Thank you for the write-up. I have a question I would love to hear your (and other people’s) thoughts on. You said:
I should have hired more people, more quickly. And, had a slightly lower bar for hiring in terms of my confidence that someone would be a good fit for the work, with corresponding greater readiness to part ways if it wasn’t a good fit.
This is really interesting as goes against the general tone of advice that I hear that suggests that being cautious about hiring. That said I do feel at times that the EA community is perhaps more cautious and puts more effort into hiring than other places I have worked.
I wondered if you had any elaboration, such as: advise on how someone at an EA org can tell if they are being too cautious? When you felt you should have taken more risks? What things it is worth taking risks on and what things it is not worth taking risks on? How you plan to change wat you do going forward?
No worries if nothing to add but it would be helpful to hear (I am involved right now in hiring decisions at a few EA orgs).
So to start, that comment was quite specific to my team and situation, and I think historically we’ve been super cautious about hiring (my sense is, much moreso than the average EA org, which in turn is more cautious than the next-most-specific reference class org).
Among the most common and strongest pieces of advice I give grantees with inexperienced executive teams is to be careful about hiring (generally, more careful than I think they’d have been otherwise), and more broadly to recognize that differences in people’s skills and interests leads to huge differences in their ability to produce high-quality versions of various relevant outputs. Often I find that new founders underestimate those differences and so e.g. underestimate how much a given product might decline in quality when handed from one staff member to a new one.
They’ll say things like “oh, to learn [the answer to complicated question X] we’ll have [random-seeming new person] research [question X]” in a way that feels totally insensitive to the fact that the question is difficult to answer, that it’d take even a skilled researcher in the relevant domain a lot of time and trouble, that they have no real plan to train the new person or evidence the new person is unusually gifted at the relevant kind of research, etc., and I think that dynamic is upstream of a lot of project failures I see. I.e. I think a lot of people have a kind of magical/non-gears-level view of hiring, where they sort of equate an activity being someone’s job with that activity being carried out adequately and in a timely fashion, which seems like a real bad assumption with a lot of the projects in EA-land.
But yeah, I think we were too cautious nonetheless.
Cases where hiring more aggressively seems relatively better:
The upside is large (an important thing is bottlenecked on person-power, and that bottleneck is otherwise excessively challenging to overcome)
The work you need done is:
Well scoped,
Easy to evaluate
Something people train in effectively outside your org
Trainable
Has short feedback loops
You are
An experienced manager
Proficient with the work in question
Emotionally ready to fire an employee if that seems best
This is taking place in a country where it’s legally and culturally easier to fire people
Your team culture and morale is such that a difficult few months with someone who isn’t working out is unlikely to deal permanent damage.
Hi Claire,
Thank you for the write-up. I have a question I would love to hear your (and other people’s) thoughts on. You said:
This is really interesting as goes against the general tone of advice that I hear that suggests that being cautious about hiring. That said I do feel at times that the EA community is perhaps more cautious and puts more effort into hiring than other places I have worked.
I wondered if you had any elaboration, such as: advise on how someone at an EA org can tell if they are being too cautious? When you felt you should have taken more risks? What things it is worth taking risks on and what things it is not worth taking risks on? How you plan to change wat you do going forward?
No worries if nothing to add but it would be helpful to hear (I am involved right now in hiring decisions at a few EA orgs).
So to start, that comment was quite specific to my team and situation, and I think historically we’ve been super cautious about hiring (my sense is, much moreso than the average EA org, which in turn is more cautious than the next-most-specific reference class org).
Among the most common and strongest pieces of advice I give grantees with inexperienced executive teams is to be careful about hiring (generally, more careful than I think they’d have been otherwise), and more broadly to recognize that differences in people’s skills and interests leads to huge differences in their ability to produce high-quality versions of various relevant outputs. Often I find that new founders underestimate those differences and so e.g. underestimate how much a given product might decline in quality when handed from one staff member to a new one.
They’ll say things like “oh, to learn [the answer to complicated question X] we’ll have [random-seeming new person] research [question X]” in a way that feels totally insensitive to the fact that the question is difficult to answer, that it’d take even a skilled researcher in the relevant domain a lot of time and trouble, that they have no real plan to train the new person or evidence the new person is unusually gifted at the relevant kind of research, etc., and I think that dynamic is upstream of a lot of project failures I see. I.e. I think a lot of people have a kind of magical/non-gears-level view of hiring, where they sort of equate an activity being someone’s job with that activity being carried out adequately and in a timely fashion, which seems like a real bad assumption with a lot of the projects in EA-land.
But yeah, I think we were too cautious nonetheless.
Cases where hiring more aggressively seems relatively better:
The upside is large (an important thing is bottlenecked on person-power, and that bottleneck is otherwise excessively challenging to overcome)
The work you need done is:
Well scoped,
Easy to evaluate
Something people train in effectively outside your org
Trainable
Has short feedback loops
You are
An experienced manager
Proficient with the work in question
Emotionally ready to fire an employee if that seems best
This is taking place in a country where it’s legally and culturally easier to fire people
Your team culture and morale is such that a difficult few months with someone who isn’t working out is unlikely to deal permanent damage.
Really helpful. Good to get this broader context. Thank you!!