I personally find the phrase “dream job” quite off putting, and it makes me think the organisation/role will be unserious and dysfunctional. Would be interested to know how this compares to other people.
It just reads as "enthusiastic North American" to me. I agree it's not my preferred aesthetic.
I would read over it and not draw any conclusions about the organization. Although I don't think any job would match my dream job ever. So if I took all ‘dream job’ ads literally, I would have to stop reading them after the first sentence.
Highly recommend trying out the Top-Grading interview from Who.
You go through a candidate's entire work history, from start to finish in chronological order, and ask these questions:
- What were you hired to do?
- What accomplishments are you most proud of?
- How did your performance compare to the previous year’s performance? (For example, this person achieved sales of $2 million and the previous year’s sales were only $150,000.)
- How did your performance compare to the plan? (For example, this person sold $2 million and the plan was $1.2 million.)
- How did your performance compare to that of peers?
- What were some low points during that job?
- Who were the people you worked with? Specifically:
- What was your boss’s name, and how do you spell that? What was it like working with him/her? What will they tell me were your biggest strengths and areas for improvement?
- Why did you leave that job?
It's just a good, natural, flowing way of understanding what things people actually did instead of trying to give them hypothetical future scenarios of what they might do.
It's also an efficient way of finding red flags 🚩 like:
- Candidate does not mention past failures.
- Candidate exaggerates his or her answers.
- Candidate takes credit for the work of others.
- Candidate speaks poorly of past bosses.
- Candidate cannot explain job moves.
- People most important to candidate are unsupportive of change.
- Candidate seems more interested in compensation and benefits than in the job itself.
- Candidate tries too hard to look like an expert.
- Candidate is self-absorbed.
- Winning too much
- Telling the world how smart we are
- Passing the buck
- Making excuses
If anyone is interested in using the topgrading method, the guy who invented/designed it wrote a whole book about it. It goes into more detail than Who, and if you really want to implement topgrading then it is very helpful.
This is super helpful, thanks!
<First sentence redacted.>
The above article, too, contains many questionable pieces of advice. Just one example: ‘Craft your questions so that it’s not embarrassing or difficult for candidates to admit that they don’t have the personal qualities that you are looking for.’ So you're supposed to rely on candidates admitting that they are not right for the job? Take the article's example of risk-taking – why wouldn't you write in the job ad that risk-taking is required? Then the honest non-risk-takers can sort themselves out before going through the trouble of applying.
What about those who don't sort themselves out? According to the article, you ask them a sort of trick question: ‘are you somebody who likes to jump head first into a problem or do you hold more of the philosophy of looking before you leap?’ This can work if you've successfully left the candidate in the dark on whether the job requires risk-taking. If the candidate knows that risk-taking is required and really wants the job (and who doesn't?), guess which of the two alternatives they will pick.
Talking about going through the trouble of applying – the above article doesn't address the feedback about hiring that made a splash on this forum a while ago: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jmbP9rwXncfa32seH/after-one-year-of-applying-for-ea-jobs-it-is-really-really I don't agree with the attitude of the latter article, but it does contain important points that ‘an EA Guide to Hiring’ would do well to address.
Addendum – a better question to find out about a candidate's risk-taking. Say: ‘It's hard to have a big impact without taking risks. Tell me about a time when you had to choose between a safe and a risky course of action. What were your considerations, how did you implement your choice and how did it turn out?’ After they've given an answer, probe. Ask follow-up questions. Always about the past. If all you dig up is more details about successful risk-taking in the past, there's a good chance the candidate fulfills your risk-taking requirement. On the other hand, if they don't have done much risk-taking, you will find out quickly using this course of questioning. This is not to say that you should turn your desk lamp on them and play a Stalin-era interrogator. All the points about being extremely friendly and putting the candidate at ease still apply.
Note to those who are downvoting this: Please describe your disagreements in a comment. Otherwise nobody can learn from them.
