Headhunting Associate / Specialist

80,000 Hours’ headhunting team helps organisations working to safely navigate the transition to transformative AI find the people they need. We have an AI-powered headhunting service to do this: hiring managers tell us about a role and what they’re looking for, and our AI system searches our database of 16,000+ candidates to produce an initial list of potential fits. A human headhunter then refines the results based on the hiring manager’s feedback. Since 2025, our service has helped place more than 40 people in impactful opportunities. Last quarter, hiring managers reached out more than 2,000 times to candidates we suggested, across 187 searches for 79 organisations. We’re receiving more search requests than we can handle, and many of the organisations we serve are planning to scale their hiring over the next 1–2 years. As such, we’re hiring up to 2 Headhunting Associates/Specialists to help us meet this demand, improve the quality of our service, and deepen our relationships with priority organisations.

You’ll likely work on 5+ searches in a usual week and spend 2–5 hours per search, e.g. by talking to the hiring manager and finding the top candidates in our database with the help of Large Language Models (LLMs). We’re looking for people with good judgment in assessing people’s fit for a role, existing networks in our priority problem areas, and familiarity with using LLMs. Previous recruiting experience is not required.

Location: London, San Francisco Bay Area, or Washington DC preferred, though we’re open to remote candidates who can overlap for a few hours with UK/US time zones.

Salary: Based on experience and location, ranges from £84k–109k (London), $136k-176k (San Francisco), $119k–155k (Washington DC), $104k–135k (US remote), and £72k–94k (other remote).

Deadline: Apply by 11:00 PM BST on September 2, 2026. Applications will be assessed on a rolling basis, so we recommend applying early.

About the team and opportunity: 80,000 Hours provides free career support to people working on the world’s most pressing problems, particularly helping society navigate a transition to a world with transformative AI. The headhunting team helps organisations working on these problems find the people they need. We do this mainly through an AI-powered service that assists with the “sourcing” stage of hiring, i.e. finding good candidates to hire and inviting them to either apply or suggest someone else who could be a good fit. AI has changed how much sourcing work a small headhunting team can do. Our system can search thousands of candidates far faster than a human could, allowing headhunters to focus on understanding what hiring managers need and surfacing the strongest leads.

What the role is like: The core of this role is running searches: you’ll likely work on 5+ searches in a usual week and spend 2–5 hours per search to find good candidates to suggest. The process typically looks like:

• Having a 15–30 minute call with the hiring manager to better understand what types of leads they’re looking for, and/or reading their feedback on the first list we sent.
• Using our Claude skills to generate and tweak rubrics to assess a candidate’s fit for the role.
• You’ll then look at the top 100–300 leads per search and filter these down to the leads worth sending, along with any other leads that you think might be a good fit.

We’re open to hiring people at either the associate level or specialist level. We expect to match candidates to the appropriate level as part of the application process, so you don’t need to decide which one to apply for. Here’s how the levels might differ:

• An associate would build relationships with hiring managers, deliver searches with a defined process, suggest improvements to the process, and encode their reasoning into the system to improve future searches.
• A specialist would do similar work to an associate, but they would own relationships with hiring managers at priority organisations. They may also take on other responsibilities, such as experimenting with different search prompts and processes.

You’ll report to either Brian Tan or Huw Thomas and work closely with the rest of the headhunting team. You may also collaborate with other teams, such as our advising, job board, and AI products teams. This is a full‑time role. The start date is flexible, though we’d like the person we hire to start as soon as possible.

What success looks like in your first 12 months: By the end of your first year, we’d expect you to:

• Have helped place multiple people into impactful opportunities.
• Build strong relationships with hiring managers, such that for most roles that they’re hiring for, they want to use our service to help fill them.
• Have significantly contributed to improving our AI system and search process, such as by improving our rubrics or figuring out which leads we should prioritise talking to or adding to our database.

What we’re looking for: You’ll enjoy this work and do it well if you have most of the following:

• Have good judgment in assessing people’s fit for a role. You can look at a candidate’s LinkedIn/CV and make quick decisions about whether to suggest them to a hiring manager.
• Have a good understanding of some of the organisations that we serve, such as some of the organisations on our job board. You can talk to a hiring manager, understand their focus areas and team culture, and figure out what types of profiles they might want.
• Are a competent user of LLMs. You use LLMs regularly already and can give them the right context and instructions to do useful work for you.
• Are intellectually curious. You’re genuinely interested in understanding why some searches succeed and others fail.
• Are good at reasoning and communicating clearly. You can reason through problems well, identify the crux of disagreements, express yourself clearly and precisely, and demonstrate a high level of reasoning transparency.

You might be especially well-suited if you have one or more of the following:

• Have existing networks in one or more fields relevant to making transformative AI go well, e.g. AI safety, AI governance, biosecurity, other emerging challenges, and/or field-building roles that support these areas.
• Have experience with or near hiring decisions (either in recruiting or as a hiring manager).
• Are based in or willing to move to the Bay Area, Washington DC, or London, where many of the organisations we serve operate.

We don’t expect any one person to be equally strong in every dimension, and we encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet every criterion.

Salary and benefits: Salaries at 80,000 Hours are set using a salary calculator visible to all staff, that accounts for the specific role, location, and a candidate's experience. For this role, we expect it to range from £84k–109k for London-based staff, $136k-176k for San Francisco-based staff, $119k–155k for DC-based staff, $104k–135k for US remote staff, and £72k–94k for other remote staff. We can support both UK and US visa sponsorship, but we cannot guarantee US visa applications will be successful.

Our benefits include:

• 25 days of paid holiday, plus public holidays
• Private medical insurance
• Long‑term disability insurance
• Pension scheme / retirement plan with employer contributions
• Up to 14 weeks of fully paid parental leave and childcare allowance for children under five
• £5,000 annual mental health support allowance
• £5,000 annual self‑development budget
• The option to use 10% of your time for self‑development
• Gym, shower facilities, and unlimited free food at our London office