EA - Suggest candidates for CEA's next Executive Director by MaxDalton

Link to original articleWelcome 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: Suggest candidates for CEA's next Executive Director, published by MaxDalton on April 26, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.As previously mentioned on the Forum, the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) is searching for a new Executive Director.We (Claire Zabel, Max Dalton, and Michelle Hutchinson) have been appointed by the Effective Ventures boards to lead this search and make recommendations to the boards.We wanted to give you all a high-level update on the process, and the opportunity to suggest candidates and give input.What we’re looking forWe’re looking for someone:With a compelling strategy for CEA,Who is dedicated to the mission set out in their strategy,Who has the management experience and leadership ability to execute on that vision,With strong judgement, high integrity, and clear communication skills.One thing to highlight is that we are both open to and enthusiastic about candidates who want to pursue significant changes to CEA. This might include:Spinning off or shutting down programs, or starting new programs,Focusing on specific cause areas, or on promoting general EA principles,Trying to build something more like a mass movement or trying to be more selective and focused,Significant staffing changes,Changing CEA’s name.We’re open to such significant changes because:We think that organizations tend to be more effective when they are led by people with a strong vision for the organization, and the leadership has leeway to execute on that vision.We think that much of CEA’s historical work has been highly effective, but we believe there are many alternative opportunities CEA could pursue (for instance, cause-area-specific community building, or focusing more on a subset of our programs), and that some of these could potentially have an even higher impact.However, we are also open to candidates who don’t make radical changes, but continue to build on CEA’s work to date.It is not a requirement that:The candidate has experience working in effective altruism (that might constrain our search space too far).They are an unalloyed fan of the effective altruism community as it exists; we think people who most notice the flaws in things may be best placed to help improve them.They are located in Oxford, or anywhere else in particular: we are a remote-first team. It is highly desirable for candidates to be able to have working hours that overlap with standard working hours between Pacific and British time though.Our processAdvisorsTo increase diversity of viewpoints feeding into the search, and add people with additional experience running complicated executive hiring rounds, we have added advisors to the search committee, who we loop into our decision-making and ask for input.We invited the following people, who have all now accepted:James Snowden, who has worked in global health and wellbeing for a number of different organizations including GWWC and GiveWell, and is now a program officer at Open Philanthropy.An advisor who works outside effective altruism and doesn’t want to be publicly listed. They have corporate experience hiring and managing hundreds of people. This advisor has a “principles first” (relatively cause agnostic) approach to cause prioritization.Caitlin Elizondo, who is Head of People Operations at CEA. She has run a large number of hiring rounds and has a great understanding of CEA’s staff and history.Finding candidatesWe have reached out via email to about 100 people to ask for candidate recommendations and feedback on the process. We’ve also asked 80,000 Hours to help with headhunting for the role.We are also seeking candidate suggestions and feedback from Forum readers (you!).Assessing candidatesAt least one committee member will go through all the suggestions, and make a longlist. Then the committee and ...