My apologies if this comment is somewhat naive, but wouldn’t it have been a more objective move to appoint an external headhunting company to supply a first group of candidates at least? This may also have brought in a more diverse group of candidates to select from, e.g. moral philosophers with management experience in a university or community setting who might not be part of the EA community (yet) but be sympathetic to it and who could be brought quickly up to speed on its issues.
Informally, I’ve heard from people at various EA orgs that using headhunters or recruiting firms generally hasn’t worked out in the past. I wasn’t told detailed information about why these experiences didn’t work well, but my vague impression is something like headhunters/recruiters didn’t understand important aspects of effective altruism, and thus lacked the ability to identify relevant criteria in potential candidates. While I do think there might be some value in using such services, my naïve assumption is that in the context of EA there are also many costs/challenges to doing so.
I think there’s some implicit assumption here that external recruiters are the default option that you need some reason to move away from, but I think standard advice is the opposite: you should not use external recruiters, unless you have some unusual circumstance.
E.g. even this Forbes article, which is essentially an ad for a recruiting firm, says “Hiring internally should be your first choice whenever you’re looking at your hiring plans.”
My apologies if this comment is somewhat naive, but wouldn’t it have been a more objective move to appoint an external headhunting company to supply a first group of candidates at least? This may also have brought in a more diverse group of candidates to select from, e.g. moral philosophers with management experience in a university or community setting who might not be part of the EA community (yet) but be sympathetic to it and who could be brought quickly up to speed on its issues.
Informally, I’ve heard from people at various EA orgs that using headhunters or recruiting firms generally hasn’t worked out in the past. I wasn’t told detailed information about why these experiences didn’t work well, but my vague impression is something like headhunters/recruiters didn’t understand important aspects of effective altruism, and thus lacked the ability to identify relevant criteria in potential candidates. While I do think there might be some value in using such services, my naïve assumption is that in the context of EA there are also many costs/challenges to doing so.
I think there’s some implicit assumption here that external recruiters are the default option that you need some reason to move away from, but I think standard advice is the opposite: you should not use external recruiters, unless you have some unusual circumstance.
E.g. even this Forbes article, which is essentially an ad for a recruiting firm, says “Hiring internally should be your first choice whenever you’re looking at your hiring plans.”