I often see EA orgs looking to hire people to do Z, where applicants don’t necessarily need experience doing Z to be successful.
E.g. instead of saying “must have minimum 4 years as an Operations Manager”, they say “we are hiring for an Operations Manager. But you don’t need experience as an Operations Manager, as long as you have competencies/skills (insert list) A—F.”
This reminds of when Bloomberg spent over $10M training a GPT-3.5 class AI on their own financial data, only to find that GPT-4 beat it on almost all finance tasks.
They thought proprietary data would perform better, but it turns out the largest models won (at the time at least).
I worry that saying “4 years of experience as Operations Manager” is less important than the “competencies A—F” we’ve identified, makes the same mistake.
You’re gambling on having found the secret sauce. But as usual the more targeted the intervention, the more likely it is to miss.
If someone claims to have competencies A-F required to be an operation manager, they should have some way of proving that they actually have competencies A-F. A great way for them to prove this is to have 4 years of experience as Operations Manager. In fact, I struggle to think of a better way to prove this, and obviously a person with experience is preferable to someone with no experience for all kind of reasons (they have encountered all the little errors, etc). As a bonus, somebody outside of your personal bubble has trusted this person.
EA should be relying on more subject matter experience, not less.
I often see EA orgs looking to hire people to do Z, where applicants don’t necessarily need experience doing Z to be successful.
E.g. instead of saying “must have minimum 4 years as an Operations Manager”, they say “we are hiring for an Operations Manager. But you don’t need experience as an Operations Manager, as long as you have competencies/skills (insert list) A—F.”
This reminds of when Bloomberg spent over $10M training a GPT-3.5 class AI on their own financial data, only to find that GPT-4 beat it on almost all finance tasks.
They thought proprietary data would perform better, but it turns out the largest models won (at the time at least).
I worry that saying “4 years of experience as Operations Manager” is less important than the “competencies A—F” we’ve identified, makes the same mistake.
You’re gambling on having found the secret sauce. But as usual the more targeted the intervention, the more likely it is to miss.
If someone claims to have competencies A-F required to be an operation manager, they should have some way of proving that they actually have competencies A-F. A great way for them to prove this is to have 4 years of experience as Operations Manager. In fact, I struggle to think of a better way to prove this, and obviously a person with experience is preferable to someone with no experience for all kind of reasons (they have encountered all the little errors, etc). As a bonus, somebody outside of your personal bubble has trusted this person.
EA should be relying on more subject matter experience, not less.