Talent, value alignment, and scaling the animal movement

• I used an LLM to help structure this post and estimate the AI writing to be less than 10%. Thinking is all mine (if such a thing can ever be said!)
• Replies from @lauren_mee 🔸 to the original Slack thread, which I broadly agree with, have shaped my reply somewhat.

There’s been an interesting discussion this week in the "animals" channel of the Ambitious Impact Slack about how the animal movement should think about talent and value alignment as funding grows. I originally wrote the reply below for that Slack, but thought ended up having too much to say on this subject and it got too long

For context, the initial post argued roughly that:

1. Because funding in animal advocacy is increasing faster than the supply of “movement‑insider” talent, we should look especially hard for projects that absorb a lot of money cost‑effectively but don’t require many value‑aligned^[1] staff.
2. Organisations should be cautious about hiring value‑aligned people for easy‑to‑monitor work that could be done by non‑aligned staff.
3. Managing non‑value‑aligned people will become a highly impactful skill in the animal movement.

Below I explain why I broadly agree with (3), am somewhat sympathetic to parts of (1), and disagree with (2 as stated).

By way of background: I have over 20 years’ experience in digital learning, organisational transformation, and people development across global companies and mission‑driven teams. I’ve led large‑scale learning and change programmes with governments, corporates and SMEs, and I’m currently helping build Myrias, an animal welfare venture studio. A lot of my career has been spent on exactly the question: “How do we bring in talent, develop it, and build cultures that can scale without breaking?”

1. Do we actually face a “value‑aligned labour” constraint?

On the first point, my instinct is that we should start from real bottlenecks rather than abstract hypotheticals.

From what I see, competition for roles in animal organisations is still quite strong, with many orgs reporting many more qualified applicants than positions, especially for generalist, operations, and research roles. That doesn’t mean there aren’t gaps - there clearly are in some specialised areas (policy, technical work, certain geographies) - but I’m not yet convinced that “we can’t find enough value‑aligned people” is the core constraint for most promising interventions.

My questions for this framing would be:

• Are there concrete interventions that look highly promising on impact grounds but are currently failing or not being attempted because they require large numbers of staff who cannot be found within the pool of value‑aligned or mission‑aligned candidates?
• If we can point to such interventions, is the binding constraint truly “alignment”, or is it more often a mix of skills, management capacity, geography/visa issues, or weak onboarding and processes?

If we can identify real examples, I’d be excited to help on targeted solutions, e.g. building specific talent pipelines, creating tailored training, or designing organisational structures that can absorb bigger numbers of non‑aligned staff safely, rather than assuming in advance that labour‑heavy interventions must rely heavily or only on non‑aligned people.

2. Why not treat value alignment as an explicit criterion?

On the second point (“be cautious about hiring value‑aligned people for easy‑to‑monitor work”), I find myself pushing in almost the opposite direction.

If a value‑aligned candidate is as capable as a non‑aligned candidate, I don’t see why we wouldn’t want them in the running, especially in a movement where:

• Funding is still constrained relative to conventional sectors, so we often can’t match top market rates.
• Work can be psychologically demanding (e.g. exposure to animal suffering, reputational risks, adversarial interactions).
• Founders and senior staff are typically strongly value‑aligned, which shapes the culture and expectations inside organisations.

Value‑aligned and mission‑aligned staff tend, empirically, to be more willing to:

• Take below‑market pay to work on the cause.
• Stay through funding dips or reputational shocks.
• Accept the real emotional costs of advocacy and movement‑building.
• Work through conflict with an eye on impact rather than status or personal gain.

That doesn’t mean they should always be preferred, regardless of competence; but it does mean that alignment is a meaningful plus, not something we should be “cautious” about.

There’s also a culture and incentives angle. 

Many mission‑driven organisations develop what I’d call “mission as alibi” cultures: because they’re doing good in the world, they implicitly treat the mission as a licence to ignore toxic dynamics, bad management, and high quit rates. Staff are expected to accept poor conditions or bad behaviour because “the cause matters more,” and this can make psychological safety and honest disagreement very hard.

