It sounds like you interpreted me as saying that rejecting resumes without feedback doesn’t make people sad. I’m not saying that—I agree that it makes people sad (although on a per-person basis it does make people much less sad than rejecting them without feedback during later stages, which is what those points were in support of—having accidentally rejected people without feedback at many different steps, I’m speaking from experience here).
However, my main point is that providing feedback on resume applications is much more costly to the organization, not that it’s less beneficial to the recipients. For example, someone might feel like they didn’t get a fair chance either way, but if they get concrete feedback they’re much more likely to argue with the org about it.
I’m not saying this means that most people don’t deserve feedback or something—just that when an org gets 100+ applicants for every position, they’re statistically going to have to deal with lots people who are in the 95th-plus percentile of “acting in ways that consume lots of time/attention when rejected,” and that can disincentivize them from engaging more than they have to.
I think part of our disagreement might be that I see Wave as being in a different situation relative to some other EA organizations. There are a lot of software engineer jobs out there, and I’m guessing most people who are rejected by Wave would be fairly happy at some other software engineer job.
By contrast, I could imagine that stories like the following happening fairly frequently with other EA jobs:
Sally discovers the 80K website and gets excited about effective altruism. She spends hours reading the site and planning her career.
Sally converges on a particular career path she is really excited about. She goes to graduate school to get a related degree, possibly paying significant opportunity cost in earnings etc.
After graduating, Sally realizes there are actually about 3-4 organizations doing EA work in her selected area, and of those only 2 are hiring. She applies to both, but never hears back, possibly due to factors like:
She didn’t do a great job of selling herself on her resume.
She’s not actually applying for the role her degree+resume best suit her for.
It so happens that a lot of other people reading the 80K website got excited about the same thing Sally did around the same time, and the role is unexpectedly competitive.
The organization has learned more about what they’re looking for in this role, and they no longer consider Sally’s degree to be as useful/relevant.
Her resume just falls through the cracks.
At this point, Sally’s only contact with the community so far is reading the 80K website and then not hearing back after putting significant effort into getting an EA career. Can we really blame her if she gives up on EA at this point, or at the very least starts thinking of herself as playing on “single player” mode?
My point here is that we should distinguish between “effort the candidate expended on your hiring process” and “effort the candidate expended to get a job at your org”. The former may be far bigger than the latter, but this isn’t necessarily visible.
The same visibility point applies to costs to the org—Sally may complain bitterly to her friends about how elitist the org is in their hiring / how elitist EA is in general, which might count as a cost.
Anyway, I think total cost for giving feedback to everyone is probably the wrong number here—really you should be looking at benefits relative to costs for an individual applicant.
I also think it’d be worth trying experiments like:
Ask candidates who want feedback to check a box that says “I promise not to complain or cause trouble if I don’t like the feedback”
Instead of saying “we can’t hire you because you don’t have X”, spend less time making sure you’re understanding the resume correctly, and more time asking questions like “it looks like your resume doesn’t have X, we were hoping to find someone with X for this role”. If they’ve got something to say in response to that, that’s evidence that they really want the job—and it might be worth letting them progress to the next stage as a way of validating your resume screen.
Interesting. It sounds like you’re saying that there are many EAs investing tons of time in doing things that are mostly only useful for getting particular roles at 1-2 orgs. I didn’t realize that.
In addition to the feedback thing, this seems like a generally very bad dynamic—for instance, in your example, regardless of whether she gets feedback, Sally has now more or less wasted years of graduate schooling.
It sounds like you’re saying that there are many EAs investing tons of time in doing things that are mostly only useful for getting particular roles at 1-2 orgs. I didn’t realize that.
I don’t know that. But it seems like a possibility. [EDIT: Sally’s story was inspired by cases I’m familiar with, although it’s not an exact match.] And even if it isn’t happening very much, it seems like we might want it to happen—we might prefer EAs branch out and become specialists in a diverse set of areas instead of the movement being an army of generalists.
It sounds like you interpreted me as saying that rejecting resumes without feedback doesn’t make people sad. I’m not saying that—I agree that it makes people sad (although on a per-person basis it does make people much less sad than rejecting them without feedback during later stages, which is what those points were in support of—having accidentally rejected people without feedback at many different steps, I’m speaking from experience here).
However, my main point is that providing feedback on resume applications is much more costly to the organization, not that it’s less beneficial to the recipients. For example, someone might feel like they didn’t get a fair chance either way, but if they get concrete feedback they’re much more likely to argue with the org about it.
I’m not saying this means that most people don’t deserve feedback or something—just that when an org gets 100+ applicants for every position, they’re statistically going to have to deal with lots people who are in the 95th-plus percentile of “acting in ways that consume lots of time/attention when rejected,” and that can disincentivize them from engaging more than they have to.
I think part of our disagreement might be that I see Wave as being in a different situation relative to some other EA organizations. There are a lot of software engineer jobs out there, and I’m guessing most people who are rejected by Wave would be fairly happy at some other software engineer job.
By contrast, I could imagine that stories like the following happening fairly frequently with other EA jobs:
Sally discovers the 80K website and gets excited about effective altruism. She spends hours reading the site and planning her career.
Sally converges on a particular career path she is really excited about. She goes to graduate school to get a related degree, possibly paying significant opportunity cost in earnings etc.
After graduating, Sally realizes there are actually about 3-4 organizations doing EA work in her selected area, and of those only 2 are hiring. She applies to both, but never hears back, possibly due to factors like:
She didn’t do a great job of selling herself on her resume.
She’s not actually applying for the role her degree+resume best suit her for.
It so happens that a lot of other people reading the 80K website got excited about the same thing Sally did around the same time, and the role is unexpectedly competitive.
The organization has learned more about what they’re looking for in this role, and they no longer consider Sally’s degree to be as useful/relevant.
Her resume just falls through the cracks.
At this point, Sally’s only contact with the community so far is reading the 80K website and then not hearing back after putting significant effort into getting an EA career. Can we really blame her if she gives up on EA at this point, or at the very least starts thinking of herself as playing on “single player” mode?
My point here is that we should distinguish between “effort the candidate expended on your hiring process” and “effort the candidate expended to get a job at your org”. The former may be far bigger than the latter, but this isn’t necessarily visible.
The same visibility point applies to costs to the org—Sally may complain bitterly to her friends about how elitist the org is in their hiring / how elitist EA is in general, which might count as a cost.
Anyway, I think total cost for giving feedback to everyone is probably the wrong number here—really you should be looking at benefits relative to costs for an individual applicant.
I also think it’d be worth trying experiments like:
Ask candidates who want feedback to check a box that says “I promise not to complain or cause trouble if I don’t like the feedback”
Instead of saying “we can’t hire you because you don’t have X”, spend less time making sure you’re understanding the resume correctly, and more time asking questions like “it looks like your resume doesn’t have X, we were hoping to find someone with X for this role”. If they’ve got something to say in response to that, that’s evidence that they really want the job—and it might be worth letting them progress to the next stage as a way of validating your resume screen.
Interesting. It sounds like you’re saying that there are many EAs investing tons of time in doing things that are mostly only useful for getting particular roles at 1-2 orgs. I didn’t realize that.
In addition to the feedback thing, this seems like a generally very bad dynamic—for instance, in your example, regardless of whether she gets feedback, Sally has now more or less wasted years of graduate schooling.
I don’t know that. But it seems like a possibility. [EDIT: Sally’s story was inspired by cases I’m familiar with, although it’s not an exact match.] And even if it isn’t happening very much, it seems like we might want it to happen—we might prefer EAs branch out and become specialists in a diverse set of areas instead of the movement being an army of generalists.