Thank you for the very in depth post! I've had a lot of conversations about the subject myself over the past several months and considered writing a similarly themed post, but it's always nice to find that some very talented people have already done a fantastic job carefully considering the topic and organizing the ideas into a coherent piece :)
On that note, I'm currently conducting a thesis on effective hiring / selection methods in social-mission startups with the hopes of creating a free toolkit to help facilitate recruitment in EA (and other impact-driven) orgs. If you have any bandwidth I'd love to learn more about your experience regarding the talent ecosystem in EA and see if I could better tailor my project to help address some of the gaps/opportunities you've identified
Imagine you could have any skill in the world with just a few dozen hours of effort. This is what hiring allows you to do and it's a neglected skill in the EA movement.
I don’t know how to code, yet “I’ve” built the Nonlinear Library and Superlinear (an x-risk prize platform). I had no experience in Indian politics but “I” was able to help Indian states update their policies to increase vaccination rates.
Because you don’t have to learn how to code or develop decades of experience in a particular political arena. You can just hire people who already have those skills or experiences, and in fact, are probably better than you’d ever have gotten.
It’s one of the highest leverage meta-skills you can develop, especially when combined with fundraising. This is why it was a top contender for my most important “lesson learned” in my last decade in EA and we’re incubating an EA hiring agency to make it so it takes even less time to hire people (they’re accepting clients now!)
It is also one of the things I get asked for advice on the most frequently, so perfect for a blog post. So, without further ado, read on for a very practical guide to hiring.
You can’t hire the right person unless you have a clear idea of who the right person is. Don’t just pick a job title and work from there; instead, brainstorm a list of the specific tasks that you want your new hire to do, and then choose a job title that fits.
This also makes it clearer to you what you’re looking for. If you think that you want to hire an executive assistant but find yourself listing mostly research tasks, maybe you really want to hire a research assistant instead. Or perhaps you actually want to hire for two or three different roles.
Job advertisements are neglected relative to other aspects of hiring. Everyone knows that interviews are important, but you won’t get lots of good candidates to interview unless they see and respond to your job ad. The more people who apply, the more likely you are to find a great fit. Your job ad should have:
The title is the most important part of any piece of writing. This is doubly true for job ads since they’re posted alongside hundreds of other jobs on job boards, or (worse) on social media, where they have to compete against Oscar drama, apocalyptic news stories, and cute red pandas for your would-be applicants’ fractured attention. This means that your title needs to be interesting.
(The writers of the Guardian Experience column have nailed this skill, we can only bow down in wonder and awe.) Here’s a great resource for writing intriguing and useful headlines.
The second most important part of any piece of writing is the first sentence. A good template for your first sentence is:
‘If your dream job is to ____, _____, and ____, then you might be the perfect fit for [job].’
You should fill in the blanks with things that will attract people who would be a great fit for the role, while repelling people who wouldn’t. For example, in my ad for the EA hiring agency, I wrote:
‘If your dream job is to work in longtermism, be your own boss, and talk to EAs all day, then you might be the perfect fit for starting an EA recruitment agency through Nonlinear’s incubation program.’
I know lots of EAs who would get excited at ‘work in longtermism’ (‘improving the long term future! Sign me up!’) but recoil in terror at ‘talk to EAs all day’ (‘talking?! To people??! Ugh!’) And that’s great! People who don’t love talking would not be a great fit for this particular job. Your first sentence should reel in candidates who’d be perfect for the job, while gently turning away those who wouldn’t.
Get potential candidates excited to apply by telling them what they’ll love about the job. For example:
‘You’ll be a great fit for this role if:
-You love____
-You’d be excited to ___
-You’re passionate about ___
If you don’t like these things, bear in mind that there’s almost always someone out there who would be genuinely excited to do the role, even if that person isn’t you.
An interesting picture will make your job ad stand out - you can design one very easily on Canva. It’s very important to make sure that the image looks good and is the right size for the platform it’s being posted on.
State the application deadline at the top and bottom of the ad and include the date, the exact time, and the time zone (e.g. ‘Applications are due by April 28th, 11.59 pm, EST’). This prevents needless angst about ‘it’s April 28th, but do they mean before the 28th or by the end of the 28th? By my midnight or their midnight?’
You can’t hire great people if they don’t know that you’re hiring, so post your job ad liberally.
Many EAs will just post their ads on the EA Forum and call it a day. This isn’t enough. You should post your job ad, at least on:
Don’t worry too much about ‘spamming’ people. You probably feel way spammier than you are. Most people won’t regularly look at all the places you post the ad, so they’ll only see it once or twice. And anyway, even if some people do see your ad five times, are they really going to care? I’d rather hear about a great job opportunity five times than not hear about it at all.
