Probably Good launched a new job board!

By Probably Good @ 2024-05-06T22:07 (+141)

We’re excited to share a new addition to our site: an impact-focused job board! 

We’ve considered launching a job board for some time, so we’re happy to add this feature to the Probably Good site. The job board aims to:

As Animal Advocacy Careers have highlighted before, job boards are often the primary gateway to career advice sites, and so we hope the job board will also extend our content’s reach and general impact.

Why we’re launching a job board 

We want more people to find genuinely impactful opportunities. Our target audience focuses on people who might not be familiar with EA but are motivated to do good with their careers. Many of our users might search for jobs on more general non-profit job boards, which do not aim to prioritize opportunities based on impact. We hope our job board will increase people’s exposure to opportunities that have a higher chance of making a significant impact.

We want to make the process of finding high-impact jobs approachable, across a variety of cause areas. Other scale-sensitive job boards we support and link to focus on a narrower set of cause areas, either in scope or in tone. We hope to complement these job boards with additional opportunities from multiple cause areas and make many of those opportunities accessible to a broader, or just different, audience. Several leaders of high-impact organizations in Global Health & Development and other cause areas have expressed interest in this kind of resource for future recruitment as well.

We want to make it easy for readers on our site to find high-impact jobs that meet their constraints. We understand that different people have very different career constraints, such as being unable to move geographically, having family responsibilities, or needing to meet specific salary requirements. If someone is already on our site, we want to meet them where they’re at by sharing opportunities that are both impactful and aligned with their individual values, interests, requirements, and current work experience. 

How you can help

Start using the job board! If you’re excited about it and find it useful, please share it with people who might be interested in this kind of resource. 

This is an initial product, so we’re working to improve it and will continue to make changes that increase the value it provides users. We’ll add more features and expand the scope of the board as we go, but we’d love to hear feedback from users. If you have any ideas for increased functionality or would like to suggest jobs or organizations to feature on the board, please get in touch!

Final Notes

If you’ve read this far and want to consult on career opportunities that are good for you and good for the world, we think you might be a good candidate for our free 1-1 advising service. If you’re interested, please apply on our site – or send the page to anyone you think might benefit from an advising call. Additionally, if you want to know other ways Probably Good can support you (or your local group) further, feel free to reach out. 

Vasco Grilo @ 2024-05-07T09:45 (+16)

Thanks for the update!

Help people find more promising job opportunities, including in cause areas that aren’t as thoroughly covered by other impact-focused boards such as 80,000 Hours and Animal Advocacy Careers.

Could you elaborate on which opportunities would be on your board, but not on 80,000 Hours' or Animal Advocacy Careers'? 80,000 Hours has opportunities in many areas in their job board. Do you think they would not be open to including the ones you think they are missing? For reference, here are the opportunities they are currently listing by area:

Probably Good @ 2024-05-07T15:27 (+27)

Thanks for asking!

The comparison with Animal Advocacy Careers is simplest - they focus on animal advocacy careers (or animal welfare more broadly).

80,000 Hours indeed have a broader set of cause areas, with significant overlap with ours. That being said, there are several differences. 80K has more roles in longtermist or x-risk focused cause areas, while we focus more on other areas. We already have more jobs in absolute numbers in Global Health & Development - as this is a major area of focus for us and for a large portion of our audience. 

Over time we expect this to be true for more of our already-included cause areas, like climate change, mental health, global aid policy, and others. This is our job board’s first week so it’ll take time. But we already see them as part of our core mission. 

Finally, as we noted in the post - even for roles that already appear on other job boards, we’re hoping having them on the Probably Good website will expose them to our audience, most of which finds us without prior familiarity with 80K or AAC.

Vasco Grilo @ 2024-05-07T15:54 (+4)

Thanks for the follow-up!

We already have more jobs in absolute numbers in Global Health & Development - as this is a major area of focus for us and for a large portion of our audience.

I wonder whether 80 k would be open to adding the positions in global health and development which they are missing and you are listing. I have also noticed AAC's job board has around 83 positions listed, which is more than the 51 in 80 k's board, so I have encouraged them to consider adding the missing positions.

lauren_mee @ 2024-05-09T11:31 (+4)

Jumping in here just to say @Probably Good I think its great to have extra exposure to the animal welfare roles! Thanks for doing this. 

In regards to having the same roles as 80k i think this is unrealistic as we have different parameters on what roles and organisations we are monitoring so that seems unlikely to happen, even though I agree it would be good.

Vasco Grilo @ 2024-05-09T12:50 (+3)

Thanks, Lauren.

In regards to having the same roles as 80k i think this is unrealistic as we have different parameters on what roles and organisations we are monitoring so that seems unlikely to happen, even though I agree it would be good.

I encourage you to share such parameters with Conor Barnes. He replied to my feedback, and was open to including roles which are listed on AAC's board that are not listed on 80,000 Hours' board.

JoshuaBlake @ 2024-05-07T14:46 (+13)

Can I get alerts when new jobs get added matching my criteria?

Probably Good @ 2024-05-07T16:12 (+6)

Currently we aren't able to send job alerts for the board, but it's a feature we'll definitely explore adding in the future. Thanks for the feedback!  

Judith @ 2024-05-09T10:04 (+5)

+1, I think that'd be at the top of my requests! This looks great though, happy to see this new board :-)

Hauke Hillebrandt @ 2024-05-07T07:04 (+13)

You should display how many people have already applied for a job and let applicants filter by that - so that they can target neglected jobs. Ideally via your own application forms, but click through statistics would do. Big orgs might not like that because they want as many applicants apply as possible, and do not internalize the externalities of wasted application time, but for candidates it would be better.

