I definitely agree with this challenge — I also wonder if this is part of the reason many of the people who I have found to be most thoughtful about recruiting in the field founded or ran small or new organizations — they had to recruit under different constraints (e.g. offering less job stability, less name recognition, etc), and had to be more creative to get talented people in.

Yeah definitely, I think that would be a really reasonable thing to do, and is the kind of experimentation I want to see in hiring in the space that I talk about here!

Yeah, I think it provides some evidence in favor of it, but there are lots of downsides to that too, like:

• Obviously, there is risk a bias, etc. (e.g. I know a small subset of possible people!)
• Lots of times, I don't actually know someone who would be a particularly good fit.

I think that doing this is lower downside risk, but probably somewhat lower upside potential in expectation, and probably just varies case-to-case in how those shake out overall.

I agree with a lot in this post! Especially doing work tests for high-skilled roles, and getting information from people with conflicts of interest. Thanks for writing this!

Run unstructured interviews

I’m not sure I agree with the straightforward reading of this (though maybe that's slightly different than what you mean). I think the case for running semi-structured interviews is better than running structured ones. But overall, I don't take "structured interviews" to mean "only ask the same set of questions". I take at least some of the literature on it to refer to asking roughly the same questions, then using structured follow ups until you've gotten a lot of information on each question from a candidate. The important part of the "structure" to me is trying to get comparability on their skills on specific attributes, not comparability on their response to the question.

Some general reflections I've had about hiring that feel related to this, but also make me skeptical of deviating from best practice (e.g. develop a job analysis, test people directly on the items in the job analysis in a structured way).

• The more hiring I do, the less confidence I feel about ~any practice. This pushes me more and more toward "see how they do at the actual job or the skills that seem needed for the job."
• I think that often what I want to do in hiring is basically very biased by what's pleasant for me. Structured interviews are very boring, especially when you do a lot of them. It feels like I'm not getting to know someone deeply. But when I look back at my most successful hires, it's almost always me following a well designed process. The only cases I see where I deviated heavily from the process and it went well was when I had worked extensively with the person before and knew them quite well (though this could just be evidence that I'm not very good at casually assessing people without structure).
  • Relatedly, this is anecdotal, but I notice organizations who are less formal in their hiring seem also less happy with their hires. I don't feel as confident in this claim though.
• Hiring is also hard if you're progressively eliminating candidates across rounds, because you never can measure the candidates you rejected. The candidate pool is always biased by who you chose to advance already. This makes me feel like I'm never collecting particularly useful data on hiring in hiring rounds. I don't ever learn how good the people I rejected were!

Informal references are useful

I agree that these are very useful, but I've also noticed them increasing in frequency in the ecosystem, and that concerns me. I think these can be really biasing. I've started turning down most requests for these for a few reasons, and now usually ask the hiring manager if they can get the candidate's consent for my reference.

• If someone left a workplace in a termination, sometimes, especially with employers of record, there might be a non-disparagement clause. My choice to take or turndown an informal reference might be primarily informed by my legal obligations, but because I can't say that, the person collecting the reference doesn't have any info on why I'm saying I won't give a reference.
• I often feel like informal references don't pass a smell test of "if the candidate knew the hiring manager was collecting this, would they be okay with it." That feels like I'm breaking a candidate's trust.
• I've been asked for informal references for my direct reports. I'm thankful that often these direct reports have shared that they were job searching with me, but if they hadn't, they probably would rightfully consider this a pretty big violation of trust on the hiring manager's end.

There are cases where the above don't apply, but I do think candidates deserve to know that there is some level of reference collecting happening from references they didn't share.

Yeah, I agree with the standardization issue and all the downsides you outline, which for me would be the main appeal of someone creating a standard, and might resolve most the concerns (since then there would be consistent practices on when organizations do cash vs accruals). I think that generally, organizations who do modified cash accrue things on a timed basis (e.g. liabilities that will exist for longer than a month will be accrued) and a size basis (e.g. major multi-year grants might be accrued), and just using that as a standard would help.

