Open position: Advisor
Table of Contents
Applications to this position are now closed.
We’re looking for new colleagues to join our team of advisors.
- Our advisors talk one-on-one to talented and altruistic applicants in order to help them find the highest impact career they can.
- We’ve found that experience with coaching is not necessary – everything from management consulting to global priorities research has helped someone be a good fit.
- London-based role with starting salary around £65,000.
80,000 Hours’ mission
80,000 Hours’ mission is to get talented people working on the world’s most pressing problems. The effective altruism community, of which we are a part, is growing in reach and now includes funding bodies with over $40 billion to allocate in total. But how do we turn all those resources into long-term impact? This is the problem 80,000 Hours is trying to solve.
We’ve had over 8 million visitors to our website, and more than 3,000 people have now told us that they’ve significantly changed their career plans due to our work. 80,000 Hours is also the largest single source of people getting involved in the effective altruism community, according to the most recent EA Survey.
The 1on1 team
The 1on1 team at 80,000 Hours takes people from “interested in the ideas and want to help” to “actually working to solve pressing world problems.” For example, Sophie Rose applied for advising in 2019. We helped her decide to focus on biosecurity and start working in the field. She co-founded One Day Sooner and is now working at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security – doing research to help prevent catastrophic pandemics. In 2021 we had more than 2,000 applications to speak with us from talented and altruistic people who aren’t sure how to use their skills to help the world.
Some of the most important ways our conversations help people increase their impact are:
- Introductions to experts in relevant fields as well as hiring managers.
- Talking through and reframing decisions in order to pin down people’s key uncertainties.
- Suggesting new ideas — whether that’s specific jobs, new paths to explore, or ways of getting funding.
We also help with recruitment for high impact organisations, sending them lists of people we think might be a great fit for them.
While our impact per call is high, the world needs far more people in total working on the world’s most pressing problems. We therefore want to greatly increase the number of calls we have by doubling our team of advisors over the next year. Our aim is to build out an excellent system for finding the best candidates for the most impactful jobs as they are created.
What we’re looking for
It’s a great sign you’d enjoy being an 80,000 Hours advisor if you’ve enjoyed managing, mentoring or teaching. For example, Habiba Islam joined us from being a manager at the Future of Humanity Institute, Alex Lawsen was a Maths teacher, and Matt Reardon was previously a corporate lawyer.
But it’s also particularly useful for us to have a broad range of experience on the team for comparing different types of roles, so we’re excited to hear about people with all kinds of backgrounds.
The core of this role is having one-on-one conversations with people to help them plan their careers. We have a tight-knit, fast-paced team, though, so people take on a variety of things. They include, for example, reviewing applications to speak with us, pieces of analysis to improve the service, and writing articles for the 80,000 Hours site or the EA Forum.
We’re looking for someone who has:
- A strong interest in effective altruism and longtermism, ideally with some experience in EA strategy.
- Strong analytical skills and enjoys puzzling to figure out the key considerations in complex problems.
- A deep interest in understanding people, and who would enjoy having large numbers of one on one conversations via video call.
Previous experience in one of our priority areas would be a significant advantage in the role, but we encourage you to apply even without that.
We’re aware that factors like gender, race, and socioeconomic background can affect people’s willingness to apply for roles for which they meet many but not all the suggested attributes. We’d especially like to encourage people from under-represented backgrounds to apply.
Details of the job
We expect this to be a full-time, in-person role, based in London. We can sponsor visas. You can work remotely for up to three months of the year if needed. If that won’t work for you, please let us know in your application.
The salary will vary based on your skills and experience, but to give a rough sense, the starting salary for someone with five years of relevant experience would be approximately £65,000 per year.
Start date of the role is flexible, but we would expect you to start during 2022 and prefer you to start as soon as you’re able to.
Our benefits include:
- The option to use 10% of your work time for self development
- 25 days of paid holiday, plus bank holidays
- Standard U.K. pension, with 3% contribution from employer
- Private medical insurance and long-term disability insurance
- Gym, shower facilities, and free food provided at our London office
Where to from here?
If you’re not interested in the Advisor role, but would be interested to join the 1on1 team in some other capacity (for example technical support), please do get in touch.
Candidates will progress through the following:
- Interview
- ~2 hour work test
- 2-5 day in-person (if possible) trial
- Job offer
The work test and trial will be paid.