Dates

• Application are open and close 15th of August 23:59 PT
• Application review and interviews second half of August
• Starting date: Ideally, in the first half of September, but we're happy to wait if the strongest candidate can't start that soon.

Short role description

The Head of Coaching holds responsibility for improving Effective Thesis’s coaching process to generate the most impact and most value for students, managing the coaching team of volunteers (4 people currently), growing the coaching capacities (e.g. via hiring new volunteer coaches and finding efficiencies in the coaching process) and making sure all our applications are reasonably served. 

This is a part time 20 hours/week position with a rate of 1700-2300 USD/month (but the hours per week and thus salary can be scaled up or down within the range of 10-40 hours a week, depending on the right candidate’s availability). We’re happy to negotiate on the salary in case of candidates with exceptionally good fit. The role is fully remote and open to candidates from all countries.

We prefer candidates who can stay with us for a full year, possibly longer depending on future funding.

Apply here; the first stage should take up to 30 minutes, possibly much less.
 

What is Effective Thesis

Effective Thesis is a project that aims to assist students in their final thesis topic choice and direct their attention to areas that have the potential to greatly improve the world. It does this by offering students to engage with profiles of several high impact research directions for each discipline, offering personalised coaching, connecting them with researchers working in these directions who can help with the specific topic choice, giving feedback on their existing ideas and research career tips, and inviting them to the online community of other students focusing on similar directions.

Here is the most recent 2019 report outlining some thoughts on future project development.
 

Responsibilities & tasks

The following section was written by the outgoing Head of Coaching to give applicants a more detailed picture of the responsibilities and prioritisation this role has encompassed in the past. But we expect the responsibilities and prioritisation for this role to change somewhat over time and depending on the person who fills this role. Below you will also find some examples of additional tasks that you may also focus on but that weren’t a focus for the previous Head of Coaching.

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Legend:

X% = the percentage of my ET time that I usually spend on this area of responsibilities. Sometimes short-term prioritisation may change how much time I spend on each areathese. I spend roughly 10 hours/week on my ET work, so 10% is roughly an hour/week.

(1) means I consider this my most important area of responsibilities; (5) means I consider this my least important area of responsibilities

(1) Strategy, developing coaching & coaching sustainability (40%)

Meta: Figure out how to and improve coaching process towards more value creation

• Identify how coaching creates value and what kind of value it creates
• Build and improve our model of the thesis topic choice process based on our coaching experience
• Build more coaching capacities
• Search for ways to make our coaching process more efficient
• Sustainability: Make coaching processes robust (independent of people working on it now) and transparent (easy to understand for anyone) = professionalisation, setting the project up for long-term success

(2) Team management & team sustainability (20%)

Meta: Make sure we have team capacity to create this value both in quantity and quality

• Quantity of coaches
  • Selection, interviewing & onboarding: Take on new coaches, if necessary, e.g. in summer before autumn, which will be high application phase
  • Manage changes in team, e.g., if someone leaves make sure cases are taken care of
  • Happiness & satisfaction: Create work environment in which existing team wants to stay
    • Check-in about plans and needs
    • Opportunities for growth: trainings, opportunity to contribute to other tasks that are a better fit, possibility to step up
    • Create workflows, documents that are easy for volunteers with little time commitment to use
    • Monitor and tackle points that are least enjoyable
• Quality of coaches/ coaching
  • Professionalise onboarding process
  • Think about expectations towards coaches when entering and leaving the process, selection criteria in taking people on
  • Create a system where quality of ongoing coaching can be improved continuously
  • Find sensible coaching trainings, opportunities for coaches to do better

(3) Ongoing Coaching Cases (20%)

Meta: Take steps to create this value day to day → carrying out coaching

• Take new applicants on & carry out coaching process (delegate to coaches)
• Support coaches with their cases currently by engaging in Slack, via mail and at weekly coaching check-ins
• Take care of my remaining cases

(4) Evaluation and post-submission process (10%)

Meta: Make sure we collect information about the impact we are having from students

• Handle post-submission process: Inform about next options, get information for publishing fitting theses on our website
• Integrate feedback forms better into process and make sure coaches use them
• Improve feedback forms (low priority, project managers mostly manage that)

(5) Integration and Communication (10%)

Meta: Be point of communication between coaching team and rest of organisation and be sensibly integrated and in touch with the project managers and the content manager

• Monthly strategy meetings with project managers and content manager
• Facilitate linking team meetings Coaching <> Opportunities <> Content.
• Other tasks that team members outside of coaching team need me for

_________________________________________________________________________

Some additional areas of responsibility you could potentially have:

• You will have access to some existing thoughts about alternative models for coaching at Effective Thesis. It will be up to you to decide whether it makes sense to implement any (major) changes.
• You will have access to some thoughts on how we can strategically expand the network of experts and will be responsible for finalizing and implementing it (this will include reaching out to old and new experts in a structured way)
• You may also take over management of the current team that strategically looks for research opportunities (internships, jobs, funding, etc.) for students and shares it with them to support especially promising and motivated students in their research career. (Currently, this team has 2 volunteers and is managed by the project managers)
• You may get in charge of developing our community strategy, developing better ways to support student connections between each other and to other researchers interested in similar topics, including potentially switching from Facebook to other community platform and designing optimal ways to plug students to the EA community

The ideal candidate brings some of the following characteristics/experiences

• Strategic and critical thinking
• Ability to think about ET coaching services in radically different but useful ways
• Ability to manage team of volunteers
• Motivation and ownership mentality: Taking responsibility and driving the coaching forward
• Understanding of EA cause areas and the community
• Understanding of the impact Effective Thesis aims to have
• Experience/knowledge in research/academia (nice to have)
• Experience/knowledge in coaching, especially research coaching and training programs (nice to have)
• Previous activity in EA-aligned organisations (nice to have)

We encourage you to also apply if you feel like you do not fulfill all of these characteristics.

We are committed to fostering a culture of inclusion and encourage individuals with diverse backgrounds and experiences to apply. We especially encourage applications from self-identified women and people of colour who are excited about contributing to our mission. 
If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, or have any other questions about applying, please contact david.janku@effectivethesis.org
 

What the hiring process will look like

We collect information from you via 2 steps. We ask you to fill out our application survey, which has two parts. The first set of questions aims to give us a better picture of your understanding of the project and strategic thinking. The answers you give here will be evaluated anonymously to ensure fairness and avoid biases. The second part asks for personalized answers (CV, email, name) and will be matched with the first part only after evaluating them separately. The deadline for the initial application is 15th August 23:59 PT.

For the top candidates, the second stage will be an interview to discuss remaining questions from both sides and details. Interviews will take place from the 16th August - 27th August.

Feel free to reach out to david.janku@effectivethesis.org in case of any questions.

Apply here: Application Form