Senior Recruiter, Research

Summary

GiveWell's senior research staff are the key decision makers for hundreds of millions of dollars in grantmaking, and we think growing that team is one of the most important things we can do to increase our impact. We're seeking one or more Senior Recruiters to help us do that.

Finding senior research staff is a hard problem for a couple reasons:

• The talent pool for GiveWell researchers basically doesn’t exist as a defined group. You can’t go to one type of program, industry, or a few obvious competitors to build a reliable pipeline. The people who succeed here come from a wide range of backgrounds — economics PhDs, policy analysts, management consultants, medical doctors, neuroscientists, primate biologists, etc. — and the roles don't have clean analogues elsewhere. What they share is a set of hard-to-measure cognitive skills and quantitative fluency that doesn’t show up reliably on resumes.
• Our process is very competitive. The offer rate for senior research roles is less than one in a thousand.

We want you to figure out where to find strong candidates, improve our assessment process, and do the hands-on work of sourcing, screening, and closing offers. You'll work very closely with our research leadership team. We're most excited about finding someone who helps us make better decisions about finding great talent — and hire them faster.

The role

You'd work closely with our research team leaders to own recruiting for our Researcher, Program Officer, Senior Researcher, and Senior Program Officer roles. A few problems we’ll want you to think about:

After candidates apply, is our assessment process effective? Our offer rate for senior roles is below 0.1%. That might mean we’re extremely selective. It might also mean we’re losing good candidates somewhere in the funnel. You’ll dig into our data and find answers (How well do early screening scores predict work trial performance? What are the most common rejection reasons, and are they signal or noise? How did past hires actually turn out?). You’ll help us develop good heuristics about what to do in situations when candidates’ signals are mixed.

Where do we even find good candidates? The ideal GiveWell researcher doesn’t come from one degree program, industry, or competitor. You’ll think about where to look and go after them. And you’ll continually develop new pipelines with creative methods (running structured referral conversations with our researchers, scouring conference guest lists, using sourcing tools creatively, or maybe vibe-coding your own).

How can we use data to make better decisions? Right now, we don’t have great visibility into which sourcing channels, process changes, or pipeline stages are driving results. You’ll track data, run analyses, and help us make evidence-based decisions about where to put effort. In some cases, you might find out that we don’t have the right data architecture to answer important questions, so you’ll build it.

What are ways our hiring process could be much better? This is harder to describe because it covers ~every strategic and tactical question we face. We want you to be thinking about all of it. Things like: Are we overweighting particular qualities and losing promising candidates without noticing? How could we run experiments on our hiring processes (randomization, A/B testing, sourcing campaigns) that actually give us useful information?

You’ll also do a fair amount of bread-and-butter recruiting work: screening applications, writing outreach emails, and interviewing candidates. We think that sort of work will keep you close to the data and help you develop strong pattern recognition.

About you

You’re excited about GiveWell's mission and methods. You think GiveWell is doing something special, not just generically “doing good.” You can explain what makes GiveWell different.

You’re careful and truth-seeking with your beliefs. For example, if a hiring manager says we need to find “scrappy” people, you’re likely to ask “Why do you believe that?” or “What does scrappy mean?” instead of uncritically agreeing. You’re quick to update your beliefs by picking up new information and asking sharper questions. You can probably tell us about times when you’ve changed your mind about important things.

You're unusually curious and analytical. When you get invested in a question, you keep trying to find the right answer after many other people would have stopped. You ground your beliefs in data when possible and hedge appropriately when you’re not confident.

You have very high standards. We have a high competence bar for our research team, and you’ll need to uphold that and own your decisions about applications that do and don’t meet our bar.

You’re entrepreneurial and high agency. You figure things out. You have a history of solving problems. You’re very resourceful. You’re more likely to make the mistake of moving too fast than moving too slow. You'd rather try something imperfect and learn from it than wait for a perfect plan.

You're direct. You say what you actually think even when it's uncomfortable.

You’re good at communicating in writing. You're concise, clear, and you don't hide behind jargon. You probably enjoy an effective memo.

If you think people who know you well would agree that many of the qualities above describe you, we’d like you to apply.

Qualifications

We care much more about the qualities described above than any specific background. That said, some things that might help:

• Experience in recruiting, talent operations, research operations, or a generalist role at a mission-driven organization
• Comfort with data — spreadsheets and basic quantitative analysis
• Strong written communication
• Experience working closely with executive-level leadership
• Familiarity with global health, development economics, effective altruism, or adjacent fields is a plus but not required

Recruiting experience is welcome but not required. Some of the best people in comparable roles at peer organizations came in without it. And we’ll support you if you want to move on to other things at GiveWell after making progress on our research recruiting. There's always a place here for generalists who are good at solving hard problems, and we have a history of developing high performers into different roles across our org.

