Yes, I at least strongly support people reaching out to my staff about opportunities that they might be more excited about than working at Lightcone, and similarly I have openly approached other people working in the EA community at other organizations about working at Lightcone. I think the cooperative atmosphere between different organizations, and the trust that individuals are capable of making the best decisions for themselves on where they can have the best impact, is a thing I really like about the EA community.

I share the negative emotional reaction to headhunting candidates from ostensibly allied organisations -- it does inevitably feel like an adversarial move. Ultimately, though, I find it quite hard to justify this opposition intellectually.

The main effect of headhunting is to provide employees with information -- e.g. that they seem like a good fit for this exciting role they might not have known about (or considered applying to) otherwise. I support people making their own employment decisions on the basis of the best possible information, and (in most cases) oppose hiding information from people because it might cause them to make decisions we don't like.

If you phrase an opposition to headhunting as "don't make our staff aware of opportunities they might freely decide to pursue over their current job", I think it sounds a lot more dubious as an organisational philosophy for an ostensibly altruistic organisation -- it strongly suggests that management don't have their employees' best interests at heart.

I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that even informal agreements against headhunting other EA organizations' employees would likely violate US antitrust law. 

Yes, we all benefit (on average, in expectation) etc. from a more efficient labour market, and an important part of that is ensuring that workers hear about relevant opportunities for them. Not everyone is constantly refreshing the 80k job board, and many jobs are never listed, so it makes sense to do direct headhunter outreach to potential hires. Organisations should focus on trying to retain talent by being as positively impactful as possible, and by offering an attractive working environment / compensation package, not by keeping their employees in the dark about their alternatives. 

Obviously recruiting people based on misleading information is bad, but that's true regardless of where you're recruiting from, and similarly it's bad to try to retain your current employees in misleading ways.

Hi Dan, I’m Luisa — I’ve been helping EA-aligned organizations find candidates for their open roles as part of my work at 80,000 Hours. I think there’s a good chance one of the direct outreach emails you’ve seen at IDinsight came from me, so I thought it’d be good to share a bit more about what kinds of headhunting we’re doing, and how we’re thinking about it. 

Briefly, 80,000 Hours is sometimes asked by hiring managers at EA-aligned orgs to recommend potential candidates for specific roles. Given we get to know lots of EA-aligned people through our programs, we think we’re pretty well-placed to help talented people find out about impactful roles they might be a good fit for (that they might not have been aware of otherwise).

This does sometimes include reaching out to people who already have jobs — sometimes at EA-aligned (and adjacent) organizations — to find out if they’re open to other roles, and if so, put some roles we think are especially impactful on their radar. 

We hope that the fact that we don’t have the same financial incentives as normal headhunters (who are paid when they get placements) means we’re able to act as a neutral-ish third party trying to think about which roles are extra-worth putting on more people’s radars. 

We recognize that there are potential downsides, like increasing costs to organizations that spend a year training a new hire, only to have that person leave for another org soon once they’ve skilled up. And we absolutely don’t endorse pushing people harder on switching jobs than they would endorse, or in any way misleading people. 

We hope this means we’re able to help create a better-working talent pipeline for orgs doing high-impact work, while minimizing the costs to orgs doing great work (like IDinsight!)

I think this is a good conversation to have. I broadly agree with the majority voice of the comments, that though it can be difficult and unfair to have your employees headhunted away from you after you invested in their development and planned around them being here, ultimately it seems better to allow it to happen because of the benefits to the employee and their new employer.

At the same time, I do want to acknowledge that there is a version of this behaviour that is a problem. To the extent that any headhunter is:

• disrespectful of people's time by trying to involve them in processes that aren't suitable for or interesting to them,
• persistent in the face of polite refusal from the employee in question,
• in any aspect intentionally misleading or dishonest,

then I'm sure we'd all agree they were doing something wrong. It's harder to prevent this kind of behaviour, because it's often subjective when the line has been crossed, but I'd support a general understanding that if a headhunter does this kind of thing, then we hold both them and the organization they are hiring for responsible, perhaps privately at first and then publically if the behaviour persists. Anyone using recruiters or headhunters should feel under an obligation to ensure their agents are acting in ways consistent with their own values.

