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This is: Hiring Process and Takeaways from Fish Welfare Initiative , published by haven on the effective altruism forum.
Who should read this: This post will likely only be useful to those employers who will be directly involved in a hiring process, although the Recommendations for Applicants section should be useful for most job applicants. Job applicants may also find it interesting to learn about the employer side of the process.
We (the co-founders of Fish Welfare Initiative) recently completed our hiring process for our first new full-time employees: a Research Analyst and an Animal Welfare Specialist (more on that distinction later).
As neither of us had previous hiring experience, we set out to build a process based on the best available evidence on how to hire effectively, objectively, and kindly. The following is what we found and learned.
We hope that this process and the linked templates will be useful to your organization and will save you some of the large time investment required to create a new process. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to comment below or contact us.
Big Takeaways
Probably the best hiring advice we received came from the CEO of a GiveWell-recommended charity. He looks for candidates who are “smart, nice, and really want the job.”
Your hiring process is a reflection of your organization. To reflect FWI, we aimed to make our hiring process evidence-based, compassionate, unconventional/innovative, and requiring some dedication.
If you’re not already, you should use Calendly or another scheduling software to schedule all interviews.
We found EA Facebook pages, our website, and personal recommendations to be the best places to find talented applicants.
Score everything with a template, where applicant materials and questions are all scored quantitatively. This will help you increase objectivity. You should input these scores for each round into one master spreadsheet.
With interviews, we updated away from asking the same somewhat shallow questions. Rather, asking fewer and more probing semi-structured questions provided more valuable information.
Don’t be afraid to gather more information about a candidate: additional calls, emails, and interviews can all be helpful.
Don’t be a jerk to your applicants. Too many employers are. Your applicants will appreciate you for how you treat them and leave with a good impression of your organization.
Resources We Used
We relied heavily on the following resources and highly recommend looking them over. We agree with most of the recommendations they make, and have tried to restrict this post to primarily our own original takeaways so as not to duplicate work.
Charity Entrepreneurship’s Application Process
Takeaways from EAF’s Hiring Round (which heavily inspired the creation and structure of this post)
Hiring Ethically & Rationally - Aaron Hamlin
Hire with Your Head
Effective Strategies for Equity and Inclusion - Sentience Institute
Additionally, although it was published towards the end of our hiring process, Notes on hiring a copyeditor for CEA is also a good resource.
We are very grateful to the organizations and individuals who created these resources.
The Role We Hired For
We were originally looking for a researcher who had prior knowledge and (ideally) credentials with fish and animal welfare. As this was the first hire FWI was going to make, we also wanted someone who would be able to take a leadership role in shaping the organization.
We ended up advertising for two separate roles: a Research Analyst and an Animal Welfare Specialist.
Advertising for Two Separate Jobs
Initially, we were unsure whether we wanted someone who was an early-career generalist (flexible and value-aligned), or someone who was later-career and had more domain knowledge and credentials (although possibly less flexibil...
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