“In our own hiring, we haven’t often found salary to be a deciding factor (though we could be wrong).”
If your hiring structured in such a way that you would notice if it was?
By which I mean, if there are 40 people who would be a good fit for a role you are hiring for, and 90% of them aren’t willing to earn less than $60k, do you have any way you would expect to find out about that fact? I’d sort of expect them to just not apply in the first place because they know they won’t get paid that much (ironically, due to the commendable transparency and openness of most EA organisations). And so you only hear from the other 4, where salary might be a concern but it’s not the primary concern.
That’s a deliberately extreme set of numbers but hopefully demonstrates the point I’m trying to make.
It’s definitely a worry. The main way I’m judging this is how important salary seems in our final negotiations with the short-list of candidates.
Of course, if all the filtering occurs at an earlier stage, then we’ll never find out, but I don’t think that’s the case. I don’t think people use salary as a “yes or no” filter (rather it’s one of many criteria that have a role at each stage of the process); we often advertise the roles without stating the salaries; when I talk to people about the roles early on they often aren’t aware of what the salaries are.
Another worry is that people care about salary much more than they’re willing to let on. It would be hard to pick this up.
One reason why salary is less important than you might first think is that “not caring about salary” is well correlated with “EA-ness” and that’s a trait we value very highly when hiring. So, usually the candidates who care a great deal about salary aren’t the ones we’re most excited to hire.
The point I was making about openness/transparency is that I suspect most people who have been around EA for a while have an ok idea of what (say) CEA employees earn because you can get a very rough idea of that very quickly from scanning any of the budgets. As you correctly pointed out, they’re also just fairly typical for the wider non-profit sector. Any for many engineers those impressions will amount to a 50%-ish pay cut.
Once they have that impression, I’m surprised you don’t think people use salary as a ‘yes or no’ filter. I definitely think people have an internal ‘minimum number’ or ‘maximum pay cut’ and then for everything after that number it becomes one of many considerations. My main concern is that large chunks of the EA meta space might be falling below that threshold for large chunks of dedicated EAs. But I don’t know of any way to settle that theory more definitively, so having stated my impression I’ll leave it at that.
In my experience, some people definitely use it as a yes/no filter, but many don’t.
Also if you’re considering a group of people, you’d expect everyone to have their minimum threshold at different points, which will create a continuum salary vs. talent tradeoff, so you’ll still be able to get a sense of how bad the tradeoff is.
(ironically, due to the commendable transparency and openness of most EA organisations)
It’s much better (for both prospective employees and the organization) for people not to apply then to apply, spend tons of time interviewing, and then realize the salary is lower than they’re willing to take. So (with some caveats I won’t get into), transparency benefits everyone here.
Short run I agree, but long run it’s not an obvious win if it means 80k, and other similar orgs, never even find out salary is the largest concern (in a hypothetical world that I’m not at all sure exists, but certainly could exist).
“In our own hiring, we haven’t often found salary to be a deciding factor (though we could be wrong).”
If your hiring structured in such a way that you would notice if it was?
By which I mean, if there are 40 people who would be a good fit for a role you are hiring for, and 90% of them aren’t willing to earn less than $60k, do you have any way you would expect to find out about that fact? I’d sort of expect them to just not apply in the first place because they know they won’t get paid that much (ironically, due to the commendable transparency and openness of most EA organisations). And so you only hear from the other 4, where salary might be a concern but it’s not the primary concern.
That’s a deliberately extreme set of numbers but hopefully demonstrates the point I’m trying to make.
It’s definitely a worry. The main way I’m judging this is how important salary seems in our final negotiations with the short-list of candidates.
Of course, if all the filtering occurs at an earlier stage, then we’ll never find out, but I don’t think that’s the case. I don’t think people use salary as a “yes or no” filter (rather it’s one of many criteria that have a role at each stage of the process); we often advertise the roles without stating the salaries; when I talk to people about the roles early on they often aren’t aware of what the salaries are.
Another worry is that people care about salary much more than they’re willing to let on. It would be hard to pick this up.
One reason why salary is less important than you might first think is that “not caring about salary” is well correlated with “EA-ness” and that’s a trait we value very highly when hiring. So, usually the candidates who care a great deal about salary aren’t the ones we’re most excited to hire.
The point I was making about openness/transparency is that I suspect most people who have been around EA for a while have an ok idea of what (say) CEA employees earn because you can get a very rough idea of that very quickly from scanning any of the budgets. As you correctly pointed out, they’re also just fairly typical for the wider non-profit sector. Any for many engineers those impressions will amount to a 50%-ish pay cut.
Once they have that impression, I’m surprised you don’t think people use salary as a ‘yes or no’ filter. I definitely think people have an internal ‘minimum number’ or ‘maximum pay cut’ and then for everything after that number it becomes one of many considerations. My main concern is that large chunks of the EA meta space might be falling below that threshold for large chunks of dedicated EAs. But I don’t know of any way to settle that theory more definitively, so having stated my impression I’ll leave it at that.
In my experience, some people definitely use it as a yes/no filter, but many don’t.
Also if you’re considering a group of people, you’d expect everyone to have their minimum threshold at different points, which will create a continuum salary vs. talent tradeoff, so you’ll still be able to get a sense of how bad the tradeoff is.
It’s much better (for both prospective employees and the organization) for people not to apply then to apply, spend tons of time interviewing, and then realize the salary is lower than they’re willing to take. So (with some caveats I won’t get into), transparency benefits everyone here.
Short run I agree, but long run it’s not an obvious win if it means 80k, and other similar orgs, never even find out salary is the largest concern (in a hypothetical world that I’m not at all sure exists, but certainly could exist).
As was in fact the issue under discussion.