Glad to see this! Suggestion—if you have lots of things that you want to screen candidates for, people who value their time aren’t going to want to gamble it on an application that is high time cost and low chance of success—there is a way to solve this, by splitting it into stages. E.g. Stage 1
- easy things for candidate—checkboxes, name, email, CV, link to works
Stage 2
“What do you expect to be the key factors affecting AI progress in the next ~5 years? ”
“Why do you think you’d be a good fit for this fellowship?”
“What sort of projects/topics would you want to work on?”
Stage 3
“Please pick ONE of the following questions to answer.”
Saves the candidates time and also makes things better for you, since you get to fast track people who seem especially promising at earlier stages and are more likely to get such candidates, since they don’t feel that their time is at risk of being wasted as much—and having the competence and care to notice this lets them positively update about you.
Thanks for the suggestion. We considered this but decided against it for various reasons (though we did cut down the app length from our first draft). I agree that it’s frustrating that application time costs are high. One consideration is that we often find ourselves relying on free-response questions for app review, even in an initial screen, and without at least some of those it would be considerably harder to do initial screening.
One consideration is that we often find ourselves relying on free-response questions for app review, even in an initial screen, and without at least some of those it would be considerably harder to do initial screening.
Why not just have the initial screening only have one question and say what you’re looking for? So that the ones who happen to already know what you’re looking for aren’t advantaged and able to Goodhart more?
Glad to see this! Suggestion—if you have lots of things that you want to screen candidates for, people who value their time aren’t going to want to gamble it on an application that is high time cost and low chance of success—there is a way to solve this, by splitting it into stages.
E.g. Stage 1
- easy things for candidate—checkboxes, name, email, CV, link to works
Stage 2
“What do you expect to be the key factors affecting AI progress in the next ~5 years? ”
“Why do you think you’d be a good fit for this fellowship?”
“What sort of projects/topics would you want to work on?”
Stage 3
“Please pick ONE of the following questions to answer.”
Saves the candidates time and also makes things better for you, since you get to fast track people who seem especially promising at earlier stages and are more likely to get such candidates, since they don’t feel that their time is at risk of being wasted as much—and having the competence and care to notice this lets them positively update about you.
Thanks for the suggestion. We considered this but decided against it for various reasons (though we did cut down the app length from our first draft). I agree that it’s frustrating that application time costs are high. One consideration is that we often find ourselves relying on free-response questions for app review, even in an initial screen, and without at least some of those it would be considerably harder to do initial screening.
Why not just have the initial screening only have one question and say what you’re looking for? So that the ones who happen to already know what you’re looking for aren’t advantaged and able to Goodhart more?