GiveWell is a research organization that identifies and funds cost-effective giving opportunities, focusing on global health and well-being. Our work is funded by tens of thousands of donors who rely on our research to inform their giving. We’ve grown from raising $1.5 million annually in 2010 to raising ~$350 million in 2024.
The Role
We’re hiring a Manager of People Operations to own our HRIS and employee data, bring our payroll administration in house, manage relationships with our benefits vendors, and support our team members through the entire employee lifecycle. You’ll be a member of our People team, reporting to our Head of People and managing an Operations Specialist.
Why is GiveWell hiring for this position now?
GiveWell’s work aims to save and improve the lives of people around the world. We couldn’t do that without a high-performing team, and we know that exceptional performance requires systems that eliminate rather than create cognitive load. We’re creating this role to bring our HRIS, benefits management, and all people operations systems in house. We think it takes substantial talent to develop and maintain reliable, effective people ops systems, and we’re hoping to find an experienced manager who loves their craft and wants to build something for the long-term.
You’ll do the following types of activities in this role:
- Evaluate our current HRIS and recommend a path forward. Because we have relied on Employers of Record for some of our full-time employees, we don’t currently have a centralized source of truth for our employee base. We’re hoping you’ll move us to a unified HRIS and clean up our employee data, giving us a single source of truth. Ideally, we’d like a HRIS that integrates with the rest of our People tech stack (including Lattice, Greenhouse, and Ethena).
- Ensure legal compliance in our current and future employment jurisdictions. We have small offices in Oakland, Brooklyn, and London, and remote staff spread across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. We’d like to ensure that we remain legally compliant in all of our current jurisdictions and that we’re able to bring on talent from other international jurisdictions in the future. Legal compliance will include completing employment tax filings, owning our visa sponsorship process for employees wishing to relocate to the United States, leading employee relations investigations, and owning all other People policies.
- Bring payroll in-house. We currently employ an HR vendor to manage our payroll, HRIS, and onboarding/offboarding logistics, in collaboration with our finance team. We want you to bring each of those tasks in house and fully manage our payroll process.
- Benefits administration. Oversee and administer our benefits offerings (including open enrollment) across all jurisdictions to ensure compliance and equity and ensure that we continue to maintain strong benefits that attract and retain top talent.
- Own end-to-end onboarding and offboarding processes. Own our employee onboarding and offboarding processes. Set up new hires (and their managers) for success by creating and executing a new hire journey that is compliant, frictionless, and thoughtful. Build onboarding processes that help people get up to speed quickly, knocks out all the necessary paperwork and logistics, and fosters connection to the team and culture. For departing employees, create smooth exit processes that maintain good relationships and capture valuable feedback.
- Audit and manage our external People vendors. We’ve used the same vendors since our team was much smaller. Some of them have adapted to our needs, but we’re long overdue for a comprehensive audit of all vendors’ fit for our growing needs. You’ll own People vendor relationships and ensure that we’re receiving excellent customer service.
- Support People team initiatives. As a member of the People leadership team, you’ll support People-related initiatives, including things like employee rewards philosophy and execution, manager and employee training, reporting of People metrics and more. Over time, certain items may transition to your ownership, including, but not limited to, the performance review process.
- Carrying GiveWell’s culture. You’ll support a strong culture by modeling truth-seeking, transparency and candid feedback.
About You
The strongest candidates will bring five or more years of experience with owning people operations, payroll and benefits, and HRIS management. We're also targeting hiring someone with prior people management experience. In addition to the right experience, we'll be looking for someone with the following characteristics:
- You own your work. You’ve independently carried out projects from start to finish. You loop in the right stakeholders at the right time and keep the big picture in mind while moving projects across the finish line.
- You communicate candidly. You share information proactively, you’re receptive to feedback, and you give feedback to others. You’re an effective verbal and written communicator.
- You’re productive. You have high output. You keep your work organized and capably juggle multiple projects with differing priorities.
- You’re analytical. You’re comfortable with numbers and spreadsheets. You enjoy producing insights from data, and you believe it’s important to rely on data to make decisions. You’re rigorous with your data analysis; you’re allergic to shallow conclusions that rely on unexamined assumptions.
- You’re conscientious. You have strong attention to detail and you don’t cut corners.
- You’re aligned with GiveWell’s mission and values. You’re passionate about GiveWell’s work and impact, and you personally resonate with our values.
Key Questions & Information
We expect you might want to know the answers to the following questions before you apply.
What is GiveWell’s culture like?
