Expression of interest: Head of Recruiting

We’re looking for someone to build and lead 80,000 Hours’ recruiting function from scratch.

We’d like to make 15–25 strong hires each year through a recruiting team. Currently, we make around 10 hires — each of which represents a very large investment in capacity from team leads — which is a major bottleneck on our growth.

Our ideal candidate can solve the problems, hire the team, and build the systems needed to pull this off. So we expect this to be a challenging role which will require substantial relevant experience.

We’re looking for someone who has experience with:

• The personnel challenges faced by organisations working in EA or AI — you’ve either worked at an EA organisation, an AI safety organisation, or have otherwise developed a strong understanding of the landscape of hiring challenges these organisations face.
• Professional recruiting — this could be as an internally-facing recruiter or as a headhunter. Recruiting for your own team could be enough, especially if you’ve been especially interested in recruitment along the way.
• Leading a team — you’ve managed people before and understand what it takes to build and lead a function.

We expect that you’ll initially report to Brenton Mayer (COO) and then transition to reporting to Sashika Coxhead (Head of People Operations) when she returns from maternity leave.

If you meet all three of the criteria mentioned above, we’d really love to hear from you through our EOI form.

If you meet two and would be excited about recruiting work at 80,000 Hours, we’d also invite you to submit a response — we’d like to keep track of potential candidates who could be a part of a recruiting team at 80K here.

Why this matters

80,000 Hours provides research and support to help people switch into careers that effectively tackle the world’s most pressing problems.

Over a million people visit our website each year, and thousands of people have told us that they’ve significantly changed their career plans due to our work. Surveys conducted by our primary funder, Open Philanthropy, show that 80,000 Hours is one of the single biggest drivers of talent moving into work related to reducing global catastrophic risks.

To scale and deliver our programmes, it is essential that we’re able to find and attract the talent to work on them. 80,000 Hours has been scaling rapidly, making 16 new hires since the beginning of 2024.

We believe that there’s an exciting opportunity for a Head of Recruiting to introduce the expertise needed to establish a centralised recruiting function that helps us find and evaluate top talent efficiently, saving us substantial programme staff time.

About the role

As 80,000 Hours’ Head of Recruiting, you would:

• Oversee the construction of our recruiting function, scoping and building the systems needed to provide effective support to other teams.
• Develop our recruiting strategy, figuring out what to focus on in order to successfully attract the best talent to 80,000 Hours.
• Grow and manage your recruiting team, managing further hiring of recruiting staff and helping decide the allocation of current operations staff.
• Manage hiring rounds across 80,000 Hours, providing valuable logistical and strategic support to other teams’ hiring plans.

Salary and benefits:

• This is a permanent, full-time role — our staff can work flexible hours and we encourage staff to work whatever schedule (consistent with full-time status) will allow them to be most personally effective.
• We are open to both London-based (preferred) or remote applicants. We can sponsor UK visa applications as needed.
• The salary will vary based on experience, and will be calculated according to a formula that is transparent to all primary staff at 80,000 Hours, which factors in experience, level of responsibility, and performance.
  • A candidate matching our criteria would most likely start on between £65–100,000, depending on the quantity and relevance of experience.

Our benefits include:

• The option to use 10% of your time for self-development
• 25 days of paid holiday, plus bank holidays
• Pension scheme/retirement plan with employer contributions
• Private medical insurance
• Long-term disability insurance
• Up to 14 weeks of fully paid parental leave
• Childcare allowance for children under five
• Coverage of work-related expenses like travel to conferences and office equipment
• £5,000 annual mental health support allowance
• £5,000 annual self-development budget
• Shower facilities, a small gym, and free food provided if you work at our London office

To express interest, please submit this form — it should only take about 10 minutes.

We’ll periodically review submissions, so please apply early. We’ll reach out if we think you may be a great fit for the role.

Note: This is an expression of interest rather than a formal job opening. We have a high bar for this role and will only progress to a formal hiring round if we identify exceptional candidates.