Cross-post from Good Structures.
Over the last few years, I helped run several dozen hiring rounds for around 15 high-impact organizations. I've also spent the last few months talking with organizations about their recruitment. I've noticed three recurring themes:
Candidates generally have a terrible time
Work tests are often unpleasant (and the best candidates have to complete many of them), there are hundreds or thousands of candidates for each role, and generally, people can't get the jobs they’ve been told are the best path to impact.
Organizations are often somewhat to moderately unhappy with their candidate pools
Organizations really struggle to find the talent they want, despite the number of candidates who apply.
Organizations can't find or retain the recruiting talent they want
It's extremely hard to find people to do recruitment in this space. Talented recruiters rarely want to stay in their roles.
I think the first two points need more discussion, but I haven't seen much discussion about the last. I think this is a major issue: recruitment is probably the most important function for a growing organization, and a skilled recruiter has a fairly large counterfactual impact for the organization they support. So why is it so hard for organizations to hire them?
Recruitment is high leverage and high impact
The majority of an organization's impact flows through its recruitment function. Since most organizations in the high-impact charity sector are research and advocacy organizations, most of their impact is a direct function of the strength of their talent. I think that choosing who to hire is basically the second most consequential decision an organization makes for its overall impact (after choosing what to work on), and importantly, it's a decision organizations are often willing to have early-career or more junior staff be involved in.
Additionally, basically all other consequential factors in an organization's impact are downstream of recruitment:
- Is your strategy strong? It probably depends on hiring people who think well about strategy.
- Is your culture good? It probably depends on hiring strong managers.
- Is your organizational structure effective? It probably depends on hiring the right people for the right roles.
If a recruiter is directly involved in the assessment of candidates, they directly generate value for the organization based on the strength of their choices and assessments. But even recruiters who don't directly evaluate candidates generate large amounts of value. They might screen initial candidates or help design assessments while a hiring manager makes advancement decisions. That is still a major factor in shaping the outcome of a hiring process.
And recruiters also reduce the time cost of hiring. Hiring is incredibly expensive for organizations. I'll typically spend 50-60 hours in a given hiring process for a direct report, and expect a similar amount in total is spent by other people involved. If I run an organization hiring even a few roles per year, it's easy to see the costs of hiring adding up. Recruiters can directly help reduce this burden, both through their work and through process improvements like designing more effective evaluations.
Organizations struggle to hire recruiters
Among hiring rounds I've run for organizations, two types of rounds have consistently failed to find strong candidates: leadership roles and recruiting roles. Leadership roles are understandable, as these hires are obviously very consequential for organizations, and there might be very few people who are a good fit.
My impression is that there is a gap, both in candidate pools and in service providers, of highly aligned, competent recruiting talent. When I've run hiring rounds for recruitment roles, organizations have been unhappy with the talent pool and often failed to make successful hires.
Why do organizations feel so unhappy with their recruitment talent pools? I think a major reason is that doing recruiting well, and especially managing a recruiting function, requires three core competencies:
Project management
Recruiters have to manage thousands of applications, handle individual emails to hundreds of people, and generally execute big, complex project management tasks. This is genuinely difficult and doing it well requires being thoughtful about communications, highly organized, and able to process large amounts of information quickly.
Decision-making under uncertainty
Hiring is inherently extremely uncertain. Our best selection methods aren't that good, and organizations that hire according to theoretically optimal selection methods still regularly face performance issues in their staff that they shouldn't expect if hiring perfectly predicted skills. And hiring is rife with uncertainty beyond "are you choosing the right person?":
- Did you scope the role well? Is the role you scoped actually going to work the way you expect?
- Was your candidate pool competitive? Maybe the salary was too low or maybe you didn't reach the right audience. You don't know who didn't apply, so it's hard to directly assess whether you're scoping the role and process well.
- Is anyone in the world actually a good fit for this role? The shorter the list of people who are actually qualified, the worse you should expect your candidate pool to be.
Ultimately, doing recruitment well is about successful project management, but it's also about building tools to make decisions under uncertainty, and then testing and improving these tools over time. Doing this requires research skills, data analysis skills, and other competencies that aren't usually considered part of the recruiter profile. The hiring tools organizations have tried (interviews, work tests, etc.) are pretty limited in the scheme of things. There is a ton of opportunity to try new methods for evaluating candidates, and for testing and improving those methods over time.
Understanding of the ecosystem
For organizations in specific cause areas, recruiters who understand their ecosystem can make a major difference. It's unclear to me if this is a good thing, but in reality, organizations rely heavily on referrals from other organizations and signals about candidates' context and value alignment. Having recruiters who can see those signals and interpret them, or decide when they're worth ignoring, helps improve the evaluations organizations make of candidates.
For organizations, it might really matter, for example, that a recruiter recognizes that a background working on responsible scaling policy at Anthropic is meaningfully different from a background working at Pause AI, despite both presenting as organizations working to ensure that AI is developed safely. Or it might make a major difference to an animal welfare organization that a candidate came out of Direct Action Everywhere vs. Shrimp Welfare Project.