David T @ 2024-05-10T12:01 (+13)

Whilst I sympathise with the desire to see more of this kind of information particularly given EA jobs being notoriously competitive, I'd be concerned that the signals sent out by raw numbers might be misleading and deter suitable applicants

The classic example is LinkedIn, which does display applicant numbers. Having seen the other side of LinkedIn job ads, I'm well aware that a job with 30+ applicants probably has about 25 who one-click apply to everything vaguely related to their field even when lacking basic qualifying criteria such as visa status. If I hadn't seen that side of things, I'd probably be deterred from applying based on not meeting a bullet point or two where actually I'd probably be in the top 10% of qualified candidates.

What I think would be valuable to some people is those organizations with relatively complex processes involving exercises and application forms choosing to indicate roughly how many people completed exercises for similar jobs in the past (as a marginal candidate I'm a lot more likely to fancy my chances of standing out if it's 10 than if it's 70), but that's a helpful thing before people devote considerable time to a process rather than something to search for.

Hauke Hillebrandt @ 2024-05-10T12:58 (+4)

Good point.

Hauke Hillebrandt @ 2024-05-07T07:05 (+5)

Same with salaries actually. If you'd let people filter by salary ranges that would force orgs to give up some leverage during negotiation.

Probably Good @ 2024-05-07T16:06 (+10)

We do have a salary slider already on the board, so you can filter by salary range for all jobs that have posted salaries. If you have any ideas for improving the salary filtering feature, we'd be happy to hear them! 

Probably Good @ 2024-05-07T16:05 (+4)

Thanks for the feedback! That's an interesting idea, and would be challenging to pull off, but we've added it to the list of potential future features for the board.  

Pat Myron @ 2024-05-06T23:42 (+8)

Filtering by salary excludes jobs that don't have posted salaries

Would love an option to toggle that

Probably Good @ 2024-05-07T03:40 (+1)

Hey Pat, 

Thanks for the comment! Do you mean you'd like a toggle to "Only show jobs with posted salaries" ? If so, we'll add that to the list of potential features to add. 

In the meantime, you can accomplish the same thing by setting the max (or min) to any number—you'll see it set in the filters bar above the listed jobs—then setting it back to its starting position. Until you clear the salary filter that will show all (and only) the jobs on the board that have posted salaries. 

If you have any other features you'd like, please let us know! 

Pat Myron @ 2024-05-07T04:04 (+3)

~2/3 of the jobs didn't post salaries, so I'd like to filter out low salaries without excluding the majority that simply didn't post salaries

Probably Good @ 2024-05-07T04:25 (+2)

In that case, there's currently no way to filter by salary without excluding jobs that don't have posted salaries, but I've added that to the list of features we'd like to add in subsequent versions of the job board. Thanks for the feedback! 

Tom_201513 @ 2024-05-12T02:26 (+3)

I believe that the oldest/newest sorting is backwards and there is no filter for Canada.

Probably Good @ 2024-05-13T14:55 (+3)

Hi Tom, 

Thanks for the comment! 

As for sorting, by 'Newest' we mean 'most recently added to the board.' I just used the sorting feature and when set to 'Newest' it correctly orders the jobs that were most recently added first (i.e. jobs added May 10, then May 9, then May 8, and so on). If this is confusing, can you tell us what you expected/what you would change? 

As for locations you can filter by, most of the filters automatically update depending on what jobs are currently listed on the board. That means if there are no in jobs in a certain country or city when you're viewing the board, you won't see the filter for that location, so you won't be able to filter for a location that doesn't currently have any jobs on the board. 

If you know of impactful orgs you think we should watch for jobs in your location, we'd be happy to hear your suggestions. 

Tom_201513 @ 2024-05-16T00:19 (+1)

It must be the filters that mess with the ordering because when I select a few filters then sort by newest or oldest it seems to be incorrect.

Probably Good @ 2024-05-16T15:29 (+3)

Hey Tom, thanks for providing a screenshot and a description of how it occurred. We extensively tested the filters and sorting feature in combination with each other and this bug didn't show in our testing. 

I just attempted to reproduce it and this appears to be a bug for specific edge cases—and even then only rarely occurs when those conditions are met (and can then be fixed by selecting 'Newest' again). 

If this is occurring for you more frequently, every time you select a combination of filters, doesn't change when you click 'Newest'—or anything like that—I'd really appreciate more details to help us address the problem. 

In any case, thanks for letting us know about this. This has been added to our list of updates, fixes, and other changes we'd like to make to future iterations of the job board.  

Tom_201513 @ 2024-05-16T20:59 (+1)

After fiddling around with it a bit I have found out that it appears to occur if you sort by newest first.

I opened a new incognito window on Firefox, selected any filter (or no filter), sorted by newest, and the list becomes stuck sorting backwards and does not fix itself upon sorting by oldest. If I first sort by oldest then the ordering works properly.

Probably Good @ 2024-05-17T00:15 (+3)

Thanks Tom! We appreciate you testing this out to see what's causing the bug. Knowing that the order of sort + filtering is likely causing the issue should help us figure out how to resolve it. If you spot any other unintended behavior from the job board, definitely let us know. 

Elliot Billingsley @ 2024-08-22T17:33 (+1)

Congratulations! One thing I notice about the board is that it's fast! The filters filter and the pages load quickly. Has a nice feel to it.