Senior Recruiter

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 directing $1.5 million in 2010 to directing more than $400 million in 2025.

Summary

GiveWell is growing fast to move more donations to where we think they will do exceptional good for people in need. But it takes unique talent to thrive here, and finding those candidates requires much more than posting jobs and screening resumes. We're hiring a Senior Recruiter who will actively search for exceptional people, uphold an extremely high bar, and serve as a true thought partner to leaders across the organization — because the quality of our hires is key to how many lives we can save and improve.

Why we're hiring for this role right now: GiveWell surpassed 100 employees in early 2026, and we’re continuing to grow. We have increased hiring goals in Operations and Outreach, and we’re building capacity to tackle that. As our hiring scales, we’re also investing in improving our approach with smarter sourcing, a stronger employer brand, and creating hiring infrastructure. This is a real opportunity to help shape what great recruiting looks like at a mission-driven organization that takes hiring seriously.

The role

As a Senior Recruiter, you’ll be a hunter for rare talent and the right organizational fit — one week building a sourcing strategy for a niche finance role, the next networking to find a senior communications candidate or learning a new function well enough to advise a hiring manager on what “great” looks like. You’ll own full-cycle recruiting for roles across GiveWell's Operations and Outreach functions — think Finance, Legal, Tech, Philanthropy, and Communications — and pitch in on research recruiting when needed. Day to day, you’ll work across multiple job openings on the following:

• Partnering with hiring managers. You’ll collaborate closely with GiveWell leaders to define what they’re looking for in their new hires, guide them through our processes, monitor and surface trends in our talent pools, and make better hiring decisions. 
• Building our top of the funnel. You’re a hunter. You seek out passive talent through targeted sourcing, referrals, networking, and events and utilize all the tools at your disposal to prospect. You’ll get in front of high-quality candidates and creatively attract them to GiveWell, not just wait for them to trickle in. 
• Creating hiring infrastructure. Everything from crafting compelling job descriptions to designing interview plans that lead to stronger signals and less noise. You’ll help sharpen the tools we use to evaluate candidates, train hiring teams on how to use them, and measure their effectiveness.
• Candidate management. You’ll be the point of contact for candidates at every point in our hiring process. You’re responsible for creating a candidate experience that is frictionless, speedy, and showcases GiveWell’s values and culture.
• Assessing talent. You’ll use your strong judgement, curiosity, and critical thinking to assess talent. You’ll regularly lead screening interviews and be trusted to jump in at later stages as part of the hiring team that upholds GiveWell’s standards.
• Project and timeline management. You keep hiring teams on track, loop in the right people along the way, and effectively manage competing priorities within the diverse teams you support.

You’ll also plan substantial time thinking about our recruiting challenges, and contributing to our overall hiring strategy. Some of the questions you’ll focus on: 

• What makes our top performers unique, and where can we find more of them? You are obsessed with understanding the qualities, skills, and experiences needed to drive impact at GiveWell and it’s your mission to find more candidates who possess them and get them into our funnel.
• How do we make better decisions, faster? You’ll track data, spot patterns, and help us understand which parts of our process are adding value and which aren’t. If we don’t have the right information to answer an important question, you’ll build the infrastructure to get it.
• How can we set new hires up for success? Your job doesn’t ‘stop’ when an offer is signed. You’re focused on developing smooth handoffs, understanding new-hire sentiment and performance, and ensuring a warm welcome to GiveWell.
• What could we be doing 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?

About You

The strongest candidates will have 3+ years of professional experience recruiting for hard-to-fill positions in a performance-driven environment. Beyond that, here’s what we’re really looking for:

You’re excited about GiveWell’s mission and methods. You think GiveWell is doing something special, not just generically “doing good” and that matters to you, personally. You can explain what makes GiveWell different, and are fascinated by what makes a candidate successful here. You are intent on finding more top performers and won’t settle for less.

You’re entrepreneurial and high agency. You are great at identifying opportunities to drive progress forward, faster. You notice gaps, ask good questions, and find solutions. If you’ve ever redesigned a broken process, built a sourcing strategy from scratch, or pushed back on a hiring manager because you had a better idea, that's the kind of energy we're looking for.

Adaptability and curiosity. You adjust your approach to recruiting based on what each role and hiring manager actually needs — not a formula you apply to everything. You’re genuinely curious about the work happening across GiveWell, and that curiosity shows up in how you engage with candidates and hiring teams alike.

Strong communication. You write and speak with accuracy and the right tone. Internally, that means being concise and specific. Externally, it means writing outreach that actually gets responses and navigating discussions with sophisticated candidates.

Solid judgment. You’re an expert at assessing candidates’ behaviors and patterns and making excellent judgment calls, even in ambiguous situations. You personally hold high standards and seek to elevate the teams you support, and should have a point of view (that you can back up!) on what makes a strong candidate.

Highly organized. You’re meticulous in how you prepare, document, and track your work. You love a well-run meeting and a clean spreadsheet.

While not required, we’re particularly interested in candidates who possess:

• Experience recruiting for a range of functions — operations, fundraising, finance, communications, tech, etc. in a high performing organization
• Project/program management experience
• Strong analytical skills: ATS reporting, spreadsheets, and translating numbers and patterns into decisions and insights
• Experience working closely with executive-level leadership and cross functional stakeholders
• Experience designing, conducting, and improving interview and assessment processes 
• An interest in HR Business Partner or Talent Development work
• Familiarity with Greenhouse, LinkedIn Recruiter, or similar tools is a plus
• Prior mentorship experience (or an interest in it!)

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

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.

About GiveWell

GiveWell is dedicated to finding and funding outstanding giving opportunities in global health and development, sharing the full details of our analysis with everyone for free. Our giving funds enable donors to contribute to the most impactful and cost-effective programs our researchers identify. 

Since 2007, we’ve directed over $2.6 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 340,000 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.

GiveWell 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 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 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 reviews every application carefully, considering 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 Applicants. By completing an application exercise, you acknowledge and assent to GiveWell’s Work Trial Policy.