Open position: Head of Job Board

80,000 Hours

80,000 Hours’ mission is to get talented people working on the world’s most pressing problems. We’re a part of the effective altruism community, which 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.

Over one million people visit the 80,000 Hours website each year, 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.

Job board

The 80,000 Hours job board enables readers to find vacancies that we believe will help them contribute to the world’s most pressing problems. We include the most impactful jobs we know about, as well as positions that we think would help our users build valuable career capital to work on these problems later in their careers.

The job board serves two functions. Its primary purpose is to help readers translate our career advice into specific career moves. However, it’s also the second most common way users enter the site (after the homepage).

In total, users spend about 670 hours per month browsing the 80,000 Hours job board. Overall, more time is spent on the job board than on any other single page on our website.

After reviewing the summaries of roles on our site, users click through to hiring organisations’ original job ads for more information over 10,000 times per month.

The job board is growing. In 2021, we drove 51% more clicks through to hiring organisations’ original job ads than we did in 2020. In 2020, we drove 32% more clicks through than in 2019.

We are now looking to considerably increase our investment in the job board. We think we can grow the product substantially into the internet’s top job board for people ambitiously focusing their career on doing good. More than 180,000 users visited the job board in 2021. Over the next few years, we hope to grow the job board to the point where millions of people per year use it to find out about impactful jobs.

The role

The ‘Head of Job Board’ will be responsible for setting and executing strategy to grow the job board’s impact, as well as managing and hiring the job board team.

We are looking for someone who can lead all elements of the job board, from setting product strategy to diving into the details of how we collect vacancies from hundreds of sources, condense them into job board updates, and send those updates to over 100,000 weekly newsletter subscribers.

The person in this role would manage our Curator, who is responsible for working with our outsource team to coordinate the weekly aggregation and curation of our job board updates and sending our weekly email updates. The Head of Job Board would also work closely with developers on the web team. There is scope to make additional technical and non-technical hires to the job board team to expand our capacity, in collaboration with the relevant Director and our Chief of Staff.

This role reports to Niel Bowerman, Director of One-on-One Programme and Job Board.

Responsibilities

1. Do whatever is needed to make the job board the most impactful product it can be.
2. Lead on setting the high-level strategy for the job board, including metrics and annual and quarterly goals, in collaboration with the relevant Director, the Chief of Staff, and the CEO.
3. Manage the job board team and hire to the team as appropriate.
4. Develop and execute the product strategy you set for the job board, including setting and implementing policies on what jobs should be listed, what features to build in what order, UI and UX design, and new content to produce.
5. Alongside the marketing team, promote the job board externally and on the 80,000 Hours site to grow its engagement and impact.
6. Talk with users, run experiments, and do analysis and activities required to understand how the job board impacts our users and the wider world.
7. Oversee internal processes to ensure that the job board is updated regularly, including troubleshooting and taking on temporary responsibilities when necessary.
8. Stay in sync with 80,000 Hours’ Directors and be the primary point of contact internally and externally on the job board.

Experience and skills

Essential

1. A strong interest in effective altruism and longtermism.
2. Ability to develop and execute data- and user-driven product strategy.
3. Ability to think carefully about how to use the job board to enable our target audience to make especially high-impact role changes, and apply this to our product strategy.
4. An ambitious approach to the role, with enthusiasm for generating new ideas for how we can increase the impact of the job board.
5. Reasoning transparency: the ability to explain your reasoning clearly to others on the team, both in writing and orally.
6. Comfort using modern cloud software such as Google Docs, Google Sheets, Airtable, Asana, Mixpanel, and Google Analytics.

Experience with any of the following could also be valuable for someone in this role, but are not required:

1. Building and managing a team.
2. Product management.
3. Experience in any of the following relevant areas:
   1. Growth marketing
   2. User experience
   3. Web design/development
   4. Product design
   5. Data analytics
   6. Managing outsource teams and designing robust, scalable processes
4. Thinking about EA movement-building strategy questions, such as which roles to direct talent towards on the current margin.
5. Analysing web product data and a quantitative approach to problem solving.

We don’t expect our eventual hire to have most of these attributes, so please don’t let that discourage you from applying. We’d especially like to encourage people from under-represented backgrounds to apply.

Role details

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 £72,000 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 UK pension with 3% contribution from employer
• Private medical insurance
• Long-term disability insurance
• Shower facilities, a small gym, and free food provided at our London office

Referrals

We are offering a £1000 referral bonus to anyone outside the Centre for Effective Altruism who suggests a successful candidate we didn’t otherwise have on our radar. Please email [email protected] with your referrals.

Application process

To apply for this role, please complete this application form by 11pm GMT on Sunday, 27 February 2022.

Applicants selected for further consideration will progress through the following stages:

• Work test (1–4 hours, remote)
• Interview
• Trial (only for candidates with a >50% chance of an offer to; 2–5 days; ideally in person)

The work test and trial will be paid.

If you have any questions, please email [email protected].