I found this finding in the MCF 2024 survey interesting:
The average value to an organization of theirmost preferred over their second most preferred candidate, in a typical hiring round, was estimated to be $50,737 (junior hire) and $455,278 (senior hire).
This survey was hard and only given to a small number of people, so we shouldn’t read too much into the specific numbers, but I think it’s still a data point against putting significant weight on replacability concerns if you have a job offer for an org you consider impactful.
Survey respondents here (who all work at EA orgs like Open Phil, 80k, CEA, Giving What We Can) are saying that if they make someone a job offer, they would need to receive, in the typical case for junior staff, tens of thousands of dollars to be indifferent about that person taking the job instead of the next best candidate. As someone who’s been involved in several hiring rounds, this sounds plausible to me.
If you get a job offer from an org you consider impactful, I suggest not putting significant weight on the idea that the next best candidate could also take the role and have just as much or more impact as you, unless you have a good reason to think you’re in an atypical situation. There’s often a (very) large gap!
FYI the question posed was:
Imagine a typical hiring round for a [junior/senior] position within your organization. How much financial compensation would you expect to need to receive to make you indifferent about hiring your second most preferred applicant, rather than your most preferred applicant?
(there’s a debate to be had about how “EA org receiving X in financial compensation” compares to “value to the world in $ terms” or “value in EA-aligned donations” but I stand by the above bolded claim).
Full disclosure: I work at CEA and helped build the survey, so I’m somewhat incentivised to say this work was interesting and valuable.
It’s worth noting that the average answers to “How much financial compensation would you expect to need to receive to make you indifferent about that role not being filled?” were $272,222 (junior) and $1,450,000 (senior).
And so I think that just quoting the willingness to pay dollar amounts to hire top over second-preferred candidate can be a bit misleading here, because it’s not obvious to everyone that WTP amounts are typically much higher than salaries in general in this context. If the salary is $70k, for instance, and the org’s WTP to hire you over the second-preferred candidate $50k, it would be a mistake to infer that you are perceived as 3.5 times more impactful.
Another way of reading this is that the top hire is perceived as about 23% and about 46% more ‘impactful’ respectively than the second-preferred hire in WTP terms on average. I think this is a more useful framing.
And then eyeballing the graphs, there is also a fair amount of variance in both sets of answers, where perceptions of top junior candidates’ ‘impactfulness’ appear to range from ~5–10% higher to ~100% higher than the second-best candidate. That suggests it is worth at least asking about replaceability, if there is a sensitive way to bring it up!
I agree that people worry too much about replaceability overall, though.
Another set of actors that would be incentivized in this would be the survey respondents, to say higher counterfactual values of first vs second choices. Saying otherwise could go against their goals of attracting more of the EA talent pool to their positions. The framing of irreplaceability for their staff also tends to lend to the prestige of their organizations and staff.
With limited applicants, especially in very specialized areas, I think there is definitely a case for a high value of first vs. second choice applicant. But I suspect that this set of survey respondents would be biased in the direction of overestimating the counterfactual impact.
I found this finding in the MCF 2024 survey interesting:
This survey was hard and only given to a small number of people, so we shouldn’t read too much into the specific numbers, but I think it’s still a data point against putting significant weight on replacability concerns if you have a job offer for an org you consider impactful.
Survey respondents here (who all work at EA orgs like Open Phil, 80k, CEA, Giving What We Can) are saying that if they make someone a job offer, they would need to receive, in the typical case for junior staff, tens of thousands of dollars to be indifferent about that person taking the job instead of the next best candidate. As someone who’s been involved in several hiring rounds, this sounds plausible to me.
If you get a job offer from an org you consider impactful, I suggest not putting significant weight on the idea that the next best candidate could also take the role and have just as much or more impact as you, unless you have a good reason to think you’re in an atypical situation. There’s often a (very) large gap!
FYI the question posed was:
(there’s a debate to be had about how “EA org receiving X in financial compensation” compares to “value to the world in $ terms” or “value in EA-aligned donations” but I stand by the above bolded claim).
Full disclosure: I work at CEA and helped build the survey, so I’m somewhat incentivised to say this work was interesting and valuable.
It’s worth noting that the average answers to “How much financial compensation would you expect to need to receive to make you indifferent about that role not being filled?” were $272,222 (junior) and $1,450,000 (senior).
And so I think that just quoting the willingness to pay dollar amounts to hire top over second-preferred candidate can be a bit misleading here, because it’s not obvious to everyone that WTP amounts are typically much higher than salaries in general in this context. If the salary is $70k, for instance, and the org’s WTP to hire you over the second-preferred candidate $50k, it would be a mistake to infer that you are perceived as 3.5 times more impactful.
Another way of reading this is that the top hire is perceived as about 23% and about 46% more ‘impactful’ respectively than the second-preferred hire in WTP terms on average. I think this is a more useful framing.
And then eyeballing the graphs, there is also a fair amount of variance in both sets of answers, where perceptions of top junior candidates’ ‘impactfulness’ appear to range from ~5–10% higher to ~100% higher than the second-best candidate. That suggests it is worth at least asking about replaceability, if there is a sensitive way to bring it up!
I agree that people worry too much about replaceability overall, though.
Another set of actors that would be incentivized in this would be the survey respondents, to say higher counterfactual values of first vs second choices. Saying otherwise could go against their goals of attracting more of the EA talent pool to their positions. The framing of irreplaceability for their staff also tends to lend to the prestige of their organizations and staff.
With limited applicants, especially in very specialized areas, I think there is definitely a case for a high value of first vs. second choice applicant. But I suspect that this set of survey respondents would be biased in the direction of overestimating the counterfactual impact.