The best approach to take to hiring differs by industry.

This means that best practice differs across startups, think tank, a video production, non-profits, academia, and news outlets will all have different practices. The practices that work best in the EA ecosystem will be different again – but unfortunately the effective altruism organisation landscape is much smaller than all of those, and so people haven't written books on how to do it.

I have been working as a hiring manager and sometimes grant maker in this space for over ten years, and I have developed some views on which practices work well in this industry. And I’ve noticed that others have (semi-)independently converged on these!

Below I've written out a few of the ones which I follow. I’ve especially tried to list those which might seem most surprising to people coming from industries like the ones listed above.

I’m trying to do a pretty quick job of this so that it actually gets out there. [Having written that sentence, I proceeded not to publish the post for 2 years. So if you’re wondering why there are errors in it, it's because this time round I’m actually going [...]

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Outline:

(01:45) Run unstructured interviews

(03:18) Work tests can be feasible and useful even for high-skill roles

(05:24) Informal references are useful

(08:07) Get information from people with conflicts of interest

(09:43) You can put numbers on things (but don't trust them too much)

(10:51) Bonus suggestion for applicants: Ask about the people you'll be working with

(11:59) Getting advice

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.