GiveWell is a research organization that identifies and funds cost-effective giving opportunities, focusing on global health and well-being. Our work is funded by thousands of donors who rely on our research to inform their giving. We’ve grown from raising $1.5 million annually in 2010 to raising over $300 million in 2023.

The Role

We’re hiring a Manager of Employee Experience to own the employee life-cycle, keep a pulse on employee sentiment, develop team-building events, and ensure that employee perspectives are integrated into GiveWell’s operational and organizational programs. You’ll be a member of our People team, reporting to our Head of People and managing an Oakland-based Operations Assistant.

Why is GiveWell hiring for this position now?

GiveWell’s work aims to save and improve the lives of people around the world. We couldn’t do that without a high-performing team. It’s important that each person on our team is supported, productive, and aligned with GiveWell’s goals, and that we create a culture that is inviting for new team members. Our team has grown substantially in the last few years, and we aren’t sufficiently staffed to do an excellent job with onboarding, engagement, team building, and more. This is a new role for GiveWell; we’re excited to bring on an experienced professional who can help us develop a strong, integrated, and inclusive team.

The job will include the following types of activities:

• Planning and managing our in-person events. We have several in-person events throughout the year. These include two all-staff Visit Weeks at our Oakland office; team retreats for our Operations, Research, and Outreach departments; and a larger number of small subteam retreats. With support from the Operations Assistant, you’ll plan Visit Weeks, support department heads with team retreat planning, and pitch in on subteam retreats as necessary. On-site support for Visit Weeks and team retreats will be required.
• Developing a strategy to build engagement in a remote-first work environment. Most of GiveWell’s staff work fully remotely, although we have hybrid staff in our Oakland, Brooklyn, and London offices. We’d like you to build connections through events and rituals, including leading All Hands meetings and drafting internal comms.
• Owning the employee life-cycle from signed offer through last day. You’ll partner with the People and Tech teams to ensure that our onboarding processes are comprehensive and efficient. You’ll also design respectful and secure offboarding processes. You’ll be responsible for employee check-ins, exit interviews, and other employee touch points to cultivate a stronger understanding of employee sentiment.
• Collecting employee engagement data, analyzing it, and taking action. You’ll own employee surveys—including annual, onboarding, and pulse surveys—from administration to analysis. You’ll identify opportunities to improve employee engagement, satisfaction, and retention, and communicate your insights to GiveWell’s leadership. We’ve recently signed a contract with Lattice; we’d like you to manage that software rollout and become the in-house Lattice Engagement expert for managers and team members.
• Carrying GiveWell’s culture. You’ll support a strong culture by modeling transparency and candid feedback.
• Recognizing employees. You’ll find ways to recognize the positive contributions of all of our team members, and you’ll ensure that we’re praising and incentivizing excellent performance and celebrating big wins.

About You

We’re looking for a candidate with three or more years of experience in at least one of the following areas: Employee engagement (including employee sentiment data collection and analysis), employee lifecycle, and event planning.

We’d prefer that candidates have more than five years of experience in one of those areas, as well as prior management experience of at least one full-time team member.

We also think the following characteristics will lead to success in the role. If you’d describe yourself using many of the sentences below—or if your colleagues and friends would describe you that way—we encourage you to submit an application!

• You’re aligned with GiveWell’s mission and values. You’re passionate about GiveWell’s work and impact, and you personally resonate with our values. We think this is very important both for your professional success at GiveWell and for your day-to-day enjoyment of our culture.
• You “get” people. We’ll want you to rely on data and evidence to make decisions, but ultimately this role is about deeply understanding people: what motivates them, what helps them grow, and what makes them feel connected. We want someone who builds strong relationships, deftly handles difficult conversations, and carefully balances different perspectives.
• You’re a realist. You understand that culture management and employee experience is complex, that it’s impossible to perfectly satisfy every stakeholder, and that hard tradeoffs are sometimes required. You’ve developed good judgment about how to navigate challenging situations.
• You’re analytical. You’re comfortable with numbers and spreadsheets. You enjoy producing insights from data, and you believe it’s important to rely on data to make decisions. You’re rigorous with your data analysis; you’re allergic to shallow conclusions that rely on unexamined assumptions.
• You communicate candidly. You share information proactively, you’re receptive to feedback, and you give feedback to others. You’re an effective verbal and written communicator.
• You’re productive. You have high output. You keep your work organized and capably juggle multiple projects with differing priorities.
• You’re creative. You’ve created systems from scratch, and you enjoyed doing it. You’re constantly on the lookout for new ideas that could make your work better.
• You’re conscientious. You have strong attention to detail and you don’t cut corners.
• You own your work. You’ve independently carried out projects from start to finish. You loop in the right stakeholders at the right time and keep the big picture in mind while moving projects across the finish line.
• You meet the physical requirements of the position. This job requires the ability to lift and move up to 45 pounds as well as other physical abilities for actively participating in office management. This is not a primary job duty, but you’ll need to pitch in during in-person staff gatherings.

