Great article. Identifying the problem is half the solution. You have provided one provocative answer, which challenges us to either agree with you or propose a better solution!
Your description mirrors my experience in looking to move into this area (AI Safety / Governance) and talking to others wanting to move into this area. There is so much goodwill from organisations and from individuals, but my feeling is that they are just overwhelmed—by the extent of the work needed, by the number of applications for each role, by the logistics and the funding challenges. Even if the money is “available”, it requires quite a lot of investigation and paperwork to actually get it, which takes away a valuable resource.
This week in the BlueDot AI Safety/Governance course, the topic was “Career Advice”. People spoke of applying for roles and discovering that there were more than 100 (even more than 500) applicants for individual roles in some cases. Which then means organisations with limited resources spend a lot of these resources on the hiring process.
And yet, you can’t just take and organisation and double the work-force in a month and expect it to maintain the same quality and culture that has made it so valuable in the first place. But at the same time, one of the lessons I’ve been learning is that organisations who want to make an impact often need a lot of time to build credibility. You can do great work, but if decision-makers have never heard of you, it may not be very impactful.
I know that there are organisations (e.g. Rethink Priorities) who are actively looking for potential founders. The problem is that being a founder requires a quite specific skill-set, commitment and energy-level.
I think that an interesting, alternative way to address this would mirror what tends to happen in the corporate world if rapid expansion is needed. Let’s say you have a company of 100 and you realise you want to become 200 by the end of the year. Here’s what you might do:
Identify the very most critical work that you’re currently doing, and make sure the right people continue to work on that. (first and foremost, don’t make things worse!)
With that caveat, think about who from your organisation would have the skillset to recruit, manage, coach, train, mentor new people. Maybe pick a team of 20, including a range of levels, but, if anything, tending towards more senior.
Treat the growth like a project, with stages—planning, sourcing funding, strategy, recruitment, … This “project” will be the full-time work of these people for the next few years.
Create a clear long-term vision for how the new organisation will look in a few years, and recruit towards that. (Don’t just recruit 100 new-graduates and expect to have a functional organisation).
Maybe the first round of recruiting might be 10-20 relatively senior people who will become part of the leadership team and who will take over some of the work of recruiting. In this first phase, each new person will have an experience mentor who has worked for the organisation for some time, and after 3-6 months, these new people will be in a position to coach and mentor new-hires themselves.
Do not fully “merge” the new and old organisations until you are very confident that it will work well. At the same time, ensure that the new organisation has all the benefits of the existing one, including access to people for networking, advice, contacts, name-recognition.
Obviously this is a vastly oversimplified scheme. But the point is: if you can make this work, instead of a new organisation which may struggle for recognition, for resources, for purpose, .., you can vastly increase the potential of an already existing, successful organisation which is currently resource-limited. As you say, the talent is there, ready to work. The problems are there, ready to be solved.
Great article. Identifying the problem is half the solution. You have provided one provocative answer, which challenges us to either agree with you or propose a better solution!
Your description mirrors my experience in looking to move into this area (AI Safety / Governance) and talking to others wanting to move into this area. There is so much goodwill from organisations and from individuals, but my feeling is that they are just overwhelmed—by the extent of the work needed, by the number of applications for each role, by the logistics and the funding challenges. Even if the money is “available”, it requires quite a lot of investigation and paperwork to actually get it, which takes away a valuable resource.
This week in the BlueDot AI Safety/Governance course, the topic was “Career Advice”. People spoke of applying for roles and discovering that there were more than 100 (even more than 500) applicants for individual roles in some cases. Which then means organisations with limited resources spend a lot of these resources on the hiring process.
And yet, you can’t just take and organisation and double the work-force in a month and expect it to maintain the same quality and culture that has made it so valuable in the first place. But at the same time, one of the lessons I’ve been learning is that organisations who want to make an impact often need a lot of time to build credibility. You can do great work, but if decision-makers have never heard of you, it may not be very impactful.
I know that there are organisations (e.g. Rethink Priorities) who are actively looking for potential founders. The problem is that being a founder requires a quite specific skill-set, commitment and energy-level.
I think that an interesting, alternative way to address this would mirror what tends to happen in the corporate world if rapid expansion is needed. Let’s say you have a company of 100 and you realise you want to become 200 by the end of the year. Here’s what you might do:
Identify the very most critical work that you’re currently doing, and make sure the right people continue to work on that. (first and foremost, don’t make things worse!)
With that caveat, think about who from your organisation would have the skillset to recruit, manage, coach, train, mentor new people. Maybe pick a team of 20, including a range of levels, but, if anything, tending towards more senior.
Treat the growth like a project, with stages—planning, sourcing funding, strategy, recruitment, … This “project” will be the full-time work of these people for the next few years.
Create a clear long-term vision for how the new organisation will look in a few years, and recruit towards that. (Don’t just recruit 100 new-graduates and expect to have a functional organisation).
Maybe the first round of recruiting might be 10-20 relatively senior people who will become part of the leadership team and who will take over some of the work of recruiting. In this first phase, each new person will have an experience mentor who has worked for the organisation for some time, and after 3-6 months, these new people will be in a position to coach and mentor new-hires themselves.
Do not fully “merge” the new and old organisations until you are very confident that it will work well. At the same time, ensure that the new organisation has all the benefits of the existing one, including access to people for networking, advice, contacts, name-recognition.
Obviously this is a vastly oversimplified scheme. But the point is: if you can make this work, instead of a new organisation which may struggle for recognition, for resources, for purpose, .., you can vastly increase the potential of an already existing, successful organisation which is currently resource-limited. As you say, the talent is there, ready to work. The problems are there, ready to be solved.