Recruiter [CLOSED]

This role is now closed to applications.

About Open Philanthropy

Open Philanthropy is a philanthropic funder and advisor; our mission is to help others as much as we can with the resources available to us. We stress openness to many possibilities and have chosen our focus areas based on importance, neglectedness, and tractability. Our current giving areas include potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence, global health and development, scientific research, global public health policy, farm animal welfare, and biosecurity and pandemic preparedness. In 2024, we recommended $650 million to high-impact causes, and we’ve recommended over $4 billion in grants since our formation.

About the Recruiting team

Open Philanthropy is growing rapidly. The organization has doubled in size over the last two years, and the Recruiting team has overseen every step of those acquisitions, helping teams do everything from identifying their initial hiring needs to making final offers. We develop and implement the systems by which Open Philanthropy finds and evaluates top talent, and serve as its institutional memory and point of call for all things hiring. The team currently has six members, led by Phil Zealley. We’re looking to add more members to keep up with Open Philanthropy’s continued growth.

Recruiting at Open Philanthropy comprises two primary workstreams — pipeline development and round management. Roughly, pipeline development is everything we do to get strong candidates to apply, and round management is everything we do to help hiring managers hire the strongest candidate from the applicant pool. Recruiters generally specialize in one of these two workstreams, though they may periodically assist in the other. This posting is for the round management workstream.

What you’d be doing

Open Philanthropy’s hiring is project-driven, whether it be a full public hiring round or a smaller opportunistic evaluation process. Each hiring project is owned by a Recruiter, whose goal is to help hiring managers make the best hire possible, while balancing other values along the way (like ensuring that candidates have a positive experience of our process). Hiring constitutes the bulk of the Recruiting portfolio, and Recruiters who focus on round management typically manage a handful of hiring rounds at any one time, providing high-touch support to key stakeholders. This involves:

    • Project management: Determining evaluation steps, planning round timelines, guiding hiring managers through the process, coordinating stakeholders and information streams at key decision points, and tracking the overall progress of the round to make sure nothing (and no one) is falling through the cracks.
    • Candidate evaluation: Reviewing applications, interviewing candidates, developing or advising on new work tests, and grading work tests or advising on their grading.
  • Providing guidance: Advising hiring managers on key decisions, maintaining legal compliance, and upholding the overall standards of the hiring process. 
  • Stakeholder management: Interfacing with candidates, responding to questions and requests, and ensuring that all parties are kept up to speed as rounds evolve. 
  • Infrastructure: Setting up and maintaining the back-end systems for each round to manage applicant tracking, work test submissions, etc. 

Recruiters also maintain and improve internal hiring systems, with some portion of their time dedicated to ongoing non-hiring projects. These range from smaller ad-hoc projects (such as creating a one-off report for leadership) to larger, longer-term strategic projects. Recent and current strategic projects include developing a hiring forecast, updating evaluation steps in response to LLM developments, improving interview templates, implementing new features in our applicant tracking system, and building new dashboards for data analysis.

That said, it’s hard to predict all aspects of the role—we’re a rapidly growing organization, and expect all staff to be flexible and set priorities according to our mission. Your work may also extend to pipeline development tasks, such as promoting roles, reaching out to partners for referrals, contacting leads, conducting introductory calls with prospective candidates, representing Open Philanthropy at events, etc.

Who we’re looking for

You might be a great fit for this work if you:  

  • Have strong project management skills. You are highly organized in your own work, and also able to ensure other stakeholders stay on track with what needs to be done. You’ll obsess over maintaining a clean candidate pipeline and make sure (almost) nothing falls through the cracks.
  • Like to move fast, get things done, and prioritize aggressively. We treat all recruiting work as urgent by default.
  • Enjoy figuring out what people could be good at, and where they could contribute — a task that involves making complex judgments and taking a broad view of the organization’s needs.
  • Have strong interpersonal and communication skills. For many candidates, you’ll be “the face of Open Philanthropy,” able to convey what makes the organization unique and why it’s great to work here while also maintaining our high level of desired transparency with candidates.
  • Enjoy iterating and improving processes. You’re skilled at breaking down complex workflows and optimizing them for clarity and efficiency. 
  • Are passionate about Open Phil’s mission and excited to support our work, across all of our focus areas. You don’t need to be a subject matter expert in any of these fields, but will need enough context to interface effectively with stakeholders and candidates within them. 

No recruiting experience is required, but we’re looking for candidates with at least a year or two of operations-relevant experience who have successfully managed fast-moving processes. If you don’t yet have this experience, we suggest completing the general indication of interest for operations roles instead (and noting if you’re interested in working on the Recruiting team specifically).

We’re especially excited by candidates with existing networks and interests relevant to our talent needs (particularly within the Global Catastrophic Risk or Effective Altruism spheres).

We don’t think it’s necessary to have every quality described above; there is no such thing as a “perfect” candidate. If you’re on the fence about applying because you’re unsure about your qualifications, we strongly encourage you to submit an application anyway.

 

Role details & benefits 

  • Compensation: The baseline compensation for this role is $116,977.12, which (for US hires) would be distributed as a base salary of $101,719.24 and an unconditional 401(k) grant of $15,257.89. 
  • These compensation figures assume a remote location; we offer higher compensation for candidates located in San Francisco or Washington, D.C.
  • All compensation will be distributed in the form of take-home salary for internationally based hires.
    • Time zones and location: You can work remotely. While we aren’t able to sponsor visas for this role, we are open to hires outside the US willing to consistently overlap with US business hours for at least 5-6 hours of the day. Our current team is dispersed from Central US through UK time zones.
  • Benefits: Our benefits package includes: 
  • Excellent health insurance (we cover 100% of premiums within the US for you and any eligible dependents) and an employer-funded Health Reimbursement Arrangement for certain other personal health expenses.
  • Dental, vision, and life insurance for you and your family.
  • Four weeks of PTO recommended per year. 
  • Four months of fully paid family leave.
  • A generous and flexible expense policy — we encourage staff to expense the ergonomic equipment, software, and other services that they need to stay healthy and productive. 
  • A continual learning policy that encourages staff to spend time on professional development with related expenses covered.  
  • Support for remote work — we’ll cover a remote workspace outside your home if you need one, or connect you with an Open Phil coworking hub in your city.
  • We can’t always provide every benefit we offer US staff to international hires, but we’re working on it (and will usually provide cash equivalents of any benefits we can’t offer in your country). 
  • Start date: We expect to make offers by late July, and hope new hires can start as soon as possible after receiving an offer, though we understand that some candidates may need longer to exit existing commitments. If this timeline doesn’t work for you, please err on the side of applying anyway and let us know in your application in case we can make alternate arrangements. 

Please apply as soon as you can — we may give priority to candidates who are able to move through the process sooner. The role will close for applications at midnight Pacific Time on May 21st.

We aim to employ people with many different experiences, perspectives, and backgrounds who share our passion for accomplishing as much good as we can. We are committed to creating an environment where all employees have the opportunity to succeed, and we do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected status.

If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, or have any other questions about applying, please contact jobs@openphilanthropy.org.

US-based Operations staff are typically employed by Open Philanthropy Project LLC, which is not a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. As such, this role is unlikely to be eligible for public service loan forgiveness programs.