I feel like it’s a circular problem. The hiring pipelines within EA are heavily optimized towards “traditional” hires—fresh grads of elite universities and people jumping from one EA org to another. Recruiting experienced professionals from the outside world requires a significantly different approach. In organizations comprised primarily of traditional hires, few people can even see that problem, much less solve it.
I don’t think the EA community at large really understands just how insulated this ecosystem is.
If we frame the problem as a talent gap, it’s more about which roles aren’t filled—not only in the sense of positions remaining vacant but also including cases where the process takes a long time, seniority gets lowered or organizations work around the lack of talent, e.g. by shifting tasks to other roles or resigning from certain growth directions.
Who is getting hired (and more importantly: who isn’t) is a highly correlated but a different issue in my eyes. Even if all the vacancies got easily filled by people perceived as the most qualified, I’d argue that keeping the ecosystem closed to outsiders is still a major problem. Beyond the obvious equitability angle, it also encourages the homogeneity of thought and reinforces the perception of EA living in a bubble.
Overall I feel like communications is a very specific edge case here. Forgive me if I oversimplify but “understanding what and how to signal in order to convince a group of people from a different culture to take certain action” sounds exactly like the job description of a communications specialist, especially for an area like AI safety.
A recruitment process requiring this skillset to navigate does actually optimize for good comms specialists. At the same time, it will filter out talented software engineers, project managers, subject matter experts, etc. based on gaps in an area that has little impact on their actual on the job performance.