half of the roles you’re applying for, you could probably benefit from expanding your applications. Exactly what this looks like depends on your field and career stage, but here are a few ideas:

• Check out our job board, which lists many promising opportunities outside the EA space. You can also expand further, looking through general nonprofit and impact-focused boards, like those on this list we compiled. These aren’t nearly as filtered for impact as our board (or other job boards run by EA orgs), but still worth checking for opportunities we may not have picked up on.
• You can also use grantmakers as leads. Grants databases (e.g. the EA Grants Database, or GiveWell’s grant history) point to potentially impactful orgs and programs you may not have on your radar and that aren’t necessarily widely discussed in EA.
• Beyond this, seek out targeted advice from people in your field of interest. People within EA orgs will have insights on orgs and opportunities within their field beyond EA. But, for various reasons, this knowledge doesn’t always get filtered through to mainstream EA resources. Reaching out via email or at EA events can be worthwhile.

Consider broader career directions. Beyond just finding more orgs to track for relevant roles, it’s potentially worth thinking broader. Pursuing EA roles can (inadvertently) push you into a relatively narrow set of paths, leading you to neglect other promising options. For instance, you could work in your country’s civil service or in an international institution, go into party politics, or start a for-profit/nonprofit. These are all options with strong cases for impact, but as broad paths with fewer discrete promising roles, they’re less likely to be represented on impact-focused job boards.

We’d also encourage people to consider effective giving, or even earning to give. This is something that many people can pursue, and has a really robust case for counterfactual impact — though perhaps somewhat reduced in light of EA’s anticipated influx of funding.

Overall, getting an EA job is hard, and plenty of strong candidates don’t manage it, even if they’re doing all the right things on paper. It’s worth continuing to apply for EA roles if they’re good options for you, and there’s a lot you can do to improve your chances. But most people would benefit from spending time on the wider world of impactful work beyond EA, too.