Half-year update: Q3-Q4 2025

By Jess Binksmith · Published March 4th, 2026 ·

Org-wide updates

We’re releasing a new career guide with Penguin Random House in May

In late May, we’ll be releasing the new edition of our career guide! This time, it will be published with Penguin Random House and available in traditional bookstores. Its core ideas have been updated for 2026, but the focus remains on having a fulfilling, high-impact career. We’ve also added two new chapters on AI, explaining its effects on the job market and why it’s the most pressing issue facing society. As usual, preorders (and sharing the forthcoming launch announcements) help the book reach more people, so any support is much appreciated.

We’ve grown to 50 staff members

Last month, 80,000 Hours reached 50 primary staff. Here’s a rough breakdown of how our team is currently split (note our one-on-one team recently rebranded to career services to better represent the work of its advising, job board, and headhunting sub-teams):

Team	Number of primary staff
Podcast	7
Video	4
Web	6
Marketing and growth	3
Career services	12
Operations	15
Office of the CEO	3

We’ve updated our estimates of job board placements

We recently surveyed 91 organisations about how useful our job board is in sourcing candidates for them.

The headline findings were:

In total, we learned of around 181 new placements attributable to our job board.
Among the 45 organisations who gave answers we could use, job board applicants accounted for around 20.8% of top candidates.
The volume of lower-quality candidates coming from the job board has increased relative to 2024, resulting in some quality dilution.
The median org satisfaction score (measuring how satisfied orgs are with the 80k job board as a source of applications) remained consistent with 2024 levels: 8/10.

Based on the survey and other sources, we’ve learnt about the following placements between 2018 to 2025 — though we expect this to underestimate the true number of placements attributable to the job board due to lag and reporting limitations.

Programme and hiring updates

Podcast

The podcast team hired two new hosts (who will start in Q2), a content specialist, a creative producer, and two longtime contractors who are now primary staff. This will bring the podcast team to 10 primary staff.
We also hired a content specialist, a creative producer, and two longtime contractors who are now primary staff. This will bring the podcast team to 10 primary staff.
We’ll also be experimenting with new episode formats in 2026, starting with direct-to-camera explainer-style episodes such as this debrief on AI timeline updates.

Video

On October 2, the team released If you remember one AI disaster, make it this one, about the Grok MechaHitler incident, which now has over three million views and was recommended by Hank Green.
We are working on our next video, on Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares’ book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.
We hired two new staff members to the video team, doubling its primary staff and adding capacity in production and editing.

Web

The web team hired three new writer-researchers and one content associate.
We launched an audio narrations podcast feed and have been working on a visual site redesign.
We also supported Benjamin Todd on writing the new career guide, alongside writing articles and newsletters.

Marketing and growth

The team’s major Q1 focus is preparing for the launch of the career guide with Penguin Random House. In Q4 2025, we also helped iterate on the book cover by running A/B tests on different designs and providing extensive feedback.
Our newly formalised paid marketing and design sub-team increased its capacity by hiring an outreach coordinator and is now working on establishing stronger sub-team processes for metrics and feedback.
We’re also providing ongoing support to other programmes through designing thumbnails for videos and other visual assets.

Job board

In Q4, the team launched a beta version of our user portal — a personalised platform that includes job recommendations and application tracking. Our focus in Q1 is to make it easier for users to learn and use the new tools.
We also tested alternative job-ranking algorithms in Q4 and found that the existing algorithm performs best.
We missed our job board clickthrough targets for Q4, as the team deprioritised this as a focus in favour of user portal work.

Advising

The team launched a beta version of the AdvisorBot, which helps advisees prepare for calls, explore jobs, and get career advice from within the user portal.
Advisors continued delivering calls each quarter, with all four advisors meeting their Q4 targets and aiming to deliver roughly 300 calls in Q1.
We ran three multi-day, in-person assessments for advisors in Q4, exceeding our upper target, and have signed on one new advisor so far.

Headhunting

We’re shifting our proactive capacity from improving fully automated searches to improving AI-augmented human searches, because we think it’s more valuable to ship a few excellent searches for top orgs than many good ones, and because doing so will feed into improvements to the fully automated tool as well.
We deprioritised delivery in Q4 to focus on hiring a sourcing product specialist, bringing someone on in early Q1. We also generated 647 ‘strong new leads’ (i.e. individuals that a hiring manager reached out to that they hadn’t been aware of), meeting our target for scaled-back delivery.

Operations

The operations team ran a large hiring round in 2025, which produced four of the hires above as well as three new hires for the operations team. This brought the operations team’s total new hires for the year to six.
We are spinning up a dedicated recruiting function within operations to support hiring managers across the org.
Our finance and governance operations team is preparing for our first audit as an independent entity.