To be clear, I'm not convinced that using context clues like this is particularly wise for organizations to do (or at least, to use as a major point of assessment). But it is part of how groups approach recruitment, and having recruiters they can rely on to do the same is part of what they're looking for.
These three skills are very different: candidates need both the operational skills of doing project management well and the research and empirical skills of trying to make good decisions under uncertainty. Finding someone with both of these who also has context on the ecosystem is even harder. Organizations looking for all three routinely fail.
Many of the people applying to recruitment roles emphasize their experience in recruitment. This isn't the background organizations need
When hiring recruiters, usually the hiring pool is made up of many people who have a high degree of project management and operational skills. Candidates tend to be operationally focused and emphasize this part of their experience and background.
But often candidates won't have either the research/empirical skills to explore ideas to improve hiring or won't be interested in this aspect of it. And often organizations are looking for candidates with significantly higher context on the ecosystem they're in than the candidates have.
The differentiator for organizations in hiring recruiters seems to usually be someone having all of these skills, not just the operational ones. Finding people at that intersection is much harder.
Almost no one is appropriately obsessed with hiring
The hiring tools organizations have are really rudimentary. Basically, organizations have a brief scan of resumes, some answers to short-answer prompts, a few interviews, and a few hours sampling candidates' work. Even organizations with great recruiting practices routinely struggle with performance issues internally. And organizations I've spoken with have struggled to automate (or don't trust the automation of) large parts of their review, meaning hiring anyone requires dozens of hours of reviewing materials of candidates who won't be advanced. All of this suggests that there are major gains to be had from trying to improve hiring at organizations.
But my impression is that most organizations aren't focused on things like experimenting with their hiring, running tests to try to improve the impact of their approaches, evaluating candidates they rejected to see if they might have made mistakes, or otherwise doing the basic steps it might take to make hiring more effective.
Given the importance of hiring, this lack of obsession is surprising. Hiring successfully is a critical part of organizational impact, but barely any time is spent trying to deeply understand how to do it well.
High-impact organizations need people who are completely obsessed with hiring. By this, I mean people obsessed with answering a question like, "How do I attract the right pool of people to a role and identify the best candidates out of tens of thousands, in a way that is minimally onerous for both candidates and my organization?"
I think that there is a huge opportunity for people who are obsessed with these kinds of questions. Answering them well unlocks a huge amount of impact for organizations, and we genuinely don't have answers for them.
The state of evidence on hiring practices is bad
A lot of the reason that organizations struggle with hiring is that the evidence base for how to assess people is terrible.
There isn't a (cheap) way to run true RCTs on hiring and evaluating hiring rounds often faces a fundamental statistical issue: in progressive rounds, you eliminate the people who did poorly in your assessment. But doing well in a hiring round is a separate skill from doing well in a job, so you're inherently filtering on a different skill set, to some extent, than the one you want to measure. So you will never get information on the relative performance of people you rejected and be able to make confident claims about the predictiveness of your hiring.
That being said, we can still collect some evidence from hiring rounds: industrial/organizational psychologists have tried to study what hiring methods are most predictive of later performance. While all these assessments suffer the issues outlined above, we can still glean something from them. But unfortunately, the evidence they produce is mixed at best:
- The best methods of assessing candidates are at best only moderately correlated with later job performance. While presumably you can improve this by assessing candidates using multiple methods, if you believe, like I do, that the distribution of talent is extremely right-tailed, then moderate correlations just aren't going to be particularly useful for finding the most talented people. You can do a good job eliminating candidates who aren't a great fit, but if talent follows a right-tailed distribution, confidently determining who the best candidate is is much more important and much harder.
- The field suffers from the statistical issues of all psychology. For example, for years, general mental aptitude (GMA) has been thought to be highly correlated with job performance. Then, in 2021, some researchers claimed that a major study underpinning this claim had (in their view) made some dubious statistical choices which, when corrected, led to GMA being a much worse indicator of job performance. Without weighing in on the debate, that it is a major debate indicates that these questions are not settled even among the researchers who have spent their lives studying them.
Separately from choosing the right evaluation method, organizations have to design the evaluation well. If I am hiring for a software engineer and have them swim a mile for their work test, I'm fundamentally not testing the right skills for the job. Recruiters have to answer difficult questions like:
- How do I even figure out what the right skills for a job are?
- What do I do when these skills are in conflict with other things I care about? Many of the highest-performing people I know work really long hours. Is "working really long hours" actually a skill I want to filter on? Or is it one of many potential proxies for something else that matters more?
Retaining strong recruiters is really hard
Many of the people who are best at recruiting and convincing talented people to join their organizations aren't in recruiting roles. Instead, they are in leadership or research roles. And it often seems like convincing someone to stay in a recruiting role, especially if they have research skills, is difficult. But this seems like a mistake — finding recruiters with the data analysis skills, research literacy, and operational skills to run experiments, improve systems, project-manage hiring rounds, and overall make the recruitment experience positive for candidates is really difficult.
