I share the negative emotional reaction to headhunting candidates from ostensibly allied organisations—it does inevitably feel like an adversarial move. Ultimately, though, I find it quite hard to justify this opposition intellectually.
The main effect of headhunting is to provide employees with information—e.g. that they seem like a good fit for this exciting role they might not have known about (or considered applying to) otherwise. I support people making their own employment decisions on the basis of the best possible information, and (in most cases) oppose hiding information from people because it might cause them to make decisions we don’t like.
If you phrase an opposition to headhunting as “don’t make our staff aware of opportunities they might freely decide to pursue over their current job”, I think it sounds a lot more dubious as an organisational philosophy for an ostensibly altruistic organisation—it strongly suggests that management don’t have their employees’ best interests at heart.
Thanks for the comment- I see where you are coming from. As noted in a previous reply, I think a lot has to do with how much the headhunter informs vs convinces. There are a lot of parallels with advertising. Do we think that advertising performs a positive social function? Well, it could if it simply provides information about a new product and allows consumers to make more informed choices. But also the advertiser has incentives to increase sales, so why would we trust them to be truthful and have everyone’s best interests at heart? Headhunters/recruiters have incentives to fill roles, so I don’t think we should assume that they are playing a neutral, information-providing role.
I don’t know nearly enough about headhunting to say anything definitive. But if we think they’re misleading—rather than informing—maybe the argument should be ‘EA orgs shouldn’t use headhunters’ for the reasons you laid out in these comments. It feels counter productive from the orgs side to trick someone into a job they wouldn’t have taken with full information (*especially* for a community trying to operate with integrity).
That seems like a distinct point from ‘EA orgs shouldn’t poach from one another’ (which is what it seemed like the post was about). In general, my prior is that norms should be the same for hiring the EA-employed and the non-EA-employed, whether that’s using headhunting services or not.
Yeah, this also seems right to me. My experiences with headhunters in the broader world have been pretty bad, and many of them seemed pretty shady, so I would definitely dock an EA org a lot of points if I saw them reach out to people with deceptive marketing.
I share the negative emotional reaction to headhunting candidates from ostensibly allied organisations—it does inevitably feel like an adversarial move. Ultimately, though, I find it quite hard to justify this opposition intellectually.
The main effect of headhunting is to provide employees with information—e.g. that they seem like a good fit for this exciting role they might not have known about (or considered applying to) otherwise. I support people making their own employment decisions on the basis of the best possible information, and (in most cases) oppose hiding information from people because it might cause them to make decisions we don’t like.
If you phrase an opposition to headhunting as “don’t make our staff aware of opportunities they might freely decide to pursue over their current job”, I think it sounds a lot more dubious as an organisational philosophy for an ostensibly altruistic organisation—it strongly suggests that management don’t have their employees’ best interests at heart.
Thanks for the comment- I see where you are coming from. As noted in a previous reply, I think a lot has to do with how much the headhunter informs vs convinces. There are a lot of parallels with advertising. Do we think that advertising performs a positive social function? Well, it could if it simply provides information about a new product and allows consumers to make more informed choices. But also the advertiser has incentives to increase sales, so why would we trust them to be truthful and have everyone’s best interests at heart? Headhunters/recruiters have incentives to fill roles, so I don’t think we should assume that they are playing a neutral, information-providing role.
I don’t know nearly enough about headhunting to say anything definitive. But if we think they’re misleading—rather than informing—maybe the argument should be ‘EA orgs shouldn’t use headhunters’ for the reasons you laid out in these comments. It feels counter productive from the orgs side to trick someone into a job they wouldn’t have taken with full information (*especially* for a community trying to operate with integrity).
That seems like a distinct point from ‘EA orgs shouldn’t poach from one another’ (which is what it seemed like the post was about). In general, my prior is that norms should be the same for hiring the EA-employed and the non-EA-employed, whether that’s using headhunting services or not.
Yeah, this also seems right to me. My experiences with headhunters in the broader world have been pretty bad, and many of them seemed pretty shady, so I would definitely dock an EA org a lot of points if I saw them reach out to people with deceptive marketing.