I'm the Chief Economist at IDinsight. 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.
I understand that the recruitment of great staff is a key bottleneck for EA orgs, and that this has resulting in more resources being into headhunting. (For posts that discuss this issue, see here, here, and here.) But I would have though that this headhunting would be concentrated on less impactful organizations outside the EA community. 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.
I wouldn't call IDinsight an EA organization, but we are certainly collaborative with the EA ecosystem, working closely with EA funders and high-impact implementation organizations in global health and development. We are a nonprofit dedicated to maximizing our social impact, and although I'm certainly biased I think we are in impactful organization. Perhaps headhunters targeting our staff feel that the roles they are recruiting for are much higher-impact than the roles people currently have at IDinsight, and I would respect their actions if this were the case. However, I would imagine that headhunters also are motivated to fill roles, and this would hinder them from accurately weighing the global impact of someone moving from job X to job Y.
I do understand this is complicated. The decision to move jobs ultimately rests with the worker, not the headhunter, and I of course respect the decision of anyone to switch jobs. But I do think the EA community should be thinking strategically about how to maximize our headhunting resources for total global impact, as opposed to just impact for the organizations they are working for. I wonder, are there any established norms or best-practices within the community? If not, I think it would make sense to develop some.
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.
Thanks for the comment- I understand where you are coming from, and see how this could go either ways. But I think I'd tend to disagree. I'm always happy for people to be aware of other opportunities and consider them, but I think there's a difference when there are paid professionals targeting specific people to switch jobs. These professions tend to not just inform, but also convince. So in the situation of a job switch, you end up with a situation where the recruiting organization gains, the recruited organization loses, and actual job-seeker perhaps gains but this isn't totally clear, depends on the amount that their decision was motivated by information vs convincing. And there's a deadweight loss from the salary of the headhunter. Therefore, I think that the net effect of a headhunter could be positive or negative. Certainly it seems like they would have a higher impact if they recruited people from low-impact orgs to move to high-impact orgs.
I don't know, this sounds to me like treating employees at EA organizations as children that have to be protected from "convincing misinformation". My employees are totally capable of handling headhunters trying to convince them, and I think most other people in EA are too. These people are not children, and it's not my right or job as an employer to protect them from harmful-to-me-seeming information, especially when I am obviously in a massive conflict of interest in regard to that information.
Perhaps obvious, but while I agree that your employer should not make it their business to protect you from misinformation of this kind, I still think that anyone who spread genuinely "convincing misinformation" would be doing something wrong and should stop.
(I'm not necessarily expecting people to agree on whether a given headhunting pitch is misinformation or not, but in cases where it is, that's obviously a problem.)
I feel like the original post was complaining about recruiting specifically as an injury to the current employer. If the claim is "EA orgs are lying during recruitment" that's a huge problem no matter where they are recruiting from.
Wasn't part of the general objection early on to Leverage over them appearing to ~headhunt (I don't know details) from other orgs like MIRI? (That very well may not be part of your issues with them though?)
Indeed, I think that criticism (as well as the criticism that they recruited donors away from other organizations) was quite unjustified (and I contributed somewhat to it a few years ago).