FAQs

Are you only working with longtermist organizations?

As co-founders, our collective sets of skills lie in experience in recruiting, hiring, consulting, organizational development, and people development. We believe this is our value-add to the EA ecosystem. As EAs we want to make sure we optimize for the most impact we can do and because of this, we chose to prioritize our focus on longtermist and EA meta leaning projects and organizations in terms of our outreach efforts.

That said, should organizations focusing on other cause areas reach out to us for support (which happens) - know that we are not strictly longtermism-exclusive and open to help as needed.

Are you going to be doing any kind of centralized recruiting for EA, or mainly working with organizations?

Right now, we see a lot of immediate impact possible in helping individual organizations with their needs, so that is our initial focus. However, as we learn and explore, we are keeping tabs on movement-wide trends, and opportunities for larger, more “meta” projects.

We expect we’ll always keep a practical focus on helping individual organizations, but longer term we’ll participate in and help spearhead movement-level projects.

For example, one thing that has been discussed is a centralized place to send finalist candidates who don’t get hired. We might be that place, or help coordinate that data sharing, but we aren’t sure yet what the best approach is.

Another is looking longer-term at talent pipeline needs to set up recruitment for different kinds of roles (ex: Will EA need dozens of event managers, or certain kinds of lawyers, in the next 5 years?).

I heard you’re hiring personal assistants. Is that your main focus?

We are focusing on the broad category of operations, from director level to entry-level and including positions like executive assistants. We are well-positioned to help individuals set up a hiring process for part-to-full time assistants that they expect to work with longer-term, such that it makes sense to run an official hiring round. We can also help with sourcing more niche skills, or people in a particular location.

If you would like to run your own hiring round and only need matchmaking support for PAs - or are focused on finding a more part-time (<15hrs/week) or project-based assistant, we highly recommend - Pineapple Operations!

What is the cost to work with you?

For organizations who have budget for support and for projects that exceed 2 hours, we’ll be working on a low-bono fee-for-service basis with hourly fees in the range of $80-100/hour depending on the needs of the client organization. (For comparison, hiring and HR consulting from established firms can cost in the range of $100-200/hour and headhunting recruiting can cost thousands of dollars).

What quick tips do you have for hiring managers?

Here are a few things we see that some EA orgs could level up on:

  • Promote your jobs frequently and widely! Go beyond the job boards and make sure to hit the EA Jobs Facebook page, and any Slack or Facebook groups dedicated to your area. Send the job to your contacts individually and ask them for referrals (usually helps to say do you know anyone like this, and can you introduce me even if you aren’t sure if they’re a good fit).

  • Make your Job Ad interesting and friendly. This is the first impression for a candidate who may know nothing about your work. Try to include a little bit of your culture in your ad. Consider including a photo, sharing a recent win, or something unusual or interesting about your organization.

  • Get SUPER clear about the necessary skills as early as possible, with as much buy-in as possible from all people involved in hiring - and the people the new potential hire will be working with. Consider whether you need someone to have experience with doing X, or the ability to learn to do X, and how you would tell.

What quick tips do you have for candidates?

A lot of these are aimed for more junior level candidates, but are good tips for everyone:

  • Check and double-check that you follow the application instructions.

  • Put your EA experience on your CV/LinkedIn Make a line that says that you’re in a local chapter, that you’ve worked on a side project, etc. Put it on there! We’ve seen applications where people say EA experience in the fill-in questions, but it is completely missing from their other materials. It can be helpful to know.

  • Explore broadly. Look beyond the jobs board. Talk with colleagues and friends, ask your local community builder for networking connections. Look at jobs lists on Slack channels and Facebook Groups.