Thank you for sharing your perspective and I’m sorry this has been frustrating for you and people you know. I deeply appreciate your commitment and perseverance.
I hope to share you a bit of perspective from me as a hiring manager on the other side of things:
Why aren’t orgs leaning harder on shared talent pools (e.g. HIP’s database) to bypass public rounds? HIP is currently running an open search.
It’s very difficult to run an open search for all conceivable jobs and have the best fit for all of them. And even if you do have a list of the top candidates for everything, it’s still hard to sort and filter through that list without more screening. This makes HIP a valuable supplement but not a replacement.
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I also think it would be worth considering how to provide some sort of job security/benefit for proven commitment within the movement
‘The movement’ is just the mix of all the people and orgs doing their own thing. Individual orgs themselves should be responsible for job security and rewarding commitment—the movement itself unfortunately isn’t an entity that is capable of doing that.
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I know one lady who worked at a top EA org for eight years; she’s now struggling to find her next position within the movement, competing with new applicants! That seems like a waste of career capital.
Hopefully her eight years gives her a benefit against other applicants! That is, the career capital hasn’t been ‘wasted’ at all. But it still makes sense to view her against other applicants who may have other skills needed for the role—being good at one role doesn’t make you a perfect automatic fit for another role.
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Moreover, I would avoid the expensive undertaking of a full hiring round until my professional networks had been exhausted. After all, if you’re in my network to begin with, you probably did something meritorious to get there.
While personal networks are a great place to source talent they’re far from perfect—in particular while personal networks are created by merit they are also formed by bias and preferencing ‘people like us’. A ‘full hiring round’ is thus more meritocratic—anyone can apply, you don’t need to figure out how to get into the right person’s network first.
Hi Peter, I see that you’re hiring right now (slicks hair back, clears throat). Thanks for engaging!
Addressing your points in order:
I agree that all conceivable jobs is indeed a broad category. By contrast, the vast majority of EA jobs are soft-skills based and, in my personal experience, rather straightforward. They follow standard business functions such as marketing, fundraising/growth, etc. I think most applicants can do the job well enough that it makes full hiring rounds hard to justify from an effectiveness standpoint. I don’t think it takes a very special someone, a needle in the haystack, to do a mid-senior comms role with decent competence. If I were hiring for such a role, I might get 10-15 leads from the HIP directory who are actively searching, interview a handful of those and then extend an offer. I don’t think the majority of roles require more than that or that the benefit of doing more than that can be balanced against the cost.
EA isn’t one big employer, true. However, it and the orgs under its banner are based on a set of principles of which cost effectiveness is foundational. Central EA orgs also play a part in influencing the internal policies of such orgs, including hiring. I suppose the hiring utopia/most cost-effective outcome would be to get good, committed people in high impact roles and have them stay at their orgs for decades so that you never need to hire again. In pursuit of that cost effective ideal, hirers should put more weight on proven commitment to the movement.
Hopefully yes, but it seems like it’s not benefitting her at all. You’re right, it doesn’t prove automatic fit—but again, I don’t think many roles are in need of a special matrix of fit-forming factors. Why not go to the opposite end and spend even more on hiring rounds in pursuit of ever-better fit? Has anyone benchmarked output quality vs. search length?
I said professional networks, not personal. I’m not advocating for pure nepotism. But if there’s a person you know of who’s, for example, considered to be very competent by people you trust the judgement of, made an effort to put themselves in the right places (HIP Directory, EAG Global, etc), in possession of relevant experience, and so on and on… why go out of your way to run a full hiring round? Is it cost effective to do so?
Thank you for sharing your perspective and I’m sorry this has been frustrating for you and people you know. I deeply appreciate your commitment and perseverance.
I hope to share you a bit of perspective from me as a hiring manager on the other side of things:
It’s very difficult to run an open search for all conceivable jobs and have the best fit for all of them. And even if you do have a list of the top candidates for everything, it’s still hard to sort and filter through that list without more screening. This makes HIP a valuable supplement but not a replacement.
~
‘The movement’ is just the mix of all the people and orgs doing their own thing. Individual orgs themselves should be responsible for job security and rewarding commitment—the movement itself unfortunately isn’t an entity that is capable of doing that.
~
Hopefully her eight years gives her a benefit against other applicants! That is, the career capital hasn’t been ‘wasted’ at all. But it still makes sense to view her against other applicants who may have other skills needed for the role—being good at one role doesn’t make you a perfect automatic fit for another role.
~
While personal networks are a great place to source talent they’re far from perfect—in particular while personal networks are created by merit they are also formed by bias and preferencing ‘people like us’. A ‘full hiring round’ is thus more meritocratic—anyone can apply, you don’t need to figure out how to get into the right person’s network first.
~
You might like this article: Don’t be bycatch.
Hi Peter, I see that you’re hiring right now (slicks hair back, clears throat). Thanks for engaging!
Addressing your points in order:
I agree that all conceivable jobs is indeed a broad category. By contrast, the vast majority of EA jobs are soft-skills based and, in my personal experience, rather straightforward. They follow standard business functions such as marketing, fundraising/growth, etc. I think most applicants can do the job well enough that it makes full hiring rounds hard to justify from an effectiveness standpoint. I don’t think it takes a very special someone, a needle in the haystack, to do a mid-senior comms role with decent competence. If I were hiring for such a role, I might get 10-15 leads from the HIP directory who are actively searching, interview a handful of those and then extend an offer. I don’t think the majority of roles require more than that or that the benefit of doing more than that can be balanced against the cost.
EA isn’t one big employer, true. However, it and the orgs under its banner are based on a set of principles of which cost effectiveness is foundational. Central EA orgs also play a part in influencing the internal policies of such orgs, including hiring. I suppose the hiring utopia/most cost-effective outcome would be to get good, committed people in high impact roles and have them stay at their orgs for decades so that you never need to hire again. In pursuit of that cost effective ideal, hirers should put more weight on proven commitment to the movement.
Hopefully yes, but it seems like it’s not benefitting her at all. You’re right, it doesn’t prove automatic fit—but again, I don’t think many roles are in need of a special matrix of fit-forming factors. Why not go to the opposite end and spend even more on hiring rounds in pursuit of ever-better fit? Has anyone benchmarked output quality vs. search length?
I said professional networks, not personal. I’m not advocating for pure nepotism. But if there’s a person you know of who’s, for example, considered to be very competent by people you trust the judgement of, made an effort to put themselves in the right places (HIP Directory, EAG Global, etc), in possession of relevant experience, and so on and on… why go out of your way to run a full hiring round? Is it cost effective to do so?
Thanks for sharing the article!