Caveat:, my experience here is pretty limited (mostly educational programs), but within that, I want to share where I currently see entry points for generalists.
I’d look for people who’ve taken on organizing roles within introductory parts of EA—running study groups, coordinating hackathon teams or cohorts, organizing events, etc. Especially people who’ve helped others learn, like facilitators or student group organizers. It isn’t perfect filter, but I see it as a decent proxy for epistemic rigor and ability to work with others.
And yes! We’ve too struggled hiring from outside the field—context turned out to matters a lot.
We got many of our best people by watching which volunteers got things done and stealing them. At some point we decided to make this replicable, so now we run volunteer days for projects not directly tied to our core work (solstices, quests, etc.). Sometimes we just grow our own organizers. For example, before our evals course, we ran a short facilitator training and built a team from there.
Not saying these are best practices, but that’s what worked for us. Curious how others approach this and what their pipelines look like.
Also I’m really glad this is being pointed out. I wish more people start experimenting here.
Caveat:, my experience here is pretty limited (mostly educational programs), but within that, I want to share where I currently see entry points for generalists.
I’d look for people who’ve taken on organizing roles within introductory parts of EA—running study groups, coordinating hackathon teams or cohorts, organizing events, etc. Especially people who’ve helped others learn, like facilitators or student group organizers. It isn’t perfect filter, but I see it as a decent proxy for epistemic rigor and ability to work with others.
And yes! We’ve too struggled hiring from outside the field—context turned out to matters a lot.
We got many of our best people by watching which volunteers got things done and stealing them. At some point we decided to make this replicable, so now we run volunteer days for projects not directly tied to our core work (solstices, quests, etc.).
Sometimes we just grow our own organizers. For example, before our evals course, we ran a short facilitator training and built a team from there.
Not saying these are best practices, but that’s what worked for us. Curious how others approach this and what their pipelines look like.
Also I’m really glad this is being pointed out. I wish more people start experimenting here.
I agree with this, and this is why our outreach strategy so far has focused very intensely on EA and AI safety group organizers!