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I think this really depends on the types of roles you’re looking for. Project management or operations in industry and then at an EA org or EA-recommended org seems like a good transition.
Is this true in software or finance? Also, it isn’t just bonuses, you get promotions and pay increases.
Kudos to 80K for both asking and publishing this. I think I literally agree with every single one of these (quite strongly with most). In particular, the hiring practices criticism—I think there was a tendency especially with early EA orgs to hire for EAness first and competence/experience second, and that this has led to a sort of hiring practice lock in where they value the characteristics if not to the same degree then with a greater bias than a lean efficiency-minded org should have.
A related concern is overinterviewing—I read somewhere (unfortunately I can’t remember the source) the claim that the longer and more thorough your interview process, the more you select for people with the willingness and lack of competition for their time to go through all those steps.
This (if I’m right) would have the quadruple effect of wasting EAs’ times, which you’d hope would be counterfactually valuable, wasting the organisations’ times, ditto, potentially reducing the fidelity of the hiring practice, and of increasing the aforementioned bias towards willingness.
I’d be surprised if Open Philanthropy routinely lost good candidates to the length of their hiring process; if this happened, I don’t think it came up in their analysis of their biggest (?) hiring round.
(I do think orgs should be thinking carefully about all the stages of their interview processes and looking for good tradeoffs between time and information on candidates. Open Phil certainly does this already, but I’m not sure about other orgs.)
Empirically, the single hiring process I’ve run for an EA org didn’t lose anyone; every candidate I asked to schedule an interview did so, and every candidate who got through to the second-round work test completed it.
I think I may have wasted candidates’ time in the first round by assigning an editing task that was too long, but the length of that initial test was in line with other industries’ initial requirements, and I hope that I “gave back” some EA time by not requiring a formal cover letter, accepting LinkedIn in lieu of resumes, etc.
I’m not sure how public the hiring methodology is, but if it’s fully public then I’d expect the candidates to be ‘lost’ before the point of sending in a CV.
If it’s less public that would be less likely, though perhaps the best candidates (assuming they consider applying for jobs at all, and aren’t always just headhunted) would only apply to jobs that had a transparent methodology that revealed a short hiring process.
80k ought to frame this as “room for improvement” or something along those lines instead of “flaws.” This is part of being media savvy.
I agree with MichaelA’s note about “room for improvement” sounding sanitized and corporate (in a context where an organization is describing itself or its own movement). “We have some room for improvement, and we’re working on it” is boilerplate stuff that any organization could write; “we have some flaws and we want to fix them” doesn’t give me the same “generic” feeling.
That seems plausible, and I don’t know if I disagree. But I think a core EA org itself naming this post as being about “flaws” may more clearly signal genuine self-awareness and eagerness to engage with criticism and adapt in response to it. And I think those things are key virtues of EA and key parts of the “EA brand”, so highlighting them could be quite media savvy.
In contrast, “room for improvement” could sound a bit more like a sanitised/hollow corporate version of that. Perhaps.