Key questions

We expect you might want to know the answers to the following questions before you apply.

What is GiveWell’s culture like?

GiveWell has a distinct and unique culture that’s influenced by our values of maximizing global well-being, transparency, truth-seeking, and emphasizing considerateness. Here are a few examples of our values in action:

• Change Our Mind. In 2022, we ran the Change Our Mind contest to solicit criticism of our work from external sources. We paid large cash prizes to the best entries and small participation awards to all good-faith submissions.
• “I Was Wrong.” In the early days of GiveWell, some staff made a T-shirt that said “I Was Wrong.” The shirt lived at the office, and people occasionally wore it when they made a prediction that turned out to be inaccurate. The T-shirt was a lighthearted reminder that it’s ok to be wrong. The important thing is to be clear with yourself and others about what’s true.
• Transparency. We maintain a prominent public log of our mistakes, and have done so since the beginning of GiveWell. We also publish some of our board meeting materials and information about our operational finances.

What’s the career trajectory of this role?

We are actively building our entire team, and there are many opportunities for excellent performers to grow into more senior roles. We’re happy to talk about an individual trajectory once we get to know you better.

Details

• Compensation:
• NYC or the San Francisco Bay Area: $148,200
• All other U.S. locations: $134,400
• Location: You must be based in the United States. We prefer candidates who live in the San Francisco Bay Area and can commit to hybrid work from our Oakland office (with a secondary preference for candidates who can work hybrid from our Brooklyn, NYC office), but we’ll consider candidates who would like to work from other U.S. locations. If you’d like to relocate to the SF Bay Area, we’ll assist with relocation expenses. GiveWell’s staff work primarily remotely within the U.S.,  with a small number of staff in Canada, the UK, and Australia.
• 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.
• 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 paid parental leave
• Ergonomic home workstations or coworking space memberships
• 403(b) retirement plan
• Travel: You’ll be required to attend Visit Weeks in Oakland (2 per year) and weeklong in-person department retreats (3 per year) in locations throughout the United States. You will also be required to attend the annual People subteam retreat. We’ll fully cover your travel expenses for these six required travel events, including childcare if you need it.
• Start date: We’d like a candidate to start as soon as possible after receiving an offer, but we’re flexible on the exact date.

About GiveWell

GiveWell makes grants to support cost-effective programs that save and improve lives. We focus on global health and poverty alleviation in the lowest-income parts of the world because that is where we've found we can have the greatest impact.

Since 2007, we’ve directed over $2 billion to cost-effective programs and interventions. In 2022, we made over $400 million in grants. GiveWell is one of the world’s largest private funders of global development efforts, and we estimate that the funding we've directed will save more than 200,000 lives.

GiveWell is most well-known for recommending a small number of top charities, which currently support seasonal malaria chemoprevention, antimalarial nets, vaccine incentivization, and vitamin A supplementation. However, most of our research capacity is devoted to finding cost-effective opportunities outside of those programs. 

Recent grants have:

• Helped governments to implement high-impact health programs, like in-line chlorination of drinking water in India and HIV/syphilis screening and treatment for pregnant people in Zambia and Cameroon.
• Funded program delivery alongside strengthened monitoring and evaluation, as in our recent grants to support treatment of clubfoot and to evaluate the program.   
• Sought to scope and scale promising interventions that don't have clear existing implementers. We are supporting the Clinton Health Access Initiative's Incubator and Evidence Action's Accelerator to identify potentially cost-effective interventions and create programs that we would be excited to support in the future. For example, we recently funded a program to provide diarrhea treatment to children in Nigeria that we co-designed with CHAI through the Incubator program.
• Tested our assumptions through further research, including studies on the effect of water chlorination on mortality, the impact of a tree-planting program on farmers' income, and the effects of combining the RTS,S malaria vaccine and perennial malaria chemoprevention.

We never take for granted that GiveWell's work is good for the world. We make our reasoning public and transparent so others can challenge it (sometimes we even pay people to point out our errors). We go to unusual lengths to check our assumptions and assess our impact, including funding research and external analysis to address our uncertainties and insisting that our grantees conduct rigorous monitoring and evaluation. We change our minds when the evidence demands it.

Additional information

We don’t want to miss candidates that could do great things at GiveWell. Practically, that means a GiveWell staff member reads all components of every application carefully and considers the whole picture of your background and potential. If you’re on the fence about applying because you meet some but not 100% of our preferred qualifications (some studies suggest this hesitation is especially common for women and people of color), we encourage you to apply anyway.

GiveWell is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer by choice. At minimum, this means that we comply with all federal, state, and local EEO and employment laws. Beyond the requirements of those laws, we value our team’s diversity in all respects, and we desire to maintain a work environment free of harassment or discrimination—we want our team members to thrive at GiveWell. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, contact us at jobs@givewell.org. We will consider employment for qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

By submitting an application, you acknowledge that you have read and consent to GiveWell's privacy statement for job applicants. By completing an application exercise, you acknowledge and assent to GiveWell's Work Trial Policy.