EA - Be careful with (outsourcing) hiring by rmoehn

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: Be careful with (outsourcing) hiring, published by rmoehn on October 17, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Who makes up an organization, a community? People. People do the work. People make the decisions. Choosing people well is the most important thing we do. People choice is self-reinforcing, too. Choose one bad COO and he’ll hire more bad people. Have a few bad people in an organization and nobody good will want to work there anymore. Hiring, therefore, is vital. What do you want from a hiring process? A good hire. Crucially, no bad hire. And for those people whom you haven’t hired to be mostly happy with how things went. Because you care for them. Sadly, you’re at risk of making a bad hire and disgruntling your other applicants if you don’t know what you’re doing. If you don’t know what you’re doing, outsourcing isn’t a solution, either, because you don’t know how to judge the actions of those you’re outsourcing to. I will demonstrate this by example of a hiring process I’ve observed as an outsider, in which the hiring firm (call them Hirely) acted in a way that would have seemed sensible to the average founder who knows little about hiring, but to me looked like blundering. Even if you don’t plan to outsource hiring, the following points are worth thinking about. Added 2022-10-16: I won't be arguing every point fully. One commenter even wrote that I make ‘lots of general assertions without a clear explanation as to why people should believe [me]’. (I appreciate this comment.) That's because doing otherwise would have made the article ten times longer. Hiring is a wide field and I've only tilled a small patch of it myself. I encourage you to follow the links to Manager Tools podcasts/whitepapers that I've included the article. They argue many of the claims properly. I will also be glad to explain more in the comments. This is a repurposed article with a history (Expanded on 2022-10-16 from the last paragraph of the originally published introduction. This describes the article's history in boring detail. Feel free to skip.) This article is strange because it's repurposed from a direct critique of the organization behind ‘Hirely’, which is a fictional name. (Please don't try to find out who is behind that name.) This is the first part of the article's history step-by-step: I observe the hiring process in which Hirely is advising the hiring manager. (I'm also advising the hiring manager, mostly telling him to be more involved and listen to Manager Tools.) I think Hirely is giving harmful advice. I write this article as a direct critique. I give the article to Hirely to react to. I tell them that I will edit it to be more general and not point the finger at them (meaning I won't out the organization by name) if they convince me that they're on a better trajectory. You may view this as being kind or you may view it as blackmail. Hirely deliberates internally. Hirely responds to me with the improvements they've made and are making, and asks me to deliver on my promise to edit the critique before publishing. Their response does make me think they're on a better path. (So again, please don't try to find out who they are.) Since I'm too lazy to rewrite the whole damn article, I search and replace the organization name with ‘Hirely’, and rewrite only the introduction. Despite this laziness, I was happy with the way it demonstrated the new main point with specificity (lwspec): If you know very little about X, you can’t safely outsource X. If X = hiring, it’s especially bad. So you better learn something about hiring. You're already yawning, but the story isn't over. To explain all the strangenesses of this article, I have to describe the rest: I publish the article. It receives a lot of downvotes in addition to upvotes. I add a prescript (opposite of postscript) asking ...