I’m fairly surprised that organizations had trouble filling operations roles in 2018 or so, as in recent hiring rounds, we’ve had large numbers of non-EA but otherwise very qualified candidates.
I’m a little uncertain of how important it is for operations staff to be highly value-aligned, but I think my view is that it is not that important, especially in lower-level roles. This makes me think the pool of quality candidates is quite a bit larger than it might otherwise seem—there are lots of people with for-profit or non-profit operations experience that is directly relevant to 90% of what I do day-to-day.
I think ultimately it is better to have a value-aligned staff member than not, but we had a lot of really great candidates for recent ops roles, and that’s probably partially due to us offering competitive compensation and advertising widely, and not just in EA.
Thanks! I wonder if some sort of two-tiered system would work, where there’s a value-aligned staff member who is part of the core team and has lots of money and flexibility and so forth, and then they have a blank check to hire contractors who aren’t value-aligned to do various things. That might help the value-aligned staff member from becoming overworked. Idk though, I have no idea what I’m talking about. What do you think?
There is probably a version of this that works. I know that some orgs have tried something sort of like this. One problem with “hire contractors who aren’t value-aligned to do various things” is that you then have to manage those people (whether they’re value-aligned or not). This is getting outside the scope of your original question, but I think people underestimate how much it can drag on an organization to hire new people without thinking hard about their onboarding. If you have a very well-defined task, with a clear deliverable, then it can make sense to contract it out. But if you just have a problem and need help, often bringing on a new person to solve that will make things worse in the long run.
I think yes up to a certain point.
I’m fairly surprised that organizations had trouble filling operations roles in 2018 or so, as in recent hiring rounds, we’ve had large numbers of non-EA but otherwise very qualified candidates.
I’m a little uncertain of how important it is for operations staff to be highly value-aligned, but I think my view is that it is not that important, especially in lower-level roles. This makes me think the pool of quality candidates is quite a bit larger than it might otherwise seem—there are lots of people with for-profit or non-profit operations experience that is directly relevant to 90% of what I do day-to-day.
I think ultimately it is better to have a value-aligned staff member than not, but we had a lot of really great candidates for recent ops roles, and that’s probably partially due to us offering competitive compensation and advertising widely, and not just in EA.
Thanks! I wonder if some sort of two-tiered system would work, where there’s a value-aligned staff member who is part of the core team and has lots of money and flexibility and so forth, and then they have a blank check to hire contractors who aren’t value-aligned to do various things. That might help the value-aligned staff member from becoming overworked. Idk though, I have no idea what I’m talking about. What do you think?
There is probably a version of this that works. I know that some orgs have tried something sort of like this. One problem with “hire contractors who aren’t value-aligned to do various things” is that you then have to manage those people (whether they’re value-aligned or not). This is getting outside the scope of your original question, but I think people underestimate how much it can drag on an organization to hire new people without thinking hard about their onboarding. If you have a very well-defined task, with a clear deliverable, then it can make sense to contract it out. But if you just have a problem and need help, often bringing on a new person to solve that will make things worse in the long run.