I'm the Chief Economist at IDinsight. I've been somewhat surprised recently to see a number of very direct headhunting attempts from people in the EA community, directed at key staff members of our organization. This is not a one-off, this is attempts to recruit multiple staff from a number of hiring organizations.
I understand that the recruitment of great staff is a key bottleneck for EA orgs, and that this has resulting in more resources being into headhunting. (For posts that discuss this issue, see here, here, and here.) But I would have though that this headhunting would be concentrated on less impactful organizations outside the EA community. Clearly, if a headhunter eases a bottleneck at a high-impact organization while creating a bottleneck at another equally high-impact organization, they are not having a positive effect.
I wouldn't call IDinsight an EA organization, but we are certainly collaborative with the EA ecosystem, working closely with EA funders and high-impact implementation organizations in global health and development. We are a nonprofit dedicated to maximizing our social impact, and although I'm certainly biased I think we are in impactful organization. Perhaps headhunters targeting our staff feel that the roles they are recruiting for are much higher-impact than the roles people currently have at IDinsight, and I would respect their actions if this were the case. However, I would imagine that headhunters also are motivated to fill roles, and this would hinder them from accurately weighing the global impact of someone moving from job X to job Y.
I do understand this is complicated. The decision to move jobs ultimately rests with the worker, not the headhunter, and I of course respect the decision of anyone to switch jobs. But I do think the EA community should be thinking strategically about how to maximize our headhunting resources for total global impact, as opposed to just impact for the organizations they are working for. I wonder, are there any established norms or best-practices within the community? If not, I think it would make sense to develop some.
I really appreciated this summary, and the thoughtfulness and epistemic care it implies. I agree with most of your takeaways here.
I think most of any remaining disagreements/bad-blood arising from "intra-impact" headhunting will come down to people's reactions to persuasion/hard-sells. I think this is a borderline case that I don't really know how to think about, which is distinct from (and a lot harder to adjudicate than) anything to do with misinformation.
I definitely feel like there's a dynamic where, if there's a culture of being careful/deferential/soft with your pitches, one person who comes in and is willing to make hard sells will extract a lot of benefits, in a way that feels a lot like defecting. This will also put pressure on everyone else to be more hard-sell-y, which probably has bad effects. OTOH, if someone really does honestly & reasonably think that a particular opportunity is exceptionally high-impact (in general, or for a particular individual), there's something to be said for outright saying that, and being willing to pay social costs to increase the chance of realising that impact. Someone being willing to hard-sell to you can also provide additional information about personal fit (in both directions) in a way that seems plausibly valuable.
I could go on, but I'm rambling. Suffice it to say that I have complicated feelings about a strong form of "explain, don't persuade" here. (I personally think I, and many people I know, generally sell too softly, which is probably influencing my takes here in a few different ways.)