High-Impact Professionals is a fantastic resource for experienced professionals looking to work with impactful organisations, and, more importantly, for organisations looking for experienced professionals to help them become more impactful.
Recently, they have created a new job-board which makes the process of "match-making" even easier and smoother. I checked out the job-board today.
I had one problem. The job-board is great, the problem lies with the organisations looking for experienced people - or who claim to be looking for experienced people, but maybe are not really.
Here is the number that best captures this. There are over 1000 full-time roles available for experienced professionals, and only 12 (twelve !!) part-time roles.
This is absurd! It makes me think that many organisation literally have not thought this through.
If you start from a simple model where all your employees are full-time people, mostly straight out of college, it's too easy to default into the idea that that is the only kind of employee you can or should have. I'd like to challenge this assumption.
Please ask yourself some questions:
- Why do you want an experienced person? Is it just to fill a normal staff-position (as in, sure, we won't discriminate against you if you're old), or is it actually to take advantage of the person's unique skills and experience?
- Can you define the problem you think this person would solve? If yes, have you really thought through how many hours per week or how many days per month you would need this person to solve that problem?
- If you want to take advantage of their skills and expertise and experience, do you really have a full-time role where, for most of the time, they will be using these? If you think it'd be great to hire an experienced HR-manager or Research-leader, who may have worked in big organisations where they handled 1000 people running 100 projects, do you really think they will need 40 hours to manage the HR needs of your start-up? If not, what do you expect them to do for the rest of the time? Just be a highly overpaid ordinary team-member? Or (from their POV if you pay them less) be a highly under-paid team-member doing work which the average 20-year-old could do better.
- Have you thought about salary? Do you plan to guilt them into accepting a low salary because that's what all the other staff (in their 20's without kids or mortgages) take? Or do you plan to break the bank to hire them, and then find yourself paying $200/hr to people who spend most of their day doing work that any of your $20/hr staff could do? (numbers not based on any data !)
- Have you ever talked to an experienced person about the specific value they would bring, and, equally important, did you believe them? In my experience, a lot of the value that experienced professionals can bring to a newish organisation is in areas where the org doesn't even realise there is a problem or an opportunity. It's a bit like explaining that you can use Claude to code or make Powerpoints to someone who has never seen AI - they think their current way of making Powerpoints is quite efficient.
- Have you ever talked to an experienced professional about the possibility of being unemployed in their 50's, while dealing with mortgage, kids, college, and having to re-enter a job-market where age-bias is rampant and AI is taking over much of the knowledge work they may excel at? Do you really think it's a good strategic move for an experienced professional with a steady job to give that up, put all their eggs in one basket and go work for your start-up, knowing where they'll end up if it doesn't work out? But maybe if your offer was for them to spend a few hours / week helping your org, they might even do it for free, in parallel to their day-job.
- How do you see the work-relationship between you (e.g. the CEO) and the experienced person you wish to hire? If this person comes in with 20+ years of experience and you are 25, does this make you nervous? Do you worry that they may bring culture and changes that you may not approve of, but to which they can give a lot of credibility? This will be easy to control if the person is part-time with a very defined role, but not if they are full-time.
- Do you judge a potential hire's commitment negatively if they do not want to work full-time? I believe most founders do. If yes, how much is that based on your personal situation (maybe you have no kids, maybe you are 25, maybe you are just so passionate about your idea and your org)? Do you really need the experienced professional you might hire to have the same degree of commitment and self-sacrifice that you have? Sometimes it's helpful to lose the "idealist" mindset and focus on "I need a way to deal with specific tasks efficiently" and accept that this doesn't need to come with an all-or-nothing commitment to your start-up.
- Do you believe that by offering full-time employment, you are making your offer more attractive? This might actually be true for junior hires, or for senior people who are currently unemployed. For for experience people who are not desperately searching, this may serve more as an obstacle.
- Etc -
Think about your needs. Would your situation be address by:
- an experienced HR manager who would work one day per week.
- an experienced project manager to design your road-map with you (CEO/COO) and run your weekly critical-path meeting and do all the preparatory work.
- someone who would come in and take some annoying, time-consuming take off your plate, where you can be confident they will do a good job.
- or whatever ...
None of this requires full-time employees.
Of course there are roles where you truly need someone fulltime. But are you sure yours is one of them? Could you consider offering full-time and part-time options, depending on the person's flexibility and availability?
To be clear, I'm not proposing something like an Advisory Board role, which is different. This would be someone really getting into the company, getting their hands dirty, doing real work against tangible objectives. But it would also be well-defined tasks which can be delivered with a specific time commitment, which sometimes may be 40 hours/week, but other times may be much less than this.
This is very much a hot-take, so I'm curious to hear what I may have missed here. I'm also curious to know if I'm the only "experienced professional" who thinks the way I do - and to be clear, it's not a deal-breaker for me, until recently I worked full-time at a climate start-up, and it was amazing.
But the reason I was able to take that role was a lot of coincidences that fell into place - location just a few metro stops away from my home, a schedule that fitted well with the school schedule, having just finished a previous 5-year contract, and also a topic (direct air capture) that I'd always wanted to work on. I think for 90% of opportunities out there, most experienced professionals will not be easily able to take a full-time role, but those who want to work on something impactful might be very willing to try to make a part-time arrangement work.
(or I could be totally wrong about this and just an exception ...)
This is really frustrating - I wrote an article and the EA Forum server crashed and the whole text was lost ... this server seems to be crashing quite a bit recently ... I will try again later.
For what it's worth, the gist of the post was that I looked at the new job-board from the High-Impact Professionals site, and was amazed to see that there were over 1000 full-time positions, but only 12 part-time.
And IMHO, in many smaller orgs especially, it makes a lot more sense to look at hiring experienced people part-time, primarily because many small orgs do not need the unique skills these people bring for 40 hours per week.
So I believe that too many orgs in the impact space are defaulting to full-time roles because maybe that's what the young people and new grads they mostly deal with are looking for. But for a senior professional, maybe they can provide 80/20 the value they can bring to a new, smaller org in one afternoon per week - and this option would enable them to avoid having to take major career risks and pivots at a time in their lives where they are dealing with kids and mortgages and not a lot of flexibility ...