What was the prompt? Mine produced different studies. I’d rather not trade LLM outputs; suffice to say, the evidence is mixed.
3-5x costs?! That’s not just a bad hire. That’s a catastrophic hire!
I’m sure those calamity hires happen sometimes. But you’d only need to network-hire cheaply for 4-6 other roles for every disastrous case to break even on the cost. So unless the calamity hires are occurring more than 15-20% of the time, the savings would offset the outlier risk.
I would change my mind if it could be shown that network hiring increases the chance of a catastrophic result, not by some unknowable margin, but by enough to override its cheapness compared to open hiring.
Well I would also be interested in knowing what yours said, because I’ve never seen research of a good sample size that backs up network based hiring as outperforming hiring rounds. That’s why they exist and in almost every high performing company. How many of the greatest companies in the world do only network based hiring?
But I think you just have very strong priors on this and we are unlikely to agree.
The cost of a bad hire logically are significantly higher, it’s hard to fire people- it takes times from the organisation, it disrupts the team, outputs are poor and ultimately you have to do another hiring round to replace them.
IMHO you are weighting the experience of candidates over the cost to organisations here.
Ask for research on network vs open hiring and there’ll be studies in both directions. I don’t know, I imagine they do both. The context of a greatest company in the world is probably different to a lean EA org.
EA focuses very much on cost effectiveness as a central principle. I think hiring could be better at walking the talk in that regard.
We both have skin in the game here—me as a disenfranchised applicant and you as someone whose org relies on there being talent gaps to fill! Thank you for engaging in good faith.
I would just like to say, that if the movement pivoted towards network based hiring we would heavily benefit from this. So me arguing against is a genuine belief not coming from my own benefit.
I do agree with you that the talent density of the EA AR movement has increased in the last few years and there aren’t enough high impact roles to absorb all the talented people. Which is why we have shifted away from just promoting non profit roles to ETG, giving more broadly and policy work.
I just don’t think the solution is open hiring rounds.
And why we also continue to do the skill bottleneck survey every year despite working consistently with organizations to have more objective data on where they are struggling to find people and I do think talent density is a different problem than skill gaps.
Anyhow thanks for engaging and it’s an interesting post to read and the comments are great.
What was the prompt? Mine produced different studies. I’d rather not trade LLM outputs; suffice to say, the evidence is mixed.
3-5x costs?! That’s not just a bad hire. That’s a catastrophic hire!
I’m sure those calamity hires happen sometimes. But you’d only need to network-hire cheaply for 4-6 other roles for every disastrous case to break even on the cost. So unless the calamity hires are occurring more than 15-20% of the time, the savings would offset the outlier risk.
I would change my mind if it could be shown that network hiring increases the chance of a catastrophic result, not by some unknowable margin, but by enough to override its cheapness compared to open hiring.
Well I would also be interested in knowing what yours said, because I’ve never seen research of a good sample size that backs up network based hiring as outperforming hiring rounds. That’s why they exist and in almost every high performing company. How many of the greatest companies in the world do only network based hiring?
But I think you just have very strong priors on this and we are unlikely to agree.
The cost of a bad hire logically are significantly higher, it’s hard to fire people- it takes times from the organisation, it disrupts the team, outputs are poor and ultimately you have to do another hiring round to replace them.
IMHO you are weighting the experience of candidates over the cost to organisations here.
Ask for research on network vs open hiring and there’ll be studies in both directions. I don’t know, I imagine they do both. The context of a greatest company in the world is probably different to a lean EA org.
EA focuses very much on cost effectiveness as a central principle. I think hiring could be better at walking the talk in that regard.
We both have skin in the game here—me as a disenfranchised applicant and you as someone whose org relies on there being talent gaps to fill! Thank you for engaging in good faith.
I would just like to say, that if the movement pivoted towards network based hiring we would heavily benefit from this. So me arguing against is a genuine belief not coming from my own benefit.
I do agree with you that the talent density of the EA AR movement has increased in the last few years and there aren’t enough high impact roles to absorb all the talented people. Which is why we have shifted away from just promoting non profit roles to ETG, giving more broadly and policy work.
I just don’t think the solution is open hiring rounds.
And why we also continue to do the skill bottleneck survey every year despite working consistently with organizations to have more objective data on where they are struggling to find people and I do think talent density is a different problem than skill gaps.
Anyhow thanks for engaging and it’s an interesting post to read and the comments are great.