Principles of Senior Hiring

From Holden Karnofsky’s post “The process of hiring our first cause-specific Program Officer” on The GiveWell Blog, September 3, 2015. The line is the first of three general principles of senior hiring; the other two:

“Interviews are highly unreliable. The evaluation process should be designed as much as possible to mimic working together.”

“References are extremely important, and it can be useful to talk to many people about the candidate (including people who weren’t specifically offered as references).”

Karnofsky was running GiveWell at the time and writing through the first hire for what would become Open Philanthropy’s program-officer model. The post is a self-audit: GiveWell had relied heavily on interviews for previous hires, found the predictive value disappointing, and rebuilt the senior process around paid work trials, extended back-and-forth on real questions, and reference calls that went well past the candidate’s own list. The opening principle is the load-bearing one. The other two follow from it.

The underlying claim is empirical: a one-hour interview measures interview performance, which is a different skill from the job. A two-week paid trial on actual work measures the actual work. The cost (a few thousand dollars and some logistics) is small against the cost of a senior miss-hire.