Hiring for values and mission alignment - especially in leadership and in ambiguous, hard‑to‑monitor work - can be one of the few robust ways to counteract that tendency. People who deeply care about the mission are often more willing to challenge harmful behaviour or bad decisions, because they see the mission as a constraint on their actions, not a free pass.

So rather than being “cautious” about value‑aligned hires, my proposal would be:

• Treat mission/value alignment as an explicit recruitment criterion in many roles (not an automatic trump card, but a genuine plus to weigh alongside skills and experience).
• Be especially careful about misalignment in leadership and in work that’s hard to monitor or carries dual‑use risks (e.g. some policy advocacy, welfare or economic research with productivity‑increasing implications).
• Use alignment to support good incentives and culture (psychological safety, constructive dissent, honesty about trade‑offs), not to justify exploiting staff or ignoring organisational problems.

3. When non‑aligned hires make sense (and what skills we need)

On the third point, I’m very sympathetic. For example, vegans ^[2]are only a small fraction of the global population, and even within that 2–3% we’re further constrained by geography, age, skills, and willingness to work in advocacy. For some highly specialised roles like certain technical, legal, or political positions, we will simply not find a perfectly aligned candidate at the calibre we need.

In those cases, I think the original post is mostly right and we should be prepared to hire non‑aligned staff and invest in:

• Clear guardrails (e.g. well‑designed incentives, good governance, transparency).
• Strong management and mentoring.
• Good processes around dual‑use risks, research publication, and conflicts of interest.

But the version of “managing non‑aligned people” I’m most excited about sits upstream of the org, not just inside it.

Rather than starting from “how do we manage non‑aligned people once they’re hired?”, I’d rather ask:

• How do we bring more mission‑aligned but not fully value‑aligned people into the movement in the first place?
• How do we help them locate themselves in the ecosystem: find the cause areas, organisations, and roles where their personal values and the org’s culture can genuinely coexist?
• How do we design onboarding and development pathways that make it easier for new talent (from corporate, government, academia, etc.) to contribute productively without either burning out or clashing badly with existing cultures?

I can easily imagine an “onboarding to animal advocacy” programme or venture. This would teach people coming into the movement what they need to know about the various forms of animal advocacy, from activism to animal welfare and direct action, and introduce them to some of the core debates, like the one between abolitionists and welfarists (if that's even relevant these days). It would also cover history, major organisations, key terminology, and the broader landscape, so that people have enough context to understand where they fit and how their skills can best contribute.

• Short fellowships or rotations/secondments across organisations and cause areas.
• Training on cause prioritisation, movement history, and common failure modes (including what went wrong in EA post‑FTX).
• Explicit work on psychological safety, culture‑building, and conflict management, so new people don’t learn the wrong lessons from stressed, under‑resourced teams.

If we expect the number of roles in the animal movement to grow substantially in the next few years, we probably do need more than an ad‑hoc, word‑of‑mouth pipeline. We’ll need structured ways for people to find their way in, build relevant skills, and understand both the opportunities and the risks of working in this space.

That’s the kind of “managing non‑aligned talent” skill I’d be excited for the movement to invest in, and as someone who’s worked in talent and learning for nearly two decades, I’m keen to explore it further. 

1. ^{^}

   By “value‑aligned” I mean broadly sharing the core priorities and norms of effective altruism and the animal cause area, e.g. trying to do the most good with limited resources, taking animal suffering seriously, caring about evidence and cost‑effectiveness, and being willing to update in light of new information. This is hard to measure directly, and that limits how precisely we can use it as a recruitment criterion as I mention on point 2. In practice, I’d treat things like sustained volunteering for animal organisations, completing EA or related courses, engaging thoughtfully in EA/animal‑advocacy online discourse, participating in local EA or animal‑advocacy groups, or making personal lifestyle and giving choices that reflect these priorities as partial but imperfect signals of alignment rather than definitive proof.

2. ^{^}

   I couldn't find a stat for values-aligned people, so I went for the very broad "vegan" category since we're talking abotu the animal movement only. I don't think you need to be a vegan to work in the animal cause area, FWIW