Generally speaking, the two keys to avoiding spamming people are:
Ask people to refer you candidates for the job. Consider asking people who are well-connected in the field in which you’re hiring, (e.g., if you’re hiring a software developer, ask developer friends) or people who just have a large network or anyone else you think would have good taste or special insight.
When you ask people for referrals, it’s most effective to:
So,
‘Hey, I’m hiring for X! Does anyone come to mind for this role? We’re just collecting names right now.’
is better than
‘Let me know if you know of anyone who’d be a great fit for this role.’
Asking direct questions puts the ball in their court - questions demand answers, and if they’re going to have to answer you anyway, they might as well spend a minute brainstorming potential candidates before they do.
Asking ‘does anyone come to mind’ makes it easier for people to give you names. If you ask ‘who might be a great fit?’, then they’ll have to umm and ahh: ‘I mean I think X might be good, but would they really be a great fit?’
OK, let’s say thousands of people saw your job ad, and now you have hundreds of applicants. Now what? How do you narrow them down? I recommend assessing candidates in multiple stages, filtering some out at each stage. The stages are: application form, then test task, then interview. You can also add a second test task and/or a second interview if you need more information and it’s a particularly high-stakes role.
If you have lots of applications, you can quickly rank candidates by including questions where candidates have to check boxes or rank themselves on a scale. For example, when I’ve hired for positions where EA knowledge was crucial, I’ve asked candidates to rate their EA knowledge on a scale of 1-5. This way, you can easily sort candidates: you can rule out the lowest-ranked candidates if appropriate, and look at the applications of the highest-ranked ones first.
After this, ask your candidates to write a short paragraph, which you can use to sort them again. These answers will take longer to sort but will give you a lot more information than a simple number.
I recommend asking two junior teammates to help with ranking candidates. This will save you time and give your colleagues valuable hiring experience. Alternatively, you can work with a hiring agency to filter out candidates in the first round.
For example, ask your colleagues to read the applications and think about whether the candidate should go on to the next stage of the hiring process, and then rank the applications on a 5-point scale according to the answers:
5 = hard yes (i.e., ‘yes they should go on to the next stage’)
4 = soft yes (i.e. ‘maybe they should go on to the next stage’)
3 = uncertain
2 = soft no
1 = hard no (i.e., ‘no, they should not go on to the next stage’)
If both teammates give a candidate a 4 or 5, they automatically go on to the next stage. If both give a candidate a 1 or 2, they automatically do not. If a candidate has a 3, or the teammates disagree on their rankings, you act as tie-breaker.
Test tasks allow candidates to directly demonstrate their skills. This means that they should imitate what the new hire will actually be doing. If possible, just give them a piece of work to do - for example, if you’re hiring an editor, ask them to edit something.
Sometimes this won’t be possible. In these cases, simulate what the new hire’s job will be like as best you can. For example, when I was hiring for the EA hiring agency, I asked candidates to interview me for a (pretend) job, since that’s what the role would involve.
Make sure that the instructions for the test task are extremely clear. Include a checklist of everything that the candidates need to do, even if some of it seems obvious. This will help avoid wasteful misunderstandings.
It’s also informative if candidates don’t follow the instructions correctly. People are usually trying their best on job applications, so if they make mistakes in the application, they’d likely make similar mistakes in the job as well.
Job interviews are stressful, and no one is at their best when they’re stressed, so it’s important to help your candidates relax. You can start the interview by asking ‘Why do you want this job?’ - this is a common, unsurprising interview question, so it’s unlikely to freak anyone out. You can also use interviewees’ answers to know what to highlight about the job - for example, if they say that they want the job because they love trying to solve complex problems, you can emphasize the problem-solving aspects of the role.
Brainstorm what your ideal hire would be like, and keep these qualities in mind when you craft your interview questions. You can use High Impact Interview Questions for inspiration. It has questions that are designed to assess many different workplace competencies, such as communication, problem-solving, and teamwork.
