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: Progress report on CEA's search for a new CEO, published by MaxDalton on August 31, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

I wanted to give an update on the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA)'s search for a new CEO.

We (Claire Zabel, Max Dalton, and Michelle Hutchinson) were appointed by the Effective Ventures boards to lead this search and make a recommendation to the boards. The committee is advised by James Snowden, Caitlin Elizondo, and one experienced executive working outside EA.

We previously announced the search and asked for community input in this post.

Note, we set out searching for an Executive Director, and during the process have changed the role title to CEO because it was more legible to candidates not familiar with CEA or EV. The role scope remains unchanged.

In summary, we received over 400 nominations, reached out to over 150 people, spoke to about 60, and received over 25 applications. We're still considering around 15 candidates, and are currently more deeply assessing <5 candidates who seem especially promising.

Process

Over 400 people were nominated for the role

We invited recommendations from CEA staff, stakeholders, and the EA community via the Forum.

We selected candidates for outreach according to their profile and experience, the strength of recommendation we received, and (in some cases) our pre-existing knowledge about them.

We decided this approach (rather than reaching out to all nominees or having an open call for applications) because

Many nominations were fairly speculative (for instance one person nominated over 30 people, many of whom did not have management experience: this was helpful because it generated some useful names we would otherwise not have known about, but it probably would not have been a good use of our/candidates' time to reach out to all of these people).

More generally, we wanted to be careful about our time and applicants' time.

We thought (based on advice from professional recruiters) that a narrower outreach process would be more likely to be attractive to our most promising candidates (who matter disproportionately).

Overall our sense from talking to people with experience of this is that this selective, non-public process is fairly standard practice in executive recruitment. I think that the main reason for this is that in executive recruitment your top candidates (who are the most important ones) have a very high opportunity cost for their time, and personalized non-public outreach is a much stronger signal that it will be worth their time engaging in the process.

My guess is that some of our top candidates would not have proactively submitted an application, but did engage when we reached out to them.

We had a lower bar for reaching out to candidates we were less familiar with (because a small chance that they would be our top candidate justified the effort).

In the end, we reached out to over 150 potential candidates

We shared a document containing information on CEA and the role, and invited them to meet a member of the search committee (typically Max).

We sometimes asked people to consider booking a call even if they weren't interested in the role, because we wanted to get their advice on our hiring process.

In many cases, we tried to personalize outreach messages somewhat and use our network:

When we knew the candidates, this was easy

Sometimes we asked for introductions from mutual connections

However there were some cases where we didn't personalize (e.g. if we couldn't find a good mutual connection).

To give a sense of the range of candidates we reached out to, according to our very rough assessment they had:

EA context

~50% high (e.g. they've been working at an EA org or otherwise have lots of signs of engagement with EA ideas).

~40% medium (e.g. they attended an EAG once or did 80k coaching, but n...