Hi Alison, 

I think this is a really valuable project, and I'll be interested to see how the playbook develops. 

Including external experts in recruitment processes where staff dont have expertise is a good suggestion. This is particularly relevant when organisations start to hire for specialised roles, without perhaps having fully defined what the role will do, what competencies are required to do the job well, how these competencies should be assessed, and how to made tradeoffs when candidates dont meet all the ideal selection criteria. 

What seems to happen is that organisations use similar or the same selection criteria and processes for these specialist roles as they've used for their core team selection. Then the organisation and candidates are both frustrated when this doesnt translate smoothly to specialist roles.

My untested theory is that I want to verify if providing an “outside expert” to assist in conducting interviews, if it will improve the success of higher skill quality candidates. 

 Including an outside expert when conducting interviews could be helpful, since it provides an expert perspective on how to score and rank candidates' technical abilities. However, I think including the outside expert from an earlier stage would be even more valuable - including defining the TORs and the competencies for the role, taking into account best practices for that professional role (eg assessing the organisation's first accountant based on how accountants are normally selected and hired, rather than how the AI safety organisation has previously hired their researchers).

I think one of the challenges as organisations scale rapidly is that organisations are hiring for positions that they'd never had before - eg they are hiring for a Head of talent, Head of Finance, Head of Operations. Since they've not had those roles before, there are two issues:

1. It's hard to know what the role should do, and related to this, what are the mandatory and desirable requirements. 

    

2. The organisation doesnt necessarily have much experience in sceening and assessing candidates with expertise in that role. So the organisation might overweight or underweight certain selection criteria or candidate responses; or might default to the established methods and criteria of assessing candidates that they are comfortable with, even if this is not a strong fit for for the specialised role. 

I think having rejected candidates know how competitive these roles/courses/fellowships are would likely reduce the drop-out from the AIS talent pool so would be a win-win for both the applicants and the orgs.

I'm not convinced that reducing the size of the AIS talent pool is a win-win. 

I'd prefer that pathways are more legible, and candidates have some guidance to steer them towards applying for roles that are at their level. 

I prefer the idea of a broad church - that the needs are many, and there's a place for people with skills and commitment. Rather than a movement that prioritises searching for unicorns and rockstars. 

Maybe it would be better if AI safety orgs could be extremely more exact about what talent means to them, but that also leaves the field fairly open to a type of gaming a lot of people seem to want to avoid.

Terms of reference should say what experience and competencies are needed for a role. I dont see a downside with being more precise about this - ie these are mandatory things we're looking for, and these are desirable competencies. The more general a job advertisement is, the more candidates will apply, which creates unnecessary workload for the hiring organisation, and wastes the time of candidates who realistically were never competitive.  

The field does act like a false positive hire is immensely worse than a false negative, though, which might not be the case.

Agreed. There's a real aversion to hiring 'the wrong person'. But if you hire enough people, you'll eventually make a bad hire. Hiring / onboarding / probation / performance management should be seen as an ongoing process to get the best candidate and make sure they're working effectively, rather than relying 100% on the hiring stage. 

As I've mentioned above, there are opportunity costs when leaving a position vacant, or hiring a more trusted but less experienced candidate and hoping they will 'grow into the role'. It seems like these costs are frequently underweighted.

Thanks Gergo, this and your previous post / guide on building context are both really valuable. 

I agree with your Venn diagram - there's plenty of very talented and experienced people around, with varying levels of context. Developing parts of that context is possible to do autonomously - eg following the steps in your earlier guide. But developing the networks, the sense of the field (who's doing what / where) is not easy, especially for people who are not located in a hub. 

I agree that hiring organisations seem to want high-context for most roles, including operations roles, whether or not this is needed. It seems like this limits your pool of potential candidates - if you want a rock star head of finance, who also has high context, who is also available to work from your location or be hired from your location. When organisations cant find these unicorns, they're either leaving the roles unfilled, or hiring a person with less experience but 'potential to grow into the role'. I've previously commented that there's an opportunity cost to both of these options.

I've been on both sides of recruiting and job-seeking, so I know it's not easy for anyone. I would like to see more programmes like the Successif organisation builder's programme, which provide a way for experienced people to build context through paid part-time work, while also helping organisations that are trying to scale and deliver.

Thank you, I think this post is great! Also I want to declare my interest, since I'm a senior candidate who also receives advice from Successif. 

I want to pick up on this point: 

With the experience they have, hiring someone they already know is an understandable choice. But it isn't a model to copy. When every organization makes the same safe choice, the leadership layer stays thin, and the field never builds the experience it needs to assess and manage senior people.

I think the bigger issue is that not that the field never builds the experience needed to assess senior people. It's that the field doesnt grow. It doesnt grow if the same trusted group of people move between organisations - this is just swapping seats without field growth. 

