Pitching people is good

Sometimes people say that you shouldn’t pitch people who are already in high-impact roles: sometimes because they think they’re unlikely to accept, sometimes because it might be bad if they did accept since their current role is really high impact.

I think this is wrong.

I don’t think it’s uncooperative to pitch people to work at your org:

1. In general I think that you end up with better allocation of talent if everyone pitches and individuals decide, rather than if people are timid to pitch

   1. If you don’t pitch them, you deprive them of the information that you’d like to work with them (which might not be obvious to them), and lose any possibility of them joining (even when it might be optimal).

      1. Obviously, sometimes individuals will decide to accept the offer that is lower impact.

      2. But overall I expect individuals to make good decisions about this individuals have info about their private preferences and circumstances, as well as more detailed info about both options, whereas the pitching orgs mostly have info on only how good their option is.

   2. It’s often hard to tell when people might want to join: maybe people have a personal reason to move cities, maybe they’re not enjoying their current role, etc. Asking them lets the system incorporate this non-public info.

2. More deontologically, I think it’s good to empower people over their career decisions and not make choices for them.

3. Not doing this is arguably illegal (collusion between employers)

In my experience the above is a somewhat established norm in EA orgs (e.g. I think 80k strongly thinks this, this was our policy at CEA when I ran it — and that’s a reciprocal norm, e.g. 80k would be fine with CEA pitching its staff, and vice versa). But I still hear people occasionally arguing against pitching.

Things that I think would be bad, but which I’m not suggesting here:

• Doing a disingenuous pitch

• Giving misleading views about whether you think someone should join your org (e.g. sometimes I pitch people, but tell them that I think they probably shouldn’t join us because their current role seems stronger in terms of fit / impact)

• (less sure) Being (excessively) negative about their current / other options.