GiveWell has a distinct and unique culture that’s influenced by our values of maximizing global well-being, transparency, truth-seeking, and emphasizing considerateness. Here are a few examples of our values in action:
- Change Our Mind. In 2022, we ran the Change Our Mind contest to solicit criticism of our work from external sources. We paid large cash prizes to the best entries and small participation awards to all good-faith submissions.
- “I Was Wrong.” In the early days of GiveWell, some staff made a T-shirt that said “I Was Wrong.” The shirt lived at the office, and people occasionally wore it when they made a prediction that turned out to be inaccurate. The T-shirt was a lighthearted reminder that it’s ok to be wrong, and that it’s important to be clear with yourself and others about what’s true.
- Transparency. We maintain a prominent public log of our mistakes, and have done so since the beginning of GiveWell. We also publish some of our board meeting materials and information about our operational finances.
What’s the career trajectory of this role?
You'll be helping to shape our people operations, and with that comes an exciting opportunity for career growth. Strong performers at GiveWell identify problems, propose solutions, and own company-wide initiatives. Your growth will be tied directly to the impact you create, with significant exposure to executive leadership. We can't promise a traditional ladder, but excellent work gets noticed, resourced, and rewarded.
What is the current People team structure?
Our Head of People currently manages a Manager of Talent Acquisition and several junior staff. We’re planning to further develop our management structure by hiring this role. You can see more on current People team members here.
What are some reasons this role might not be a strong fit?
This role requires someone who genuinely enjoys individual contributor work—you'll own the full cycle of payroll, benefits, and HRIS tasks personally. If you're at a point in your career where you want to focus primarily on management and strategy rather than hands-on execution, this role probably won't be the right fit.
Details
- Team: You'll report to our Head of People and manage our People Operations Associate.
- Compensation:
- NYC or the San Francisco Bay Area: $152,400
- All other U.S. locations: $138,200
- Location: You must be based in the United States. GiveWell’s staff work primarily remotely within the U.S., with a small number of staff in Canada and the UK.
- Flexibility: We support and encourage flexible working, including flexible hours, working remotely, and working from the office when you choose. The majority of our staff, including senior management, work flexibly in one way or another.
- Benefits: Our benefits include:
- Fully funded health, dental, vision, and life insurance (we cover 100% of premiums within the US for you and any dependents)
- Four weeks of paid time off per year
- 16 weeks of paid parental leave
- Ergonomic home workstations or coworking space memberships
- 403(b) retirement plan
- Travel: You’ll be expected to attend two whole-organization Visit Weeks in Oakland, a weeklong in-person Operations retreat, and a People subteam retreat, with the latter two events taking place at locations throughout the United States. We’ll fully cover your travel expenses for required travel events, including childcare if you need it.
GiveWell makes grants to support cost-effective programs that save and improve lives. We focus on global health and poverty alleviation in the lowest-income parts of the world because that is where we’ve found we can have the greatest impact.
Since 2007, we’ve directed over $2.4 billion to cost-effective programs and interventions. In the last two years, we’ve made more than $500 million in grants. GiveWell is one of the world’s largest private funders of global development efforts, and we estimate that the funding we’ve directed will save more than 270,000 lives.
GiveWell is most well-known for recommending a small number of Top Charities, which currently support seasonal malaria chemoprevention, antimalarial nets, vaccine incentivization, and vitamin A supplementation. However, most of our research capacity is devoted to finding cost-effective opportunities outside of those programs.
Recent grants have:
We never take for granted that GiveWell’s work is good for the world. We make our reasoning public and transparent so others can challenge it (sometimes we even pay people to point out our errors). We go to unusual lengths to check our assumptions and assess our impact, including funding research and external analysis to address our uncertainties and insisting that our grantees conduct rigorous monitoring and evaluation. We change our minds when the evidence demands it.
Additional information
We don’t want to miss candidates that could do great things at GiveWell. Practically, that means a GiveWell staff member reviews every application carefully and considers the whole picture of your background and potential. If you’re on the fence about applying because you meet some but not 100% of our preferred qualifications (some studies suggest this hesitation is especially common for women and people of color), we encourage you to apply anyway.
GiveWell is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer by choice. At minimum, this means that we comply with all federal, state, and local EEO and employment laws. Beyond the requirements of those laws, we value our team’s diversity in all respects, and we desire to maintain a work environment free of harassment or discrimination—we want our team members to thrive at GiveWell. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, contact us at [email protected]. We will consider employment for qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
By submitting an application, you acknowledge that you have read and consent to GiveWell's privacy statement for job applicants. By completing an application exercise, you acknowledge and assent to GiveWell's Work Trial Policy.
Originally posted on Himalayas
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