Key Questions

What are some of the reasons I might not like this role?

• GiveWell has a unique approach to hiring, and it’s possible that you’ll dislike it. For example, we tend to lean heavily into work trials and finding empirical evidence about the candidates we hire. We are rigorous in how we evaluate candidates, and hold really high standards, which can lead to longer hiring rounds with more steps than what is typical elsewhere. We’re extremely quality focused and would rather hold out for the right candidate than settle on someone who’s “mostly right.”
• You’ll need to deeply understand our work and culture to succeed. We want you to be able to speak with candidates about our work and what makes GiveWell special, and provide useful input to hiring managers when we’re developing assessments and evaluating candidates.
• You will be expected to hunt, not just farm. While we receive a high volume of inbound applicants, we are looking for recruiters who effectively source and attract candidates, not just wait for them to trickle in.
• You’ll be collaborating with leaders with high expectations. We’re a founder-led, performance-driven culture and you’ll be collaborating with our executive team regularly in this role. Strong partnerships will depend on you building trust, leading with curiosity, and reliably delivering results.
• You’ll be running hiring rounds from start to finish. We consider this a full-lifecycle role, which means you should be comfortable with things like scheduling, building out roles in Greenhouse, and day-to-day coordination with candidates. While you might have support from more junior colleagues, you’ll be expected to capably manage your own pipelines.

What does growth look like in this role?

GiveWell’s growing, and you’re going to help shape that. Your growth will be tied directly to the impact created by the people you help hire. Beyond day-to-day recruiting, you’ll have the opportunity to work on more strategic projects, including shaping our overall hiring approach and improving our employer brand. In this role you’ll also have significant exposure to executive leadership and many corners of our business. The talent acquisition team is doubling in 2026, which means there are clear opportunities for mentorship and potentially growing into a team leader.

What does this interview process entail?

We'll use a combination of interviews, written exercises, and work trials to assess the qualities described above. Past versions have looked like:

• Simulating a hiring manager intake conversation
• Walking through a sourcing strategy for a hard-to-fill role
• Reviewing a job description or process and offering a critique
• Writing a candidate outreach email or internal communication

We'll share more specific details if we invite you to move forward, but our current plan is:

• Screen with a member of the Talent Acquisition team
• Career history interview with the Manager, Talent Acquisition
• Work trial, which will include live conversations and written work
• Values interview with VP, People
• Final conversation with Manager, Talent Acquisition
• References

Team structure

This role sits on GiveWell's People team and reports to our Manager of Talent Acquisition. Day-to-day, you'd work in close partnership with our Research Program Director, who owns senior research hiring decisions and is part of our Research Leadership Team. You'd collaborate regularly with other members of the People and Research teams on sourcing and candidate evaluation.

We'll likely also want you to attend research team meetings, develop 1:1 relationships with research team members, and potentially join research team-building retreats. We’ll be interested in ~any kind of team embedding that helps you build useful context.

The details

• Compensation:
  • NYC or the San Francisco Bay Area: $149,600
  • All other U.S. locations: $136,000
• Benefits: Our benefits include:
  • Fully funded health, dental, vision, and life insurance (we cover 100% of premiums within the US for you and any dependents)
  • Four weeks of paid time off per year
  • 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave
  • Ergonomic home workstations or coworking space memberships
  • 403(b) retirement plan
• Location: You must be based in the United States and can choose to work remotely, hybrid or in person at one of our offices located in Brooklyn, NY or Oakland, CA.
• Flexibility: We support and encourage flexible working, including flexible hours, working remotely, and working from the office when you choose. The majority of our staff, including senior management, work flexibly in one way or another.
• Travel: GiveWell hosts “Visit Weeks” twice a year in our Oakland, California, office and up to two annual departmental retreats. Attending these in-person opportunities will be important to fulfilling the goals of this role. Occasional additional travel may be helpful for conferences or recruiting events.
• Visa sponsorship: We are not currently able to sponsor visas for this role.
• Start date: We’d like a candidate to start as soon as possible after receiving an offer, but we’ll offer flexibility for candidates whose personal or professional circumstances require them to moderately delay their start date.

We don't want to miss candidates who could do great things at GiveWell. If you're on the fence about applying because you meet some but not 100% of our preferred qualifications, we encourage you to apply anyway.

GiveWell is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer by choice. We value our team's diversity in all respects and desire to maintain a work environment free of harassment or discrimination. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, contact us at careers@givewell.org.

Originally posted on Himalayas