80,000 Hours advising referral signup

Win a $5,000 career grant by referring others to our advising service

Our advising team is looking to speak to more people than ever before, and we need your help to do it. So we’re giving away $5,000 career development grants to 10 people who successfully refer two or more of their friends for calls with our team.

To enter, generate a unique link by entering your own information in the form below, then share the unique link you receive with friends you’d like to refer.

How it works

There are two ways to have your referral counted:

• Generate a unique link using the form above and have your friends apply using that link.
• Your friends can also type your full name into the referral field in their application (but this is less reliable).

We will track referrals from now until October 6, 2024. A referral counts as successful if they meet all three of the following criteria:

1. We invite the applicant for a call.
2. They show up for the call.
3. We haven’t spoken to them before.

Who wins

The top three people who make the most successful referrals are guaranteed to win. The next seven winners will be drawn by lottery from among everyone who makes at least two successful referrals, where referrers with more referrals get proportionately greater chances to win (i.e. every referral over two gives you an additional lot in the random draw).

The prize

We’re offering up to $5,000 in career development funding for the winners to put towards any educational or professional opportunity they identify. This includes things like: all expenses associated with attending a professional conference, a skills development course or service, or even tuition support for a formal degree program.

We’ll get in touch with winners shortly after October 6th, 2024, and the winners can then share their development plan and what the costs will be.

Winners are also welcome to gift their prize to someone else. Just email [email protected] to let us know who that is.

Who to refer

We are looking to speak to everyone who:

1. Is interested in working on our top problems, and
2. Has accomplishments that suggest they could do great work on those problems

Everyone means all ages, educational backgrounds, and areas of expertise. This is not just a service for young adults or people who are already at the peak of their careers. It is for both of those groups and everyone in between.

On interest in our top problems, it’s usually important that our advisees have context on the nature of our top problems and the specific reasons we’re concerned about them. Having tentative or more well-developed views on exactly which interventions are most helpful is a bonus, but not at all necessary. If you’re a fan of our work or work we cite and feel like you’ve had (or could have) a productive 30-minute conversation with your friend about our top problems, they’re probably above the bar!

On accomplishments, we construe them broadly. If someone you’re considering referring has really impressed you, there’s a good chance they’ll impress us too. Our top problems need a broad range of talented contributors working on them from policy experts and computer scientists to communicators and academics. People with generalist skills in building teams, systems, and organisations can be especially valuable too.

Importantly, potential can count just as much as historical success. The easiest way to show this is getting good grades at a top university, but there are many other ways. A thoughtful and well-maintained blog can do the trick. A few examples of impressive public speaking or a rapid series of promotions in an otherwise non-prestigious job can often tell us as much as a degree from Harvard.

The thing we want to stress more than anything is when in doubt, apply. The form takes 10 minutes. It’s easy for us to imagine people spending more than that worrying about whether they’re the right kind of person — that’s not good for any of us!