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.
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.