Senior Recruiter, Research

Summary

GiveWell's senior research staff are the key decision makers for hundreds of millions of dollars in grantmaking, and we think growing that team is one of the most important things we can do to increase our impact. We're seeking one or more Senior Recruiters to help us do that.

Finding senior research staff is a hard problem for a couple reasons:

• The talent pool for GiveWell researchers basically doesn't exist as a defined group. You can't go to one type of program, industry, or a few obvious competitors to build a reliable pipeline. The people who succeed here come from a wide range of backgrounds — economics PhDs, policy analysts, management consultants, medical doctors, neuroscientists, primate biologists, etc. — and the roles don't have clean analogues elsewhere. What they share is a set of hard-to-measure cognitive skills and quantitative fluency that doesn't show up reliably on resumes.
• Our process is very competitive. The offer rate for senior research roles is less than one in a thousand.

We want you to figure out where to find strong candidates, improve our assessment process, and do the hands-on work of sourcing, screening, and closing offers. You'll work very closely with our research leadership team. We're most excited about finding someone who helps us make better decisions about finding great talent — and hire them faster.

The role

You'd work closely with our research team leaders to own recruiting for our Research Program Officer, Research Scientist, Researcher, and Senior Program Officer roles. A few problems we'll want you to think about:

After candidates apply, is our assessment process effective? Our offer rate for senior roles is below 0.1%. That might mean we're extremely selective. It might also mean we're losing good candidates somewhere in the funnel. You'll dig into our data and find answers (How well do early screening scores predict work trial performance? What are the most common rejection reasons, and are they signal or noise? How did past hires actually turn out?). You'll help us develop good heuristics about what to do in situations when candidates' signals are mixed.

Where do we even find good candidates? The ideal GiveWell researcher doesn't come from one degree program, industry, or competitor. You'll think about where to look and go after them. And you'll continually develop new pipelines with creative methods (running structured referral conversations with our researchers, scouring conference guest lists, using sourcing tools creatively, or maybe vibe-coding your own).

How can we use data to make better decisions? Right now, we don't have great visibility into which sourcing channels, process changes, or pipeline stages are driving results. You'll track data, run analyses, and help us make evidence-based decisions about where to put effort. In some cases, you might find out that we don't have the right data architecture to answer important questions, so you'll build it.

What are ways our hiring process could be much better? This is harder to describe because it covers every strategic and tactical question we face. We want you to be thinking about all of it. Things like: Are we overweighting particular qualities and losing promising candidates without noticing? How could we run experiments on our hiring processes (randomization, A/B testing, sourcing campaigns) that actually give us useful information?

You'll also do a fair amount of hands-on recruiting work, from sourcing to closing candidates.