I think the primary advantage is cash accounting has way less room for error. It's half the general ledger lines, so I guess half as many places to make mistakes. And, since a journal entry of only P&L and liability/receivable accounts isn't reconcilable, in practice, it seems like transactions that only touch them generate more errors than ones touching cash accounts.

And, I think I regularly encounter organizations doing accrual whose liability accounts are just really messed up (e.g. I'm pretty sure every organization on earth accruing payroll taxes has some payroll tax account with a messed up value they have to correct).

I do think for EA organizations, INPAS seems like a big improvement on GAAP. One issue in adoption in the US - since statements need to be prepared according to GAAP for charitable solicitation registration audits for most states, there would need to be some state level policy change, since organizations might be hesitant to pay for two audits.

Nice! Thanks for sharing.

I only read the implementation guidance, so these comments are not super in the weeds. Also, I'm only comparing to GAAP, not FRS/IFRS:

• Restricted net assets seem to be handled way better than GAAP, and I'm very in favor of getting rid of release transactions, though in practice it seems like this is mostly something organizations don't actually do on their books, so are mostly added by auditors.
  • It also gets rid of the issues of people who try to track restricted assets on the balance sheet, which is clearly an intuition lots of people in nonprofits have / want to act on, so that seems good.
• It doesn't seem like it can handle endowments/permanently restricted assets super cleanly compared to GAAP - this explicitly seems like an upside of GAAP's restriction handling, but also maybe isn't super relevant to many EA orgs?
• The rest of the standards seems basically fine, but I wouldn't expect EA organizations to see major changes in their books if they adopted them — I suspect it basically wouldn't change how EA orgs recorded transactions (at least against GAAP), and just would impact preparation during an audit.
  • Since almost no EA funders ask for financial reporting (especially in a standardized format), I don't know if it would impact organization's engagement with funders.
• I could see this being really nice for anyone who does gov grants in the US, though that would require a substantial policy change.

My controversial accounting take will forever remain that the vast majority of EA nonprofits and funders would be better served by organizations preparing financial statements on a modified cash basis rather than any accrual standard, and I suspect this is true for basically any non-service provisioning nonprofit (e.g. hospitals or food pantries, etc), and I'd be way more excited to see a standard that supported modified cash accounting for audit purposes.

I think this is plausibly among the top two most promising immediate funding opportunities in the wild animal welfare space (besides general support for WAI, where I have giant conflicts of interest). CXL is really good at fundraising from non-EA donors, and if this works, which it seems like it has a decent chance to, it just effectively helps conservation dollars and for-profit investment go into a promising WAW intervention. I'd be excited to chat with anyone considering funding it about why I think it is so promising in more detail.

I think this is true as a response in certain cases, but many philanthropic interventions probably aren't tried enough times to get the sample size and lots of communities are small. It's pretty easy to imagine a situation like:

• You and a handful of other people make some positive EV bets.
• The median outcome from doing this is the world is worse, and all of the attempts at these bets end up neutral or negative.
• The positive EV is never realized and the world is worse on average, despite both the individuals and the ecosystem being +EV.

It seems like this response would imply you should only do EV maximization if your movement is large (or that its impact is reliably predictable if the movement is large).

But I do think this is a fair point overall — though you could imagine a large system of interventions with the same features I describe that would have the same issues as a whole.

Probably, but not sure! Yeah, the above is definitely ignoring cluelessness considerations, on which I don't have any particularly strong opinion.

I don't think this is quite what I'm referring to, but I can't quite tell! But my quick read is we are talking about different things (I think because I used the word utility very casually). I'm not talking about my own utility function with regard to some action, but the potential outcomes of that action on others, and I don't know if I'm embracing risk aversion views as much as relating to their appeal.

Or maybe I'm misunderstanding, and you're just rejecting the conclusion that there is a moral difference between taking, say, an action with +1 EV and a 20% chance of causing harm and an action with +1EV and a 0% chance of causing harm / think I just shouldn't care about that difference?