Organizations do sometimes find these people. However, many of the best recruiters don't stay in these positions for long. Instead, they often move into management, leadership, or research roles. This exacerbates the issue: many of the people with the most experience in running effective recruitment don't actually work in recruitment. The skills that make someone excellent at recruitment might also make them an excellent researcher or excellent project manager. And because recruiting isn't seen as particularly high status, people doing incredibly impactful work often move out of it to other roles.
I'm not sure what to do about this, but currently, my best guess is that recruiting should be viewed as having significantly higher impact than most people think it has, so there is greater social reward for staying in these roles.
Why might this be less important than I think?
High-impact organizations are usually pretty good at hiring, so finding better recruiters doesn't make that much of a difference
I think that most high-impact organizations are doing very reasonable things in their hiring: they're running multiple kinds of assessments (e.g., work tests, structured and unstructured interviews, work trials, etc.). Relative to other nonprofits, most organizations I work with in EA, AI governance, etc., are doing a good job at hiring.
If organizations are pretty good at hiring well, maybe there isn't that much to be gained from hiring a recruiter, or recruiting talent would have the greatest counterfactual impact by going to organizations with the worst recruiting practices.
I suspect this is wrong though. I have rarely seen organizations do things I think are fundamental to successfully evaluating and improving their recruitment, like:
- Conducting job analyses
- Evaluating the later performance of candidates they rejected
- Backtesting their recruitment practices to see if they predicted later performance
This is too hard
I don't think that the issues with recruitment I describe here are limited to high-impact philanthropy. I suspect that major for-profits, who theoretically should have heavy incentives to find the best talent, also struggle with them.
This indicates to me that there are just hard problems in doing this well. We might only make marginal improvements from the current best approaches.
I find this pretty convincing and think it's possible I'll look back at this post in 10 years and think it was misguided.
But again, I've not seen anyone try to just take recruitment as seriously as I think it deserves to be taken. I think given the stakes, it deserves a shot.
I'm trying to find people interested in this kind of approach to hiring. If this is you, please reach out.
This post isn't meant as a pitch, but I'm trying to find people who are interested in exploring roles in recruitment, who are obsessed with hiring, or are interested in taking a highly empirical/experimental approach to hiring. If this is you, get in touch! I'm both looking for candidates for my own work and am regularly asked for referrals for recruiting roles.
I find this very interesting to think about. Your reasoning makes a lot of sense to me, and I agree that these practices would make organizations more impactful. But, being in the animal welfare space, these questions feel like fanciful thought experiments (until that Anthropic money comes in, or do we not talk about those dreams outloud?). I know you already know this, but Animal charities don’t have the resources to do rigorous testing of recruitment practices (or to offer competitive salaries). At ACE we can’t afford the time to systematically look at where rejected candidates end up or add prediction steps to the recruitment process—even though I’d really like to. I’ve seen the difference that excellence makes, but the hiring cost is already so time consuming that adding MEL would likely come at the cost of all the work necessary to retain that talent. We’re also too small to get much meaningful data from experiments.
But I could see how a centralized capacity building organization in the effective animal advocacy space could potentially play a role (Animal Advocacy Careers or maybe Sharpen Strategy or High Impact Professionals?). They could collect the data for job analyses, backtest, follow candidates, etc. across multiple organizations. That recruiter would need to thoroughly understand the theories of change for various interventions and organizations. They would also need to understand which competencies and attitudes fit those different contexts best.
Meanwhile, the charities must be willing to really engage humbly and transparently with this central recruiter and with other animal orgs. Can the EAA community look at the replaceability and counterfactual impact of the movement’s talent pool, without a competitive or scarcity mindset, and encourage their people to move so we collectively do the most good?
I would like to think about this more, but first I need to raise the money to make sure I can keep my current staff next year and hopefully provide them with COLA and maybe an extra 0.5 FTE in support. (No, not bitter about the lack of funding for animal welfare at all.)
Re: your three identified core competencies, project management is the one I would be most willing to compromise on in a recruiter, because you could potentially mitigate that skill gap with tools or admin assistance. But the ability to be a strategic sparring partner with the hiring manager seems non-negotiable. Same with a desire to test and improve hiring methods because they are determined to figure out the puzzle of getting people in places that sets the org up to do more. You need someone who questions decisions, not a go-fetch headhunter.
Anyway, I like this obsession with the meta recruiting of obsessive recruiters.
Yeah, I agree with all of this difficulty. But, I also think the animal movement trends too far in hiring too many people, and all things considered, I'd probably prefer an animal movement that was smaller and more strategic (though this is partially because I don't think ambitious animal welfare goals, like abolishing factory farming, are tractable), and think the things that are tractable (wild animal welfare policy, shrimp welfare, etc.) would do better if coordinated by fewer talented people rather than more mass movement — but I recognize that I'm the only animal advocate in the world who is against broad movement building so don't put too much stock in my views.
I also think the animal movement suffers from a lack of "coolness" unfortunately — e.g. I think AI risk, for example, just has more general appeal / trendiness, and so they can appeal to a way larger audience of potential applicants, which should in theory mean higher quality (just because more people are interested).
I agree that it could be centralized — I think the benefits outweigh the risks here, especially for heavily EA organizations.
One more thought: I think your points also apply to the recruitment of board members.