Hire for skill not fit
Sometimes we are precious about being right
Ideas are tools, if they don’t seem useful put them back on the shelf.
Why are you hiring?
One thing that I constantly see in job postings in the non-profit world is a preference for candidates with, “Value alignment”, or here in the Norwegian non-secular world, “You identify with our organization’s goals and values”.
I understand this desire, but I think that it is misguided.
This advice is relevant for any organization or business, but you will see that I am really using EA as an example case because I think they are an extreme example of what alignment means for an organization. I would argue that many religious organizations would require less alignment than Effective Altruism. (A lot of people ask if religious people are really religious when they dont seem to be acting on their beliefs. That is rarely a criticism you can aim at effective altruists.)
Effective Altruist value alignment is an incredibly high threshold for anyone to reach, including most active effective altruists.
To say that you need a good Effective Altruist for a job is to limit yourself to a pool of homogenous candidates under the age of 30, who studied very similar things, and do not have all the skills required for a successful organization. Yes, the average EAer is smart and well educated, and they can probably learn a role quite well, but does not mean they could be the best at it.
Rather, there are lots of people in the world who are not value aligned with the EA community that could do an incredible amount of good despite, and possibly because of, their lack of alignment.
If your project is more important the direct cash transfers, don’t you want the best?
I will also go out on a limb and share my intuition that most EAers are not suited for a variety of roles. More specifically: marketing, management, fundraising and advocacy. In fact, for many jobs in the world, thinking like an EAer can put you at a disadvantage because often the most important thing is not what you say, but how you say it, or if it is worth saying at all. The EA desire for “openness” and “honesty” can actually be incredibly destructive ( yes, this is a rule of thumb, not universal, you can just insert your exception clause here, please), and often inaccurate.
I will give you an example: empathy. Often doing the right thing involves understanding someone else’s perspective, accepting it regardless of its rationality, and then acting in the manner that creates the best outcomes possible despite your actions being rationally sub-optimal. This is a whole other issue worth talking about, which is subsuming your own rationality to the success of project. Rationalism and Effective Altruism are not the same thing.
Experience matters in the world, and by hiring people with experience you are buying skills that cannot be studied. These skills take time, take experience, and also education that is not part of the typical EA skill set. Many, many good people did not go to the Ivy League, and studied something that you need at a university that is probably better at it than Yale.
Culture is very much a choice
Moving on, this does not mean that fit doesn’t matter, but if you want the best talent then you also have to make sure that your culture suits your whole team.
Small teams often don’t have to worry about fit because they are a bunch of friends hustling. They have a strong shared vision, similar habits, taste in office and communication. They tend to be able to spend a lot of time together because they are friends — if they couldn’t, they wouldn’t have started their gig in the first place.
Eventually as you find success you are going to need to look to hire people not like you. They might not be utilitarians, they might be omnivores, but whatever they are that you are not, there is a high likelihood that a non-aligned person will help your project be much more useful than direct cash transfers.
So this doesn’t mean you need to serve meat at team dinners. This does mean, though, that you need to see how you can cater to their needs and preferences in a manner that helps them do their job well, because helping them do their job well can have incredibly positive consequences for your work.
You need to start shaping the culture to fit your people, not just find people that fit into your culture.
I think that this is something that Effective Altruism could be good at. Effective Altruism is a very welcoming community. If there is homogeneity, it is not a choice but an unintended consequence worth discussing further. Effective Altruists on the whole are very conscious of others and care. The trick is to make it an active decision to think about the culture, to shape the culture to make it inclusive. Inclusivity is not just the desire to do no harm, it is also the positive action of making it accessible.
Edge-case criticism
To cut off any edge-case comments I know are brewing: Dont hire jerks, dont hire toxic people, and of course don’t hire people who are actively opposed to your values or goals. That’s just common sense. Like I said in my epistemics, ideas are tools, not lifetime sentences. use your common sense and remember that competency doesn’t require cognition. Use that intuition evolution has given you!
