EA - 80,000 Hours wants to see more people trying out recruiting by Niel Bowerman

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: 80,000 Hours wants to see more people trying out recruiting, published by Niel Bowerman on December 18, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Tl;drI'm excited to see more EAs try out recruiting for EA projects. 80k doesn't "have it covered", and we are keen to see more people and organisations test their fit with this kind of work.Recruiting has low "barriers to entry": you need to find a hiring manager who wants your help, and you need to have the time available to help them.Work hard to understand what the hiring manager is looking for.You don't need a mountain of centralised data in a single CRM to get started. You can start with referrals, spreadsheets, emails and conversations.AimsThe aim of this article is to:Encourage more people to test their fit with recruiting, and reduce the extent to which 80,000 Hours is inadvertently "crowding out" other organisations and people from working in the recruiting space.Communicate some tentative "lessons learned" from our time recruiting in 2019-2020.Historical contextIn 2019 and 2020 I worked on a team with Peter McIntyre at 80,000 Hours, helping organisations working to solve some of the world's most pressing problems to identify candidates to hire. Below are some reflections and lessons learned from that period. At the start of 2021 we put on hold much of our efforts to help organisations hire in order to focus on increasing 80,000 Hours' capacity to have conversations with people who applied to speak with us. (We are hoping to increase our capacity on recruiting again in 2023.)We did ~534 calls with potential candidates in 2019 and 2020. We generated lists of names for roughly 174 roles. We spent just a few minutes on some of those lists, and up to a month on others. We think something like 23 people from the lists we generated were later hired by organisations, though we make no claims about counterfactual impact in this article.I've written this article for people who are considering trying out recruiting, but haven't done much recruiting before. I've put the article together pretty quickly, and expect to update parts of it in response to questions and comments, so please do fire away in the comments section. I've posted this on the forum as part of the draft amnesty days.Lots of hiring managers want help hiringThere are a lot of hiring managers out there who are struggling to find great candidates to hire.Sometimes that's because the person they want doesn't exist, but sometimes it's because the hiring manager doesn't have the time to go find the right person.If the problem is that the hiring manager doesn't have the time to find the right person, then you may be able to help if you're willing to put in the time.Focus on building great models of what hiring managers want in a candidateHaving buy-in from the hiring manager is crucialThe best way to build up a model of what the hiring manager is looking for is to be able to ask them a lot of questions.Understand how they would trade off between the various attributes they want in the ideal candidate.If you aren't able to regularly email/message/speak with the hiring manager during the selection process, it will be a bunch harder for you to find a candidate that will ultimately get hired.We tried doing recruiting for a few roles in large organisations where we knew someone on the team but not the hiring manager. We generally had a much lower placement rate in these cases.Give a great experience to the hiring managerIn order to get access to the hiring manager, it's usually valuable to be as helpful as you can initially. Write out detailed but concise descriptions of the candidates you're suggesting, put them into tiers, add LinkedIn links, and generally make the process easy for the hiring manager. Once you have more experience you can start cutt...