OpenAI pilots a ‘mission interview’ for marketing and HR candidates

Getting a job at OpenAI now involves one more conversation. This one isn’t about your skills. It’s about whether you believe.

The company is piloting a new hiring step called the mission interview, OpenAI told Fortune on Monday. It starts with candidates for the marketing and human resources teams.

The idea is to give applicants a dedicated slot to explain how they would contribute to OpenAI’s stated mission. That mission reads, in full, “to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity.”

What the mission interview actually is

OpenAI is calling this a pilot, so the scope is narrow for now. Marketing and HR are the first two teams to get the extra stage.

The purpose is specific. Candidates get a space set aside purely for talking about how their work would serve the company’s AGI goal.

According to the research summary reviewed for this story, mission alignment has already been a core part of hiring for OpenAI’s engineering and research roles. Extending it to non-technical teams changes the message. The company is signaling that a recruiter or a brand marketer is expected to care about AGI outcomes too, not just the people training the models.

The hiring backdrop: 821 open roles and big paychecks