In our latest round, we had more than 20 people who met our bar for ‘would be a values-aligned, valuable Board member’. Also, some of them were so impressive that we wouldn’t have approached them directly, believing that they would be unlikely to accept.
How many of these 20 people were people you already knew? I think for us at RP doing open board recruitment, the key thing was finding a bunch of people that we had no idea to ask and never would’ve invited.
Somewhat related question for both of you—what was your strategy, if any, for announcing/sharing your open board search so that strong applicants outside your usual networks would see it and apply?
I think a common sticking point for hiring and search processes of all kinds is that it can be difficult to get the word out beyond the most obvious places, but still keep it targeted enough to get strong applicants, and I’m curious if you encountered this problem or have any generalizable suggestions for solving it.
Great question. Our two main sources were targeted messages to potential candidates using LinkedIn searches; and 80k, which has such a big reach that it bought in a lot of people who wouldn’t consider themselves ‘part of EA’ (obviously you could argue that they are if they are on 80k’s newsletter, but I think that is a low bar).
We are also a bit unusual in having a Board almost entirely composed of people who are ‘EA adjacent but not core EA’, and so that helped to spread the word to people within their networks but still able to offer an outside view.
How many of these 20 people were people you already knew? I think for us at RP doing open board recruitment, the key thing was finding a bunch of people that we had no idea to ask and never would’ve invited.
Somewhat related question for both of you—what was your strategy, if any, for announcing/sharing your open board search so that strong applicants outside your usual networks would see it and apply?
I think a common sticking point for hiring and search processes of all kinds is that it can be difficult to get the word out beyond the most obvious places, but still keep it targeted enough to get strong applicants, and I’m curious if you encountered this problem or have any generalizable suggestions for solving it.
Great question. Our two main sources were targeted messages to potential candidates using LinkedIn searches; and 80k, which has such a big reach that it bought in a lot of people who wouldn’t consider themselves ‘part of EA’ (obviously you could argue that they are if they are on 80k’s newsletter, but I think that is a low bar).
We are also a bit unusual in having a Board almost entirely composed of people who are ‘EA adjacent but not core EA’, and so that helped to spread the word to people within their networks but still able to offer an outside view.
I think two