I was aware of the possibility of relevant competition law, but didn’t mention it because I’m just not that familiar. My assumption was that it would not be the same for non-profits, but that could be untrue. I am not very excited about coordination between employers in any case.
Independent of legal worries, one probably doesn’t need to look at resumes to gauge applicant pool—most orgs have team pages, and so one can look at bios.
This is a good point.
Thanks for the post by Kelsey. My thought is that we shouldn’t expect organizations to worry too much about whether the feedback is constructive or even easy to understand, which seems to be the bulk of the work Kelsey is describing. On the one hand it’s bad if EA orgs alienate applicants via the mechanisms Kelsey describes, on the other hand I do still think that something is better than nothing given sufficient maturity. Nonetheless I take your point seriously.
There are serious legal risks to giving feedback of any kind, let alone feedback that is neither “constructive” nor “easy to understand”. I found this book on U.S. employment law to be an accessible introduction to legal restrictions around hiring with good citations (though it is written in an alarmist, of-the-moment tone).
We might hope that candidates with an EA mindset wouldn’t sue after getting feedback, but not all candidates will have strong EA ties, and even people with strong EA ties sometimes do surprising things.
Other difficulties with feedback include:
Making it harder to implement work tests in the future (Open Phil tells me I didn’t do X on their test, so I do it next time and tell my friends to do it next time and everyone’s natural ability is now a bit murkier)
Creating arguments with disgruntled candidates (“that’s not enough justification for not hiring me, I’m going to send you nasty emails now”; “you told me I didn’t have X, but I actually do and accidentally left it out of my resume, you’d better hire me now”)
Creating a sense of bias/favoritism (person A is a really strong candidate on the cusp of getting hired and gets detailed feedback; person B is a really weak candidate and would be much less useful to provide with feedback; person B hears that person A got feedback and is angry)
Personally, I love feedback, and I appreciate Ben West of Ought for giving the best feedback of any org I applied to in my last round of job-hunting, but I can understand why organizations often don’t give out very much.
I was aware of the possibility of relevant competition law, but didn’t mention it because I’m just not that familiar. My assumption was that it would not be the same for non-profits, but that could be untrue. I am not very excited about coordination between employers in any case.
This is a good point.
Thanks for the post by Kelsey. My thought is that we shouldn’t expect organizations to worry too much about whether the feedback is constructive or even easy to understand, which seems to be the bulk of the work Kelsey is describing. On the one hand it’s bad if EA orgs alienate applicants via the mechanisms Kelsey describes, on the other hand I do still think that something is better than nothing given sufficient maturity. Nonetheless I take your point seriously.
There are serious legal risks to giving feedback of any kind, let alone feedback that is neither “constructive” nor “easy to understand”. I found this book on U.S. employment law to be an accessible introduction to legal restrictions around hiring with good citations (though it is written in an alarmist, of-the-moment tone).
We might hope that candidates with an EA mindset wouldn’t sue after getting feedback, but not all candidates will have strong EA ties, and even people with strong EA ties sometimes do surprising things.
Other difficulties with feedback include:
Making it harder to implement work tests in the future (Open Phil tells me I didn’t do X on their test, so I do it next time and tell my friends to do it next time and everyone’s natural ability is now a bit murkier)
Creating arguments with disgruntled candidates (“that’s not enough justification for not hiring me, I’m going to send you nasty emails now”; “you told me I didn’t have X, but I actually do and accidentally left it out of my resume, you’d better hire me now”)
Creating a sense of bias/favoritism (person A is a really strong candidate on the cusp of getting hired and gets detailed feedback; person B is a really weak candidate and would be much less useful to provide with feedback; person B hears that person A got feedback and is angry)
Personally, I love feedback, and I appreciate Ben West of Ought for giving the best feedback of any org I applied to in my last round of job-hunting, but I can understand why organizations often don’t give out very much.
+1 to Ought giving great job-search feedback.