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 tens of 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.

We're hiring a Talent Acquisition Specialist to partner with our research leadership in finding, cultivating, and hiring exceptional research talent. The quality of our research team is absolutely critical to GiveWell’s success, and you’ll be a key partner in helping us get hiring right. You’ll be responsible for managing hiring rounds, providing an outstanding candidate experience, contributing to recruiting strategy, and continuously improving our work. You’ll report to our Manager of Talent Acquisition and sit on GiveWell’s People Team.

Why we're hiring for this role right now: Our research team’s hiring goals are considerably expanding, so we’ve decided to hire a specialized research recruiter (we’ve previously only hired generalist recruiters) to help us meet those goals and strengthen our hiring practices. Also, our most tenured generalist recruiter is moving into a new role internally, and we want to backfill that role.

The Role

Specific duties will include:

• Leading full-cycle recruitment for research roles, including developing sourcing strategies and building the top of the funnel, administering work trials and coordinating with interview teams, and making and closing job offers
• Partnering with the Research team leaders to design interview processes and work trials that effectively assess candidates and provide a great candidate experience
• Analyze recruitment metrics and pipeline data to help develop internal benchmarks and inform our hiring strategy
• Coaching and providing guidance and training to hiring managers
• Building and maintaining relationships with potential candidates and growing our referral networks
• Contributing to the development of systematic, values-aligned hiring practices across GiveWell
• Writing effective and compelling job descriptions, scorecards, external and internal communications, and outreach
• Strengthening GiveWell’s employer brand

About You

The strongest candidates will have 3+ years of in house, full-cycle recruitment experience, preferably focused on hiring research, technical, or analytical roles. We’re open to candidates without recruiting experience (more on that below). In general, we’ll be looking for someone with a strong track record of:

• Owning projects that centrally rely on data to inform decision making and strategy
• Using scorecards to design interviews and other candidate assessment tools
• Interviewing candidates to assess their technical skills, behavioral qualities, and motivations
• Managing projects with opinionated stakeholders
• Strong relationships with hiring teams, candidates and prospects
• Consultative partnership with senior leaders 

While not required, these attributes are preferred:

• Familiarity with our tech stack (Greenhouse, LinkedIn Recruiter, Asana, Google Suite, etc.)

We also think these qualities will help you do well in the role and at GiveWell:

• You're deeply curious and truth-seeking – you ask great questions, you care about getting things right even when it’s hard, and you’re willing to interrogate your own and others’ work. 
• You have high agency – you drive projects forward and proactively improve processes rather than simply executing existing procedures.
• You're passionate about GiveWell's mission and research — you can effectively engage with research team members about their work, and you can talk about GiveWell’s work with candidates.
• You’re great at organization and prioritization – you have meticulous attention to detail when it matters, but you don’t lose sight of the bigger picture. 
• You have strong emotional intelligence — you can build lasting relationships both internally and externally.
• You have outstanding communication skills – you speak and write clearly, and you believe it’s important to get the right message across.

Key Questions

Do I need prior experience as a recruiter to apply?

We’ve previously hired successful team members without any professional recruiting experience, and we’d be willing to do it again. But, it’s important to note that all else equal, candidates with in-house recruiting experience will be at an advantage relative to candidates without that experience. For candidates without recruiting experience, we’ll be looking for a minimum of 3 years of professional experience, a strong track record of professional accomplishments, excellent communication skills, sincere passion for GiveWell’s work, and alignment with our values (with clear evidence of each of these). The bottom line is: If you’re excited about GiveWell’s work and think you could do a great job in this role, you should apply.

What does GiveWell’s research team do?

Our researchers try to save and improve as many lives as possible with the money that’s available to GiveWell. To do that, they produce all of GiveWell’s core work products, including intervention reports, cost-effectiveness analyses, and lookbacks on our previous work. They use this research to make grants to the most cost-effective opportunities they can find (>$500 million in the last two years). You can see more details in the “About GiveWell” section below, which we recommend you review in moderate depth.

What are some of the roles I would be responsible for hiring?

You can see several open research roles on our jobs board. In addition to the roles listed there, you might hire for Program Associates (who manage grantmaking investigations and keep things moving), Research Analysts (who provide crucial vetting and research support to all of our research subteams), and other team members at varying levels. Visit our People page if you’d like to see everyone’s titles, and you can also check out our team members’ LinkedIn profiles to see how they describe their jobs. We’re happy to dig into hiring targets and specific roles when we meet you!

