Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Notes on hiring a copyeditor for CEA, published by Aaron Gertler on the Effective Altruism Forum. Over the last year, there’s been a lot of discussion about the “EA job market” and how to build an effective career in an EA field. A few months ago, I went through my first hiring process from the employer side when I found a part-time copyeditor to work on CEA’s social media posts (and a few other tasks). I thought my process might be interesting to people who've been following the aforementioned discussion, so I’m writing up my notes in this post. Meta: It can be legally tricky to write applications, conduct job interviews, and provide feedback to applicants. (Though feedback can also be really valuable!) I recommend consulting your local HR expert before attempting to hire. Statistics on the hiring process The initial application was meant to give me information about applicants’ editing skills and experience, as well as their familiarity with EA (which I felt would be helpful for the role, given the material they’d be editing and sometimes writing). Applicants were asked to edit half of a transcript of an EA Global talk generated by a transcription service, which contained many errors. They were given a two-hour limit to make it as clean and readable as they could. Only a few applicants didn’t finish the full edit, some because they went over the time limit and others because they applied very soon before the deadline. It’s possible that some people ignored the limit; I spot-checked the edit history of some of the best transcripts and didn’t see this, but I didn’t check all transcripts in this way. Applicants were also asked to provide some information about themselves; see the next section for a link to the full job description. Number of applicants who completed the initial work trial: 183 Number of applicants who scored at least “1” on each of two 1-3 scales (one for EA/editing experience, one for editing skill): 147 (I describe my system in more detail below, but you can think of this as “the number of people who followed the instructions, seemed to be fluent in English, and indicated a genuine interest in the position.”) Number of applicants who reached the interview stage: 21 Number of applicants who reached the “final work trial” stage: 8 The job description Here’s the description I used to advertise the position. I shared it through the EA Newsletter, the 80,000 Hours job board, the EA Job Postings Facebook group, and EA Work Club. I didn’t try to track how many candidates came through each source. The position was posted in the first week of June, and was open until the last day of June. Some thoughts on how I handled this process, and what I wish I’d changed: I didn’t have a good sense for how many people would apply, so I erred on the side of having a more “open” description: I described an “ideal” candidate, but didn’t set out many strict requirements. On the one hand, this led to many more people applying than I had expected, and quite a lot of applicant time being invested in a work test for minor (if any) benefit to applicants. This makes me wish I’d done more research beforehand to better understand how many people tend to apply for these positions — for example, by asking GiveWell about their past experience hiring people to write up conversation notes (a position with similarly loose qualifications). On the other hand, had I screened for professional editing experience or professional EA experience, I might have missed out on some of my best candidates,perhaps including the person I eventually hired. I could have saved even more applicant time by asking contacts in the EA community for references; several candidates I chose to interview were people I expect I’d have found through this method. However, since I didn’t think the position would require...