OP here. Thanks for all of the engagement with this post and for the varying opinions. People have brought up some important points on the benefits of headhunting (increased information, better outcomes for employees, overall better job matches, etc), and I agree with a lot of what is said.   After taking these into account and mulling what has been said, here's where I stand (subject to change):

1. It's clearly ok for EA orgs to hire employees who work at other friendly orgs. Refusing to do so is illegal and I'd say also unethical. 
2. I think it's ok if you work at an EA org and you know someone who might be a great fit for a role at your org, totally find to reach out to them and let them know. 
3. It's not ok to use misinformation. I'll be clear that in the headhunting instances  I witnessed from EA orgs, I did not see any misinformation, and all communication was respectful. 
4. I think recruiters and headhunters within the community should aim to inform rather than persuade recruits, which I do not think is the norm in the headhunting world. This can be a very fine line. The headhunting I witnessed was mostly in the "information" column, yet there was some stuff on the margin. For instance, I think a headhunter should be very careful about insinuate that they job they are recruiting for is higher impact than someone's current job. In one of the emails I saw, the recruiter did not explicitly say this, but it was implied (or at least that was my interpretation). I'm not sure if this was purposeful. 
5. I think it would be a positive norm for friendly orgs to alert one another if they plan to headhunt, especially if reaching out to multiple people for a role. This allows the original org an opportunity to do what they can to ensure that the employee is having their needs met in the current job. This did happen in one of the instances of headhunting that IDinsight encountered, and it was appreciated.  
6.  I think foundations/donor orgs have an extra layer of responsibility, as they wield a lot of power in the ecosystem, and in most cases pay more money than their grantees. When considering headhunting the staff of non-profits, they should be extra sure to follow best practices and ensure that they don't destabilize the orgs they are poaching from. I'm not saying they shouldn't recruit from NGOs, but I think they should be very careful about avoiding persuasion and alerting the recruitee orgs. 
7. I think the bar for paid headhunters is even higher. For instance, if the EA Infrastructure Fund is going to fund headhunters for the EA ecosystem, I think that these headhunters should have a strong bias toward headhunting from lower-impact jobs. (Agreed this is not so easy to figure out what is high and low impact.) If they are instead just contributing to churn among high-impact orgs, I think they have an ambiguous amount of total social impact. Could be high if it increases information, improved job matches, improves employee satisfaction. But could be low if those positive elements are outweighed by switching costs of jobs and the cost of the headhunter themselves. 

For what it's worth, I also share the intuitive aversion. Reading Habryka's comment, I'm not sure that the aversion would stand up to reflection. But I could imagine it doing so after I thought more about it, e.g., if poaching employees would lead to unequal or loopsided mentoring or hiring costs, or if headhunters were paid per person and not less for people from organizations which are already doing valuable work.

First,

 I've been somewhat surprised recently to see a number of very direct headhunting attempts from people in the EA community, directed at key staff members of our organization. This is not a one-off, this is attempts to recruit multiple staff from a number of hiring organizations. 

This is useful information to know! Thanks for sharing it. I just want to send good vibes for "if you see something you see is weird, lean towards transparency."

My personal intuition is that it's good to have a culture where people are politely, and perhaps  lightly, headhunted. 

However, there definitely could be more issues here:

1. It seems bad if some groups/orgs get highly targeted. This can create an uncomfortable situation if not handled well.
2. It's hard to be polite. I could easily imagine recruiters being pushy or rude. 

I imagine that perhaps in this case at least, some orgs used similar logic to target IDinsight (lots of great talent and training, but work seems less directly aligned for specific EA goals), but didn't realize how many others were doing it. 

I'd recommend messaging the Community Health team at CEA to get a bit of coordination. Or just directly send an email to the various orgs flagging the issue. I imagine they might well be able to find a more reasonable solution. 

I think a lot of the disagreements in the comments is coming down to different conceptions of headhunting. Dan, you refer to targeting/specific/direct outreach to particular individuals, but that doesn't seem the crucial difference, its in the intent, tone and incentives.

"Hey X person, you're doing a great job at your current job. You might be totally happy at your current job, but I thought I'd flag this cool new opportunity that seems really impactful - happy to discuss why it might be a good fit" seems fine. 

