1. Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I meant the cost of the 160 hours of staff time. Was that 160 hours total across the team, or 160 hours per person involved? Either way, do you have a rough estimate of the monetary value of that time?
2. If the outreach/referrals bucket produced the two strongest candidates but cannot be decomposed further, then it seems hard to know which part of the process generated the most value. It also makes it hard to tell whether a closed or semi-closed round would have been cheaper and more efficient in this case.
3. From your description, I’d imagine that skills had already been assessed before the final interview. I’m curious what, specifically, was missing among the final interviewees who did not meet the bar. Was the final interview surfacing new disqualifying information, or were they strong and hireable candidates facing a limited number of positions?
4. On retention, I’m surprised that two of the three hires staying one year would already count as a great success. Given the time invested by the team, and by many candidates, I would have thought the process would need to produce longer-term retention of exceptional talent. One year seems like a low bar for such a high bar, especially if you then have to run a similar round again.
To be upfront, I am sceptical that typical EA hiring processes are a judicious use of donor money (or candidate time). I may be wrong, but that is why I’m interested in the numbers here. If there is a more efficient way to hire, one should try to find it rather than defaulting to process templates from other organisations.
Transparent write-ups like this are valuable because they let us examine the trade-offs directly. My underlying question is whether an organisation could get most of the value by starting with a much smaller pool: top referrals, strong previous finalists, or otherwise directly sourced candidates, before running a large open process.
1. Money Spent: As I said, I was the only one involved in the process and I have a low salary (and a high number of hours), so it cost the charity €1,500. But the value of my time is way higher (5–10x).
3. What makes the break at interview: It’s value alignment, real motivation toward effective generosity principles, and a mindset oriented toward results that make a difference. If you request access to the questions, you will have a better sense.
4. Open vs closed: My intuition is that finding the real best person has tremendous value, and when these people work even for one year, they can get you so much more done. My organisation was constrained in terms of ideas and my network pool was very limited. Right now the limiting factor is my personal time, but actually much more so the generation of new ideas and ways to fundraise more money. It’s that I can’t easily spend money to buy myself more time, so I need to hire people.
Disclaimer: rough BOTEC coming. In my case, I think the value created by the people I hire versus the best people from the direct referral pool (I don’t have the total number of applicants, but I’m thinking of the people who reached the 3rd round) will be twice as impactful. Let’s say very conservatively that the value of hired people’s time is 1⁄4 of my time (therefore the other pool would be 1⁄8 of mine). Two people for one year = 4,000h. The open process took me 160h (120h more than a closed one). So the cost of 120h would generate 500h without additional costs.
I think in plenty of other contexts, depending on the questions I put at the beginning, it will not be valuable to do an open round. Plus, as I said, for Mieux Donner it also has communication value. At foundation events, different people heard about Mieux Donner and effective giving through the communication of the process.
For example, if next year I want someone capable of doing detailed research on niche effective altruism subjects, I will not do an open round. It won’t be worth my time, because the people who can do the job well are probably already in my network.
Your BOTEC seems to depend on the assumption that the people hired through the open process will be roughly twice as impactful as the best people available through a closed process. That seems like a big uncertainty, but I appreciate it was a rough sketch.
If the open process produced people who are 2x as impactful, then yes, 120 additional hours looks very worthwhile. But if the difference is much smaller, or if a semi-closed process would have brought in the same people (which is why I wanted to know whether the two you mentioned were found via personal outreach/sourcing), then the case becomes less clear.
To run such a round for communication or marketing/SEO value is a novel approach, but isn’t without cost in terms of the sheer numbers of people spending time applying.
I wouldn’t say that open hiring should never be used, but that orgs should stop defaulting to elaborate processes when targeted hiring may be more efficient. I agree with your final point that an open round may not be worth it in some cases.
Hi Romain, thanks for engaging!
1. Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I meant the cost of the 160 hours of staff time. Was that 160 hours total across the team, or 160 hours per person involved? Either way, do you have a rough estimate of the monetary value of that time?
2. If the outreach/referrals bucket produced the two strongest candidates but cannot be decomposed further, then it seems hard to know which part of the process generated the most value. It also makes it hard to tell whether a closed or semi-closed round would have been cheaper and more efficient in this case.
3. From your description, I’d imagine that skills had already been assessed before the final interview. I’m curious what, specifically, was missing among the final interviewees who did not meet the bar. Was the final interview surfacing new disqualifying information, or were they strong and hireable candidates facing a limited number of positions?
4. On retention, I’m surprised that two of the three hires staying one year would already count as a great success. Given the time invested by the team, and by many candidates, I would have thought the process would need to produce longer-term retention of exceptional talent. One year seems like a low bar for such a high bar, especially if you then have to run a similar round again.
To be upfront, I am sceptical that typical EA hiring processes are a judicious use of donor money (or candidate time). I may be wrong, but that is why I’m interested in the numbers here. If there is a more efficient way to hire, one should try to find it rather than defaulting to process templates from other organisations.
Transparent write-ups like this are valuable because they let us examine the trade-offs directly. My underlying question is whether an organisation could get most of the value by starting with a much smaller pool: top referrals, strong previous finalists, or otherwise directly sourced candidates, before running a large open process.
1. Money Spent: As I said, I was the only one involved in the process and I have a low salary (and a high number of hours), so it cost the charity €1,500. But the value of my time is way higher (5–10x).
3. What makes the break at interview: It’s value alignment, real motivation toward effective generosity principles, and a mindset oriented toward results that make a difference. If you request access to the questions, you will have a better sense.
4. Open vs closed: My intuition is that finding the real best person has tremendous value, and when these people work even for one year, they can get you so much more done. My organisation was constrained in terms of ideas and my network pool was very limited. Right now the limiting factor is my personal time, but actually much more so the generation of new ideas and ways to fundraise more money. It’s that I can’t easily spend money to buy myself more time, so I need to hire people.
Disclaimer: rough BOTEC coming. In my case, I think the value created by the people I hire versus the best people from the direct referral pool (I don’t have the total number of applicants, but I’m thinking of the people who reached the 3rd round) will be twice as impactful. Let’s say very conservatively that the value of hired people’s time is 1⁄4 of my time (therefore the other pool would be 1⁄8 of mine). Two people for one year = 4,000h. The open process took me 160h (120h more than a closed one). So the cost of 120h would generate 500h without additional costs.
I think in plenty of other contexts, depending on the questions I put at the beginning, it will not be valuable to do an open round. Plus, as I said, for Mieux Donner it also has communication value. At foundation events, different people heard about Mieux Donner and effective giving through the communication of the process.
For example, if next year I want someone capable of doing detailed research on niche effective altruism subjects, I will not do an open round. It won’t be worth my time, because the people who can do the job well are probably already in my network.
Thanks, this is helpful and clarifies the crux.
Your BOTEC seems to depend on the assumption that the people hired through the open process will be roughly twice as impactful as the best people available through a closed process. That seems like a big uncertainty, but I appreciate it was a rough sketch.
If the open process produced people who are 2x as impactful, then yes, 120 additional hours looks very worthwhile. But if the difference is much smaller, or if a semi-closed process would have brought in the same people (which is why I wanted to know whether the two you mentioned were found via personal outreach/sourcing), then the case becomes less clear.
To run such a round for communication or marketing/SEO value is a novel approach, but isn’t without cost in terms of the sheer numbers of people spending time applying.
I wouldn’t say that open hiring should never be used, but that orgs should stop defaulting to elaborate processes when targeted hiring may be more efficient. I agree with your final point that an open round may not be worth it in some cases.
Anyway, thanks again for writing this up.