“Recruitment is extremely important and impactful. Some people should be completely obsessed with it.” by abrahamrowe

Nov 11, 2025

In this engaging discussion, Abraham Rowe, a researcher dedicated to enhancing recruitment in high-impact organizations, shares his insights from overseeing numerous hiring rounds. He highlights three key issues: candidates face terrible experiences, organizations struggle to find quality talent, and retaining skilled recruiters is a significant challenge. Rowe emphasizes the high leverage of effective hiring on an organization's success while outlining essential competencies for recruiters. His call to action encourages a deeper focus on improving hiring practices.

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ANECDOTE

Personal Experience Running Many Hiring Rounds

Abraham Rowe ran hiring rounds for ~15 organisations and saw recurring problems in candidate experience and recruiter retention.
He observed many candidates endure unpleasant work tests and organisations struggle to hire and keep recruiters.

INSIGHT

Recruitment Drives Organisational Impact

Recruitment shapes most downstream factors of an organisation's impact, second only to choosing what to work on.
Recruiters directly create value by assessing candidates and cutting hiring time and costs for the organisation.

INSIGHT

Recruiting Requires Three Distinct Skills

Effective recruiting requires project management, decision-making under uncertainty, and ecosystem knowledge combined.
Finding people who possess all three competencies is unusually hard and explains weak candidate pools for recruiter roles.

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Cross-post from Good Structures.

Over the last few years, I helped run several dozen hiring rounds for around 15 high-impact organizations. I've also spent the last few months talking with organizations about their recruitment. I've noticed three recurring themes:

Candidates generally have a terrible time
Work tests are often unpleasant (and the best candidates have to complete many of them), there are hundreds or thousands of candidates for each role, and generally, people can't get the jobs they’ve been told are the best path to impact.

Organizations are often somewhat to moderately unhappy with their candidate pools
Organizations really struggle to find the talent they want, despite the number of candidates who apply.

Organizations can't find or retain the recruiting talent they want
It's extremely hard to find people to do recruitment in this space. Talented recruiters rarely want to stay in their roles.

I think the first two points need more discussion, but I haven't seen much discussion about the last. I think this is a major issue: recruitment is probably the most important function for a growing organization, and a skilled recruiter has a fairly large counterfactual impact for the organization they support. So why is it [...]

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Outline:

(01:33) Recruitment is high leverage and high impact

(03:33) Organizations struggle to hire recruiters

(07:52) Many of the people applying to recruitment roles emphasize their experience in recruitment. This isnt the background organizations need

(08:44) Almost no one is appropriately obsessed with hiring

(10:29) The state of evidence on hiring practices is bad

(13:22) Retaining strong recruiters is really hard

(14:51) Why might this be less important than I think?

(16:40) Im trying to find people interested in this kind of approach to hiring. If this is you, please reach out.

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First published:
November 3rd, 2025

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HLktkw5LXeqSLCchH/recruitment-is-extremely-important-and-impactful-some-people

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.