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: Talent identification as an underappreciated career option, published by CE on May 27, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Ambitious Impact is hiring!

Ambitious Impact (AIM), formerly Charity Entrepreneurship (CE), runs training and incubation programs for high-impact career paths.

Recently, we have been scaling our work. AIM has developed new programs to support talented individuals in impactful careers beyond founding a charity. These include grantmaking, nonprofit research, and for-profit entrepreneurship. We are currently seeking a Talent and Recruitment Manager (or Director) to help us find and select the most talented people for these programs, helping outstanding individuals put their skills to better use for the world.

Talent identification, or vetting as we frequently refer to it within Ambitious Impact, has received little attention as a potentially highly impactful career. For the purposes of this article, we're defining talent identification/vetting as work that takes a recruitment process from the point of application closure to the point of a job offer.

This is separate from the marketing or communications work essential in a recruitment process to advertise the role and encourage high-quality candidates to apply.

We believe a talented individual taking our Talent and Recruitment Manager position would take a high-impact, high-leverage role. Similar opportunities for impact likely exist at other effective organizations scaling significantly. This article shares our thinking behind this.

Why great vetting matters

Our internal assessment from the past five years of running our Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program is that the quality of the co-founding team is the best predictor of high-impact charities. As we scale up, one of our biggest challenges is identifying highly talented, value-aligned individuals from thousands of candidates worldwide. The difference in outcomes between a bad and a good hire can be huge, and we think this variation is even more extreme with co-founders.

The initial staff of an organization sets the pace, tone, and culture for the long term. As we scale, we must identify outstanding candidates for our new programs, including researchers and for-profit entrepreneurs where we have less track record and precedent to base decisions on.

We believe high-quality vetting may be high leverage for organizations like AIM scaling significantly and looking to maintain a strong culture and values in who we hire and why. At small organizations, the leadership team can exert an outsized influence on the organization's culture and processes, stepping in directly to make changes where appropriate. Larger organizations cannot operate like this since there is too much work for leadership to be directly involved in.

In these circumstances, effective talent identification is crucial. High-quality vetting involves finding potential new staff who are particularly talented and well-suited to the organization's culture, values, and aims. In this way, the person vetting must clearly and deeply understand what drives the organization's culture while identifying the answers, experiences, and traits a candidate may offer that best correlate with the organization's culture.

A vetting manager must develop explicit, testable role and career fit models, pairing these with a deep understanding of what it takes to excel in various career paths. With this knowledge, they can design processes to select the right talent, enabling a team's rapid growth while protecting its core values and approaches.

What might make you a great fit for vetting

Vetting is more than a technical role. The ideal vetting officer is person-focused, with a strong practical understanding of human psychology and a keen eye for quickly assessing people. While these skills can be enhanced...