One other reason worth considering is that AIM may be hiring to a set bar, rather than filling a pre-determined number of seats. People who miss this bar, in AIM’s eyes, won’t make exceptional founders. Of course, many people grow and improve between rounds, but equally, many don’t.
AIM do maintain a list of second-placers internally, who are offered as candidates for high-level roles within their incubated charities.
(Disclosure: I know people on the team, but don’t actually know if this is the case)
They may be, although absolute candidate quality doesn’t seem to be the only consideration; for context, the feedback I received as a finalist suggested a different mechanism. I was told that a main consideration was that I was relatively locked into a single idea, and that this idea was among the most popular in the cohort. ‘This does mean we have to make the difficult decision of turning down talented potential founders like yourself who are better suited to some popular ideas.’
The implication was that they expected to be able to find founders for that idea regardless, so they prioritised more flexible candidates or those interested in less popular ideas in order to maximise the total number of charities launched.
So I don’t think there’s a pure ‘fixed-bar’. Some candidates who clear the bar might still be turned down due to idea-level constraints.
I’m not sure to what extent both of these are operating simultaneously (e.g. a minimum bar + then matching), but if the latter is a meaningful factor, it seems to strengthen the case for tracking near-miss candidates across rounds rather than resetting the pool each time.
One other reason worth considering is that AIM may be hiring to a set bar, rather than filling a pre-determined number of seats. People who miss this bar, in AIM’s eyes, won’t make exceptional founders. Of course, many people grow and improve between rounds, but equally, many don’t.
AIM do maintain a list of second-placers internally, who are offered as candidates for high-level roles within their incubated charities.
(Disclosure: I know people on the team, but don’t actually know if this is the case)
They may be, although absolute candidate quality doesn’t seem to be the only consideration; for context, the feedback I received as a finalist suggested a different mechanism. I was told that a main consideration was that I was relatively locked into a single idea, and that this idea was among the most popular in the cohort. ‘This does mean we have to make the difficult decision of turning down talented potential founders like yourself who are better suited to some popular ideas.’
The implication was that they expected to be able to find founders for that idea regardless, so they prioritised more flexible candidates or those interested in less popular ideas in order to maximise the total number of charities launched.
So I don’t think there’s a pure ‘fixed-bar’. Some candidates who clear the bar might still be turned down due to idea-level constraints.
I’m not sure to what extent both of these are operating simultaneously (e.g. a minimum bar + then matching), but if the latter is a meaningful factor, it seems to strengthen the case for tracking near-miss candidates across rounds rather than resetting the pool each time.