I agree with a lot of this post and I’m really glad you wrote it! I would be very excited to see readers with whom this post resonates apply for the Open Phil recruiting team (which I manage). I think our team’s work is extremely high-impact and we’ve often found it hard to hire great people onto it in the past.
One place where I slightly disagree with the post is on the value of past recruiting experience. Most of our team had ~no previous recruiting experience before joining the team, and that hasn’t stopped them being successful in the role, so it’s very far from a requirement. However, it does mean that past recruiting experience can be a valuable differentiator for some candidates. At the risk of speaking too specifically to my past self, anyone who has a background in recruiting (in any context) and is interested enough in high-impact work to read this comment should know that their application would be extremely welcome!
thanks. how do you know the recruiters have been “successful”. Open Phil would get lots of incredibly capable applicants for every job, how can you know the counterfactual effect vs. a more experienced recruiter?
Can you maybe describe why you think experience wasn’t important for this job? I know EA orgs do value experience less than others....
“Most of our team had ~no previous recruiting experience before joining the team”
Thanks for the questions! By ‘successful’ I just mean something like ‘our team is doing a good job of accomplishing its goals, and that’s down to the great work of individual team members’. I think we do well at making the right counterfactual hires based on our attempts to identify what qualities we’re looking for and to get signal on those qualities throughout our hiring process, but we can’t know that for sure; that feels like a pretty fundamental limitation of hiring work to me.
Re: experience, I think many of the core skills required to be a successful recruiter are transferable from other kinds of roles, and we’re happy to train new hires up on any gaps. Our job description highlights the kinds of skills I think are helpful, and I overall agree with Abraham’s discussion of this topic in the original post too. That said, part of what I was trying to communicate in my first comment was that more recruiting experience would be helpful on our current margin (not speaking for any other orgs)!
As a heads up, I probably won’t respond to further comments as I’m on leave for the next few weeks and don’t intend to be on the Forum much.
I agree with a lot of this post and I’m really glad you wrote it! I would be very excited to see readers with whom this post resonates apply for the Open Phil recruiting team (which I manage). I think our team’s work is extremely high-impact and we’ve often found it hard to hire great people onto it in the past.
One place where I slightly disagree with the post is on the value of past recruiting experience. Most of our team had ~no previous recruiting experience before joining the team, and that hasn’t stopped them being successful in the role, so it’s very far from a requirement. However, it does mean that past recruiting experience can be a valuable differentiator for some candidates. At the risk of speaking too specifically to my past self, anyone who has a background in recruiting (in any context) and is interested enough in high-impact work to read this comment should know that their application would be extremely welcome!
thanks. how do you know the recruiters have been “successful”. Open Phil would get lots of incredibly capable applicants for every job, how can you know the counterfactual effect vs. a more experienced recruiter?
Can you maybe describe why you think experience wasn’t important for this job? I know EA orgs do value experience less than others....
“Most of our team had ~no previous recruiting experience before joining the team”
Thanks for the questions! By ‘successful’ I just mean something like ‘our team is doing a good job of accomplishing its goals, and that’s down to the great work of individual team members’. I think we do well at making the right counterfactual hires based on our attempts to identify what qualities we’re looking for and to get signal on those qualities throughout our hiring process, but we can’t know that for sure; that feels like a pretty fundamental limitation of hiring work to me.
Re: experience, I think many of the core skills required to be a successful recruiter are transferable from other kinds of roles, and we’re happy to train new hires up on any gaps. Our job description highlights the kinds of skills I think are helpful, and I overall agree with Abraham’s discussion of this topic in the original post too. That said, part of what I was trying to communicate in my first comment was that more recruiting experience would be helpful on our current margin (not speaking for any other orgs)!
As a heads up, I probably won’t respond to further comments as I’m on leave for the next few weeks and don’t intend to be on the Forum much.