Secondly, the field doesnt grow because of the missed opportunity of hiring a senior manager.(Maybe this is what you meant when you said leadership stays thin?).  Each senior manager can typically manage a 8 to 10 direct reports, with additional teams under these direct reports. This gives you capacity of around 30-40 staff under an experienced COO if you have small teams. Of course, some experienced commercial COOs have thousands of staff in their reporting chain. When trusted but inexperienced candidates are hired into senior roles, organisational growth is slowed while they learn the skills needed, which can take years. I think this opportunity cost is frequently underweighted. 

Good luck with the programme - it looks very interesting! 

Great writeup. This is also a really positive example of the kind of work that Gen Stream can produce by getting someone to focus on a specific issue for a short sprint, and publish the analysis. So kudos to you and to Gen Stream for this initiative. 

I want to acknowledge that managing a recruitment process is a huge amount of work, and giving detailed feedback is an additional workload on top of this. Not all organisations will have capacity to do give targeted feedback, even if they wanted to. There are also some risks of giving targeted feedback in some jurisdictions - eg if your feedback indicates that the employer has unlawfully discriminated against the candidate. 

However, the further candidates advance and invest in a selection process, the more they would benefit from getting targeted feedback. Feedback can be provided by stage as you've explained (candidates who reach the final round might get individual feedback, candidates who do not pass the first screening might only get general feedback). I also agree that feedback can be misplaced - if a candidate reaches a late round, they are probably well beyond the stage of BlueDot and 80,000 hours and referring these candidates to resources that they have already advanced beyond doesnt seem very helpful. 

I'd be interested to see examples of good feedback if the organisations you've chosen decide to post them. From previous high volume experience, I've seen some organisations give effective feedback by describing what strong candidates did vs weaker candidates - eg strong candidates could clearly describe A,B and C and apply this knowledge to the scenario to identify risks, impacts, sequencing. Weaker candidates identified 2 or less of the key issues; did not link the issues to an impact and / or did not clearly describe a viable sequence. By showing candidates what good and bad look like, you invite them to find their own opportunities for improvement.

I also think there are more opportunities for common recruitment processes and recruitment for shared rosters across organisations. I know this is not easy to organise, but it's common practice in some industries. Often organisations are recruiting for very similar competencies (rightly or wrongly), and it's a significant workload on both hiring organisations and applicants to repeatedly have full hiring processes for common roles. 
 

Thanks Morgan, this is a valuable perspective. 

One observation from an adjacent world: absorption capacity is treated here as a new and poorly understood problem, but it’s a mature discipline in the multilateral, development and humanitarian ecosystems. Surge absorption has been studied and managed there for decades, with identified tools and processes - eg absorptive-capacity assessments before scale-up, phased disbursement tied to implementation rates, pooled funds that spread money across implementers when no single organisation can absorb it, and monitoring systems that flag when spending outruns capacity.

The failure modes you list (unnatural growth, rushed strategy, hiring ahead of funding that doesn't materialise, and plus, corruption) are also well documented there, from post-tsunami aid to large global health scale-ups. We know from experience that absorption fails at the organisational level before it fails at the field level; phased growth outperforms step-change growth; and reversibility ("two-way doors") is exactly the right design principle.

So I'd add one suggestion to your four: the sector doesn't need to derive this knowledge from first principles. There are many practitioners with extensive (decades-long) of experience planning, budgeting and disbursing at the scale you are concerned about. As one example, the budget of the Syria Humanitarian Needs and Response plan for 2026 is $2.9b, covering health, education, food security, water and sanitation. The experience of these practitioners who have disbursed at billion-dollar scale through these exact dynamics is currently almost invisible to this ecosystem. Importing that expertise seems cheaper than re-learning the hard lessons.

https://reliefweb.int/attachments/28e3e5cb-a476-44ee-9cb7-f69625bdf31a/syrian_arab_republic_2026_humanitarian_needs_and_response_plan.pdf 

Well done Roman! The post is great (and important!). And I love visual storytelling like this - there should be more of it in the AI safety field. This Hans Rosling video is one of my favourite examples of data visualisation / storytelling, in case you're not familiar with it already: 

I think the pipeline (or funnel) is a a solid analogy - we are trying to direct people towards impactful contributions and impactful careers. And that pipeline is very leaky - there are a lot of people who are interested in contributing to fields like AI safety, but arent able to navigate the process. Some of the reasons you've mentioned in your article. Additionally, if hiring organisations get 300 to 500 applicants for each position, they can choose the top candidate, which potentially means that many similarly capable candidates are not selected. Some of those candidates will eventually get discouraged and find work in other fields - not because they were not passionate about making an impact, but because at some point they have done as much as they can, and they need a job. This is not the fault of the candidate - this is an employment marketplace failure, where people who have skills and want to work are not able to be matched to a role in what ought to be a rapidly scaling ecosystem. 

To give credit where credit is due, I have seen some organisations starting to provide rejection letters (at least at first round) which point candidates towards existing resources and courses that could help them gain more context. I agree this is a good practice and should be encouraged.