If you lose your top choice due to insufficient salary, how good do you expect the replacement to be?
For CEA, I’d likely guess they’d be indistinguishable for most roles most of the time.
I’m CEA’s main recruitment person and I’ve been involved with CEA’s hiring for 6+ years. I’ve also been involved in hiring rounds for other EA orgs.
I don’t remember a case where the top two candidates were “indistinguishable.” The gap very frequently seems quite large (e.g. our current guess is the top candidate might be twice as impactful, by some definition of expected impact). There have also been many cases where the gap is so large we don’t hire for the role at all and work we feel is important simply doesn’t happen. There have also, of course, been cases where we have two candidates we are similarly excited about. This is rare. If it does happen, we’d generally be happy to be transparent about the situation, and so if you have been offered a role and are wondering about your own replacability, I’d encourage you to just ask.
Context: I’m an advisor to the search committee, not a member so I have some insight but not complete visibility.
My guess is the set of people with significant EA context who have been involved in appointing 3+ leaders of EA and EA-aligned organisations is a very small set of people, many of whom would not have been willing and/or appropriate members of the search committee. I also think Max’s description may have been misleading in terms of how much/what kind of experience was brought to bear during this process:
Max has previously run the hiring rounds for two executive directors (EA Funds and GWWC). Claire participated in decision-making for both of those decisions. These were smaller, less complex processes, though.
Max consulted ~a dozen people with more experience hiring executives.
Max met ~weekly with an advisor who had more experience hiring executives.
We paid an external consultant to help generate candidates and found it a bit useful, although we think we would have found most of the top candidates without their assistance.
In terms of recruitment generally, Max and I have both been involved in dozens of hiring rounds at CEA and the others folks involved also bring significant recruitment experience (which I know a bit less about).
Still, I agree that this is still not the same as having someone who has done this activity at this scale many times actually leading the process.
If you are wondering about whether we should have hired an external firm to run the process/help us run the process, what I’d say is that when we’ve tried to hire professional firms or experts for guidance in high context decision making in the past, it has often been either unhelpful or actively harmful. My personal experience has been that their normal customers have such different desires/incentives that their guidance to us feels wildly off base. HR people, for example, assume we are in an adversarial relationship with our employees and become confused when we want to e.g. share more of certain types of information with them. Similarly, we often don’t seem to be able to get on the same page about valuing integrity or transparency for their own sake, not just the appearance of such things. So, if prior experience is applicable, I personally expect a big headhunting firm would have had some very different ideas about what makes a good CEO and we’d have spent a lot of time trying to close a large inferential gap for a small outcome difference.
All of that said, I think it’s possible we should have explored what executive search firms might be able to offer in more depth. While I expect them to be of limited use in terms of candidate generation, and expect some of their guidance to be wildly off target, it’s possible they might have brought advice about conducting the recruitment process or about candidate assessment that might have complimented the perspectives the committee members brought to the process. That said, given the degree to which this increases coordination costs, it seems plausible but not obvious it would have been the right call to invest effort into this.
Also pulled from Max’s quick notes: