Hi there

I'm now (finally) doing a round of user interviews to understand what influences people to apply or not apply. If you know of anyone who you would consider a very talented potential founder that has decided not to apply, I'd love to connect with them to understand their thinking. (I won't try to change their mind, just understand their reasons.)

Steve@charityentrepreneurship.com

Hi there

I'm now (finally) doing a round of user interviews to understand what influences people to apply or not apply. If you know of anyone who you would consider a very talented potential founder that has decided not to apply, I'd love to connect with them to understand their thinking. (I won't try to change their mind, just understand their reasons.)

Steve@charityentrepreneurship.com

See also, Joey's response to a very similar question towards the top of the thread

Thanks Thijs

Good point. TBH, I haven't given much thought in a while. Be good to re-calculate given that we have way more datapoints now and, as you say, the funding situation has changed. 

We believe that it's very challenging to change  existing organizations.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/drRsWTctSqNRveK56/what-is-the-expected-value-of-creating-a-givewell-top

Oh - and apologies for how long it took me to respond to this. 

Yep - it's true we get very large numbers of applicants. Perhaps 80% are speculative though, and don't even really understand what we do.  So the big number is somewhat misleading. Of the two or three hundred  relevant candidates we receive, maybe 20 or so will make it onto the program.  So for the purposes of those reading the EA Forum (who one would imagine are somewhat or very involved in EA) the likelihood of getting into the later rounds of the application process are actually pretty good. 

I will add, however, that it's a little difficult to communicate around this topic. On the one hand we want to ensure people know that it's highly competitive; on the other, we don't want to discourage people. Furthermore, each recent round of applications has been really quite different, so it's not easy to generalize or lay out probabilities.  

What we are confident about is that if we could find more excellent candidates we would be able to start more excellent charities.  Our experience is that it makes a huge difference to find particularly well suited candidates. They tend to go on to start exceptionally effective organizations.