Open position: Head of Marketing

By · Published August 10th, 2021 ·

Applications for this position have now closed.

We’re looking for a Head of Marketing to help us expand our readership and be the founding member of our marketing team.

We’re hoping to find someone who could take on the Head of Marketing position immediately. However, we’re also open to hiring a candidate with less experience who we could support to take on the responsibilities of a Head of Marketing over time. To apply for the more junior position instead, please see our Marketer job description.

80,000 Hours provides free research and support to help people find careers tackling the world’s most pressing problems.

We’ve had over 8 million visitors to our website, and more than 3,000 people have told us that they’ve significantly changed their career plans due to our work. We’re also the largest single source of people getting involved in the effective altruism community, according to the most recent EA Survey.

Even so, about 90% of U.S. college graduates have never heard of effective altruism, and just 0.5% of students at top colleges seem highly engaged in EA. As Head of Marketing, your aim would be to help us reach all students and recent graduates who might be interested in our work. We anticipate this could increase our readership up to five times, and lead to hundreds more people pursuing high-impact careers.

We’re looking for a senior marketing generalist who will:

  • Develop our marketing strategy. For example, you’d generate ideas for major marketing initiatives, decide which to pursue, and figure out which metrics we should optimise to most effectively achieve our goals.

  • Run experiments in new ways to reach users. For example, you could set up a referral campaign with a book giveaway, coordinate a media campaign to launch the second version of our ‘key ideas’ series, or test other marketing ideas that you come up with.

  • Own and improve our current approach to reaching users. For example, you might promote our work on social media and other platforms, write newsletters, and run A/B tests to maximise engagement.

  • Build and manage a marketing team to execute on the above.

Which of these you’ll focus on will depend on your strengths and interests, as well as what you decide to prioritise. But as some indication of what success in the role might look like, over the next three years you might have:

  • Doubled our newsletter subscriptions from 150,000 to 300,000
  • Doubled our reach, increasing our unique website visitors from 1.5 to 3 million per year
  • Increased engagement with our job board by 5x, taking the number of times users click through to a job ad they find on our job board from 10,000 to 50,000 per month
  • Found effective ways to spend a six-figure (or even seven-figure) marketing budget
  • Launched one or more major new marketing initiatives

We’re looking for someone who has:

  • A strong interest in effective altruism and longtermism, ideally with experience in EA strategy
  • Previous experience in any area of marketing, or a related field (This might be — but isn’t limited to — product management, software engineering, data science or communication; or maybe you’ve worked on a side project that attracted a large number of users)
  • Experience building and managing a team
  • An interest in thinking carefully about what will drive engagement with our work from people who might make especially high-impact career changes, and what this means for our marketing strategy
  • An ambitious approach to the role, with enthusiasm for generating new ideas for how we might appeal to our audience
  • Excellent written communication (In particular, you’re comfortable discussing decisions and uncertainties with the rest of the team in writing)

Ideally, you’d also have the ability to write engaging marketing copy that both appeals to our target audience and communicates the nature and promise of 80,000 Hours’ programmes.

This is a full-time, in-person role, based in London. You can work remotely for up to three months of the year if needed.

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 £81,000 per year.

Our benefits include:

  • The option to use 10% of your time for self development
  • 25 days of paid holiday, plus bank holidays
  • Standard U.K. pension with 3% contribution from employer
  • Private medical insurance
  • Long-term disability insurance
  • Gym, shower facilities, and free food provided at our London office

To apply, please fill in this application form. If you have any problems submitting the form, please send your CV to [email protected].