Craft your questions so that it’s not embarrassing or difficult for candidates to admit that they don’t have the personal qualities that you are looking for. If you’re trying to work out whether a potential hire is comfortable taking risks, you shouldn’t ask ‘are you more of a risk-taker, or are you more of a quivering mound of jelly who wets themself at the first whiff of adversity?’ Ask what they’d do in a situation where a more daring approach and a more cautious approach both seem reasonable! For example ‘are you somebody who likes to jump head first into a problem or do you hold more of the philosophy of looking before you leap?’
For most personality traits, whether or not they’re desirable depends on the job; but almost everyone should try not to hire people who tend to cause conflicts. Occasional conflicts are unavoidable, but if a person seems to cause drama and upheaval wherever they go, run a thousand miles in the opposite direction, even if they seem otherwise talented. Their drama won’t just affect their work; it’ll leak out everywhere and affect the whole organization.
Once I was so enthusiastic about a candidate that I offered them the job right then and there in the interview. But then, I interviewed the next candidate… and they were so much better! Don’t make the same mistake! This is the archetypical secretary problem. Don’t prematurely exploit.
It’s useful to record your interviews. This way, you can share them with others on your team to get other perspectives. Also, if your new hire leaves the organization, you can re-watch their interview and see whether you could have predicted this at the interview stage.
Make sure that your questions are actually sorting people. If everyone gives the same answer to a question, it’s useless to you, and you should tweak it or remove it.
Why not hire out the hiring? Hiring usually takes anywhere from a dozen to over one hundred person-hours and months start-to-finish. It also requires a lot of hard-to-articulate social intuitions and an appetite for talking to people that the average introverted EA is less than thrilled about.
Hiring agencies allow you to outsource varying degrees of the work to people who specialize in it. For example, Pineapple Operations by our very own Holly Morgan provides you with a list of pre-vetted PAs you can hire, allowing you to skip promoting the job ad and the first round of vetting. Others, such as the new EA Hiring Agency (working title), can do custom amounts of work for you, ranging from just hopping on a quick advisory call to doing the full hiring process up until the very end, just sending you a shortlist of the top 3-5 candidates along with their recorded interviews, scorecards, and test tasks.
Not only do they save you time, but since hiring agencies specialize in the area of hiring, they can often do far better than you would. For example, despite me being quite experienced at hiring, the EA Hiring Agency is handling the hiring process for our Executive Assistant and they more than doubled the number of people who applied for the role compared to previous rounds.
This is a long post but still far from comprehensive. If you want to skill up more on hiring, I recommend the following:
Leave other tips or resources in the comments.
Reminder that if this reaches 25 upvotes, you can listen to this post on your podcast player using the Nonlinear Library.
This post was written collaboratively by Kat Woods and Amber Dawn Ace as part of Nonlinear’s experimental Writing Internship program. The ideas are Kat’s; Kat explained them to Amber, and Amber wrote them up. We would like to offer this service to other EAs who want to share their as-yet unwritten ideas or expertise.
If you would be interested in working with Amber to write up your ideas, fill out this form.
Hey!
I'm trying to do stuff to improve EA hiring [1, 2, 3, 4?, 5?, more coming], so first of all Hi!
I like this post and plan to recommend it to others,
I have small disagreements that I'll write here kind of as an excuse to make conversation:
You said:
I talk to lots of candidates, so from their perspective I can share that questions like this are often interpreted as "I need to impress the interviewer with my answer", especially in the application itself, but I assume also in interviews.
You said:
Continuing what I said before - you might be fitting your answers to how the candidate tried to impress you.
I suggest an alternative to both of these:
Something like "Do you have questions for us? This is supposed to be an opportunity for me to help you with things you're worried about, things you're not sure about regarding our company or how we work, and it's not a test or an interview question where you're supposed to impress us, I hope you'll ask what you actually care about" [phrased in your style, if you don't like mine]
Part of why I'm saying this is that lots of candidates do have lots of uncertainties that make them afraid to even apply to a "wrong" company. A common piece of advice I give candidates is "ask the recruiter" [instead of, for example, researching 'what is it like to work in an EA org' before they apply to anything]. So I think many would appreciate the opportunity.
Reminder that I really like your post and it also seems like you look at hiring from a different direction than I do, which is always interesting!
:)