This 80,000 Hours post touches on the question. It concludes: “So, among charity managers and fundraisers, it would be normal for a good one to be about twice as good as an average one, and many, many times better than a bad one. Being 10% better than your replacement at the top of a charity, therefore, could be quite achievable. And very high impact.”
Good question, just from talking to staff of orgs in the EA community who’ve actually been involved in hiring. It might have been mentioned in a talk by 80k at EA Global as well. Can someone confirm?
Again, from talking to people at EA orgs my impression is that it’s also pretty common that someone gets hired because they turn out to be a good fit, but the counterfactual is that no-one would’ve been hired at all. E.g. when volunteers get hired full-time without there being an official job posting.
If you mean “you should consider the counterfactual when deciding whether to work at an organisation” then that’s definitely true.
The evidence for the best candidates being much better than the next best is anecdotal, but many people hiring at EA orgs feel like this. Indeed, it doesn’t seem uncommon for positions to go unfilled because they didn’t find anyone who’s a good enough fit.
Could you elaborate on why you believe this?
This 80,000 Hours post touches on the question. It concludes: “So, among charity managers and fundraisers, it would be normal for a good one to be about twice as good as an average one, and many, many times better than a bad one. Being 10% better than your replacement at the top of a charity, therefore, could be quite achievable. And very high impact.”
Good question, just from talking to staff of orgs in the EA community who’ve actually been involved in hiring. It might have been mentioned in a talk by 80k at EA Global as well. Can someone confirm?
Again, from talking to people at EA orgs my impression is that it’s also pretty common that someone gets hired because they turn out to be a good fit, but the counterfactual is that no-one would’ve been hired at all. E.g. when volunteers get hired full-time without there being an official job posting.
It depends what exactly is meant by “the replaceability argument”. If you mean the argument that because someone else would take the job otherwise, working in a nonprofit typically has very little impact, I think that’s really not obvious. There’s some elaboration here: https://80000hours.org/2015/07/replaceability-isnt-as-important-as-you-might-think-or-weve-suggested/
If you mean “you should consider the counterfactual when deciding whether to work at an organisation” then that’s definitely true.
The evidence for the best candidates being much better than the next best is anecdotal, but many people hiring at EA orgs feel like this. Indeed, it doesn’t seem uncommon for positions to go unfilled because they didn’t find anyone who’s a good enough fit.