make several excellent hires [...] major focus next year [2021].
Great to see you expanding, especially on the groups team!
How do you plan to hire people—public vacancies or private offers?
I’m personally in favor of public vacancies as you reach more people and might find better applicants, and also because it makes the whole process more transparent and fair. I feel like EA employers currently often offer jobs privately to people in their network, which makes it seem like knowing the right people is more important than having the best skills. Consequently, people interested in EA might feel like they need to focus more on networking and being visible instead of actual work (also if that’s not actually the case).
On the other hand, public hiring processes cost time which may not be worth it, and there might be other downsides I’m not yet aware of. Curious about your thoughts on this (if you find it worth your time to elaborate, no worries if you have more important things to do!)
PS: Just to be clear, I don’t mean to criticize any previous hires—glad that Huw, Sara & Aadil joined your team!
We plan to do most hiring through public vacancies, but we will make occasional exceptions when we think we’re very likely to be aware of the top candidates.
In the first case we wanted to hire someone who had experience leading a successful university group, and since we work closely with many group leaders we felt like we had a good enough sense of the talent pool to do a closed round (where we invited a small number of candidates to do work trials, interviews etc.) We might do this sort of thing again.
We brought on Sara and Aadil through the same hiring round, for an executive assistant position. Longview Philanthropy and 80,000 Hours had recently advertised a public position for an operations/executive assistant role. With the help of those organizations and their applicants, we were able to cut out some of the early advertisement/screening steps, and focus on some of their top candidates. I think this saved us a fair amount of time without compromising much on accessibility/fairness. We might do similar things in the future.
But I acknowledge the costs you share, and we plan to normally invite public applications (as for this new contractor role, and for a finance/data role that we plan to post soon).
Happy to hear that you generally prefer public vacancies too. In my impression, this often has not been the case for EA orgs in the past (and the people who upvoted my comment might feel similar), so it’s nice to see you publicly write in favor of that.
It makes sense that you make those occasional exceptions for specific cases and I agree that they seem worth it to save time as long as it does not compromise too much on accessibility and fairness.
Great to see you expanding, especially on the groups team!
How do you plan to hire people—public vacancies or private offers?
I’m personally in favor of public vacancies as you reach more people and might find better applicants, and also because it makes the whole process more transparent and fair. I feel like EA employers currently often offer jobs privately to people in their network, which makes it seem like knowing the right people is more important than having the best skills. Consequently, people interested in EA might feel like they need to focus more on networking and being visible instead of actual work (also if that’s not actually the case).
On the other hand, public hiring processes cost time which may not be worth it, and there might be other downsides I’m not yet aware of. Curious about your thoughts on this (if you find it worth your time to elaborate, no worries if you have more important things to do!)
PS: Just to be clear, I don’t mean to criticize any previous hires—glad that Huw, Sara & Aadil joined your team!
We plan to do most hiring through public vacancies, but we will make occasional exceptions when we think we’re very likely to be aware of the top candidates.
In the first case we wanted to hire someone who had experience leading a successful university group, and since we work closely with many group leaders we felt like we had a good enough sense of the talent pool to do a closed round (where we invited a small number of candidates to do work trials, interviews etc.) We might do this sort of thing again.
We brought on Sara and Aadil through the same hiring round, for an executive assistant position. Longview Philanthropy and 80,000 Hours had recently advertised a public position for an operations/executive assistant role. With the help of those organizations and their applicants, we were able to cut out some of the early advertisement/screening steps, and focus on some of their top candidates. I think this saved us a fair amount of time without compromising much on accessibility/fairness. We might do similar things in the future.
But I acknowledge the costs you share, and we plan to normally invite public applications (as for this new contractor role, and for a finance/data role that we plan to post soon).
Thank you Max for elaborating!
Happy to hear that you generally prefer public vacancies too. In my impression, this often has not been the case for EA orgs in the past (and the people who upvoted my comment might feel similar), so it’s nice to see you publicly write in favor of that.
It makes sense that you make those occasional exceptions for specific cases and I agree that they seem worth it to save time as long as it does not compromise too much on accessibility and fairness.