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

The below items are objectively neutral, but we expect that they’ll be differentiating factors for many potential applicants (If all of them sound good to you, we hope you’ll apply!).

• GiveWell’s research team has a unique approach to hiring, and it’s possible that you’ll dislike it. In general, our research leadership tends to be skeptical of hiring processes that mainly consist of interviews. All of our research hiring processes currently rely heavily on work trials (as one example, see our Senior Researcher hiring FAQ), and we spend a huge amount of staff effort on developing and grading these assessments. We also haven’t historically devoted substantial effort to proactively sourcing candidates (though we’d like to expand our efforts in this area once you join the team).
• You’ll need to deeply understand our research team to succeed. We want you to be able to speak fluently with candidates about our work and provide useful input to hiring managers when we’re developing assessments and evaluating candidates. To do that, you’ll need to spend substantial time talking to members of our research team and reading their work products (see the “About GiveWell” section below for examples). If you feel disinterested in our research work, it’s unlikely you’ll be happy or successful in this role.
• No recruiting activities are out of scope for this role. You’ll be responsible for coordinating, sourcing, and all other aspects of recruiting for every hiring round that you manage. That might sometimes look like dealing with scheduling issues between candidates and interviewers who live on opposite sides of the world, or trying to wrangle data to answer a question from a hiring manager that the data wasn’t designed to answer. If you’re looking for a role with very specialized recruiting duties (e.g. you want to mainly work on sourcing, or coordination, or data analytics), this isn’t that role.
• You’ll need to write a lot. Our culture is writing-forward, and you’ll often be expected to engage with internal discussions by writing and reviewing detailed memos. We don’t mean to imply that we never discuss things in live meetings (we often do!), but our culture prizes rigorous, analytical decision making, and we think writing is a great medium to support that kind of thinking. It’s possible that you’d prefer an environment with different communication norms.

What type of recruiting experience is most relevant for this role?

We think the most relevant experience would be in-house recruiting work for senior, technical roles, because these are the sorts of roles that our team is looking to hire. Ideally, you’ll have worked in a dedicated capacity for a particular team. If you’ve mainly recruited entry-level, executive, or non-technical talent, or if you’ve mostly worked in a more generalized capacity, we’ll be looking for evidence of your adaptability. 

What is the hiring process like?

Our basic plan for the hiring process is listed below. If you move to step 2, you’ll be in touch with a member of our recruiting team who will quickly answer any questions about logistics and timelines.

1. Submit your application below. You don’t need to write a cover letter (we deliberately turned off the cover letter upload field); we only need you to answer our application questions and submit your resume.
2. Short, multiple-choice assessment.
3. Zoom screen with a member of our recruiting team.
4. Virtual interviews with several folks across our teams, including our research leadership. It’s likely that one or more of the interviews will require substantial written preparation, which we’ll compensate you for.
5. Reference checks.
6. Offer.

Please note that we could choose not to move forward at any stage of the process described above, and we do not share individualized evaluative feedback with applicants.

We plan to devote substantial time to reviewing applications, and we will respond to everyone who applies. We’ll review applications on a rolling basis, so it’s better to apply sooner. If we decide to close the application by a specific deadline, we’ll update this page at least one week in advance.

Details

• Team: You'll report to our Manager of Talent Acquisition. You’ll be in the Operations department and the People subteam.
• Compensation:
• NYC or the San Francisco Bay Area: $105,800
• All other U.S. locations: $95,900
• Location: Anywhere in the United States. We have offices in Oakland, California and Brooklyn, NYC; you are welcome but not required to work from either. We’ll fund your relocation expenses if you’d like to move to one of our office locations.
• Visa sponsorship: We do not plan to sponsor visas or U.S. work authorization for this role.
• 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 fully paid parental leave
• Ergonomic home workstations or coworking space memberships
• 403(b) retirement plan
• Travel: Every year, we host two Visit Week gatherings in our Oakland office with the entire GiveWell team each year. We also have annual department and subteam retreats. We’ll expect you to attend each of those four gatherings, although we’ll offer some flexibility in the event of major conflicts or emergencies. We’re uncertain on additional travel—it’s likely that attending career fairs, research conferences, or other venues may be important to accomplish recruiting goals, but we’re happy to have an open discussion about your excitement and availability to travel later in the interview process.
• Start date: We’d like a candidate to start as soon as possible after receiving an offer.

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 the last two years, we’ve made more than $500 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 careers@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.