EA - Hiring: a couple of lessons by Cait Lion

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Hiring: a couple of lessons, published by Cait Lion on September 14, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Background: I work in recruitment for CEA. Here are two aspects of recruitment where I worry some organisations may be making costly mistakes.Target your role vision (carefully)When a hiring manager identifies the need to hire an additional staff member, I think the process they ought to follow is to figure out that person's anticipated key responsibilities and then carefully draft a list of competencies which they endorse as predictive of success at those specific tasks. And to the extent possible, they should then evaluate only based on those traits that are (ideally pre-registered) predictors of success.What I think sometimes happens instead is something like one of the two following situations:The hiring manager imagines a person they would like to fill that role and writes down a list of traits for this imagined individual.The hiring manager picks a title for the role and writes down a list of traits and abilities that usually are associated with that role title.I think this causes problems.Toy example:Imagine you are hiring for a new executive assistant. You've never had an executive assistant before. You imagine your ideal executive assistant. They are personable, detail oriented, they write extremely clear professional emails, and are highly familiar with the EA community. So you test them on writing, on how warm and personable they are, and on knowledge of EA cause areas. Maybe you hire a recent grad who is an extremely strong writer. Once you hire them, you notice that things aren't working out because while they write elegant emails, they do so slowly. More importantly, they are struggling to keep track of all the competing priorities you hoped they'd help you handle, and have trouble working on novel tasks autonomously.It turned out, you should have focused instead on someone who can keep track of competing priorities, who is highly productive and can work autonomously, etc. Maybe it turns out that some of those criteria you originally listed were nice-to-haves, but in fact for this particular role at this particular moment, it's actually correct to prefer a seasoned deadline ninja who is a non-native speaker and writes slightly clunky emails. The person you hired might have also actually been an excellent executive assistant for some people in some contexts, they just weren't the puzzle piece you most needed. If you had taken the prediction exercise seriously, I claim you would have noticed at least some of the mismatch and adjusted.In my opinion, it's worth investing significant time into targeting your role vision.Other benefits:Facilitating stakeholder alignment. Often there are a variety of stakeholders in a given hiring round (e.g. other team members, leadership). If you create a thoughtful vision document in advance of launching the round, you can share it with those stakeholders. This can surface and hopefully allow you to resolve previously invisible disagreements that would otherwise have snuck up on you mid-way through the recruitment round.(Ideally) fighting biasIf you don't pre-register endorsed traits, you are more likely to be (even more) subconsciously swayed by the candidates' similarity to you or possession of not-role-relevant status-related traits (e.g. confidence in an interview setting)Done effectively, pre-registering endorsed traits should be good for diversityNoticing/acknowledging confusion earlier in the process. Even if after attempting this exercise you don't have a strongly held list of traits, then at least you know you don't knowEvaluate the traits you care about (and not related traits)I suspect many EA orgs are using candidate evaluation tools in a way that causes a harmful level of false negatives....