Giving a hard sell, strongly denigrating the current employer or being strongly incentivised for switches (eg paid a commission) seems way less fine.

Left unspoken? EA needs more head hunting aimed at senior non-EAs.

Hi! I have absolutely no expertise in this, but it seems long-term good to maximize the quality of matches between employers and employees. So, formally, I suppose I disagree with the statement:

Clearly, if a headhunter eases a bottleneck at a high-impact organization while creating a bottleneck at another equally high-impact organization, they are not having a positive effect.

If an employee takes a job at another org, presumably they expect it to be a better match for them going forward. I'd count that as a positive effect, assuming (on average) it increases their effectiveness, decreases their chances of burnout, etc. Even if its just for money or location, its hard to know what intra-household bargains have been made to do EA-work, etc.

There might also be positive general equilibrium effects: An expectation of a robust EA job market (with job-to-job transitions) increased my willingness to leave a non-EA job (academia) and enter this ecosystem. I would have been more hesitant had I felt there was a norm against hiring from other orgs. Though I'll flag that I'm not confident I accurately understand the term 'head-hunting' here, as opposed to recruiting, as opposed to hiring. In any case, a strong 'no head-hunting/recruiting' norm seems like it would weakly pressure orgs not to hire from other orgs (since they wouldn't want to be seen as recruiting from other orgs). 

I get that there are costs associated with re-hiring, re-training, and re-integrating that would be avoided if the original org just directly hires from the non-EA-employed camp. Maybe I'm underestimating these! My uninformed guess is that they are small relative to the benefits of increasing match quality. 

Curious about others thoughts on this though! Thanks for writing it.

Here's a related thought that I'm curious for people's views on: if org X has a reputation for being good at interviewing and hiring candidates, and org Y is hiring for a similar role, and org Y says to candidates "if you have an offer from X then we'll hire you with no further process", or similarly "if you work or have worked at X, we know you're good and don't need to assess you ourselves". This can feel like org Y is misappropriating the products of org X's work and expertise finding and assessing good people. Is this unethical?

My inclination is to say something similar to the replies to this headhunting post: it sucks to have this happen to you, but trying to prevent it in a heavy-handed way would be worse, so it seems better to just be aware of the phenomenon and be mindful of how you are benefiting from the work of others. (And again, the dynamic is different in for-profit organizations in competition with each other vs. non-profits with at least some amount of goal alignment.)

Thanks for this post, Dan. I work in headhunting for EA orgs, so please read these comments with that in mind!

• I'd echo Ozzie's comment on transparency, and I'd want orgs to push back on me if they think what I'm doing is overstepping the mark into something like 'aggressive persuasion'.
• (Naturally) I don't see my role like that, and whilst I wouldn't claim that I perfectly calculate the global impact of every potential job switch when considering reaching out to someone, nor is it a simple case of following a short-term financial incentive. Even from a purely selfish headhunter's perspective, I don't think a strategy of heavy convincing in order to fill a role would be productive in anything but the very short term.
• I certainly consider the downsides for the potential losing employer if that employer's an EA or adjacent org. This is especially so if they haven't been there long, and/or would be making a  sideways move rather than advancing their career.
• That said, I wouldn't want to rule out approaching employees of EA or adjacent orgs, to include extolling the virtues of the hiring org as I understand them. That sort of 'convincing' seems legitimate to me. As Habryka points out, people are capable of considering offers and incentives hiring organisations and headhunters might have, and host orgs are capable of counter-convincing.
• So it seems to me that the key issue is what counts as legitimate or otherwise - obviously deception is wrong, but I'm not sure it's easy to draw the line between 'providing information' and 'convincing'. Do you have specific suggestions? I want to make sure I get this right, so would be keen to discuss with you - my email is [email protected]. 
• FWIW, I agree that it's better to hire from outside of EA where possible, and I'm especially excited about bringing more mid-career talent into the community from 'outside'. What makes this difficult is that hiring managers often want to see evidence of 'value alignment' or 'cultural fit', one proxy for which is often 'working at an EA/adjacent org'.  EA-specific knowledge can also be helpful in a lot of roles. People already connected to this space are also much likelier to understand and be motivated to work on the weird causes that EA orgs pursue.

Thanks again for your post, and I look forward to hearing from you if you'd like to discuss further.