Mieux Donner is hiring: why we opened 4 roles to fill 2 positions

By Romain Barbe🔸 @ 2026-03-16T19:20 (+27)

TLDR

Mieux Donner is the French effective giving initiative, launched in 2024 through the Ambitious Impact and Giving What We Can incubation programme. We've directed over €1M to high-impact charities and reached a giving multiplier of 5-6x (2025 Activity Report). 

Why we opened 4 roles to hire 2 people

We don't know which strategy will have the biggest payoff

Mieux Donner currently runs with 2 FTE and an annual budget of around 90k€. We know we want to grow. What we don't know is where extra effort will yield the greatest return.

Should we publish more SEO content? Pitch more op-eds? Do more outreach for podcasts? Build a stronger ambassador network? Target high net worth individuals more systematically? Optimise our website? Focus on corporate CSR? Double down on social media or newsletter growth?

We have spoken with other Effective Giving Initiatives, have analysed our previous donations, created a weighted factor model, and tried to model the cost-effectiveness of extra hours of different tasks. This helps us to estimate which strategy will have the best expected pay-off but there is still a lot of uncertainty. 

The variance between people may matter more than the variance between strategies

Here is the core of our reasoning. In knowledge work, and especially in mission-driven organisations where creativity, relationships and judgement matter, the difference between a good hire and a great hire is not marginal. 

It can be the difference between 4 podcast appearances in a year and 20, or between building a network of donors giving €100k each and donors giving €500k each. When one approach becomes five times more effective in the hands of the right person, it can outperform a theoretically better strategy executed by someone merely good.

We've also noticed something more recent that sharpens this. AI tools have significantly compressed the productivity gap for routine tasks. Generating visuals, converting a doc into a web page, drafting a first version of almost anything: these used to take hours. Now they take minutes. We're uncertain about the full implications of this, but our intuition is that it may have reduced the value of mid-level generalist output for orgs that use a lot of automation, while increasing the relative value of people who bring judgement, relationships, creative strategy, who can harvest the full capacity of AI tools, and who require neither extensive proofreading nor long onboarding periods.

We don't know if this is fully right. But it pushed us further in one direction: prioritise finding people with genuine superstar potential over optimising the job description in advance.

So we listed four roles instead of two

Our hiring process follows the recommendations from Charity Entrepreneurship's handbook How to Launch a High Impact Non-Profit, which we've found to be a practical and rigorous framework.

Rather than narrowing to two descriptions and hoping the best candidates would happen to fit them, we opened four roles. The logic is simple: by predefining two narrow roles, you risk the best candidates not seeing themselves in either. Opening four broader roles increases the chances that someone exceptional finds a way in.

We also deliberately kept some roles broad to avoid missing strong candidates. When we meet someone exceptional and find ourselves wishing they were on the team, we ask whether one of the open roles could fit them. If not, we ask whether their specific strengths could genuinely move the needle for us, and if the answer is yes, we broaden the role accordingly.

This approach probably makes the most sense when, like us: you face genuine uncertainty about where leverage lies; you are a small team where each person has outsized influence on the whole organisation; and you are willing to adapt the role around the person rather than the other way around.

However, this approach has real costs worth being transparent about. Opening more roles means writing more: more job descriptions, more evaluation tasks, more calibration work. Writing our first complete offer, including the job description, the evaluation tasks and the full process, took around 25 hours. A year later, updating that offer and adding three new roles took another 25 hours. The overhead is real but not linear: going from one role to four roughly doubles the time investment rather than quadrupling it. Several of our exercises are also identical or similar across roles, and we've built a benchmark and anchors system to make cross-role comparisons as rigorous as possible. Still, comparing candidates across very different profiles is harder than comparing within a single role. We think the trade is worth it: if finding the right people is one of the highest-leverage decisions an org can make, investing twice the time in the hiring process is probably a very good use of your time.

We'd tentatively recommend it to other orgs in a similar position. When the leverage point is unclear, optimising for person quality over role specification seems like the right trade.

The four roles (French-speaking candidates only)

We think the range is broad enough that almost any ambitious, rigorous French-speaking person could find themselves in at least one of them:

We created a landing page with the different offers and an FAQ.

Live Q&A: 25 March 2026 at 19h CET

Application deadline: 3 April 2026 

Know someone who should apply?

If someone comes to mind, someone who has launched or significantly grown a project, who consistently exceeds expectations, and who brings real initiative, please connect them with us before they apply.

As a thank you, if your referral leads to a hire you can choose between:

The referral must be made before the candidate applies. You can either tag them on our LinkedIn posts, or send us their contact details directly with their consent.

 

If you have thoughts on the hiring strategy, or a different model for how small orgs should think about this, we'd genuinely like to hear it in the comments.

Romain and the Mieux Donner team

Richard Möhn @ 2026-03-21T22:30 (+2)

I find it a bit disconcerting that you write about the costs to the org, but not the costs to the applicants. Ie. applicant puts a lot of work into applying for a role and then you decide that that one is the one you won't fill. It may very well be that the trade is still worth it and that the negative effect on candidates can be mitigated. But lacking even a single sentence in this direction seems callous. (I'm writing this as someone who spends more time on the side of hiring people than on the side of applying for jobs.)

Romain Barbe🔸 @ 2026-03-24T19:27 (+1)

Hello  Richard, thanks for raising this point.

I was thinking that this process changes little for applicants, and we've actually tried to design the process with their experience in mind.

First, a general note on the process itself (happy to have feedback on this too): the full process takes around 6 hours across 4 steps: a written application (30 min), practical exercises (1h30), a coworking session (1h30), and a final interview (1h). Only 15% of applicants pass step 2, so most people invest no more than 2 hours before getting a clear answer. Our rejection emails include specific feedback on each exercise, which we hope makes the time feel less wasted regardless of outcome. We also tried to design the exercises to be intellectually engaging, connected to real effective giving work, and useful for candidates to assess their own fit for this kind of role.

On the specific concern about opening multiple roles: from an applicant's perspective, we don't think this changes much, and having four broad roles rather than two narrow ones may offer more people the opportunity to find a role that fits them, and could reduce exclusion based on specific backgrounds.

When we open any hiring process, even for a single role, there are two reasons we reject someone: either no one passed the bar and no one was hired, or someone else was judged better suited to our mission. 

The role a candidate applies for should not change how they are judged. We try to run the process this way. If you are not hired because someone outperformed you, it shouldn't matter whether that person applied for the exact same role or a different one. And in our case, the role titles are not even fully fixed: they will be adapted to the person we hire. Someone better than you might end up in a role that is a blend of two or three of the ones we listed.

For candidates who reach the final round and are ultimately not selected, I will tell them specifically where they underperformed: on the task exercises, on conscientiousness, on value alignment, or on the interview, depending on what the key determining factors were.

The asymmetry of effort in hiring is real, but we don't think opening four roles makes it meaningfully worse. Happy to push back!