AMA with AIM's Director of Recruitment (and MHI co-founder), Ben Williamson

I'll leave out the specific data on this but we were pleased with the number and quality of applicants for this from our first recruitment round earlier this year. I'd say in general we've got a mix of more 'CEO' and 'CTO' type candidates - ones with significant experience in building startups and fundraising, and those with significant technical experience and skill. Possibly a bit of a skew to the former so we're especially excited for applicants from a more technical side this time around.
 

I certainly had doubts when I first applied to the program! I was rejected in 2021 and then accepted in 2022: I got further in the process than I expected to in 2021 so in that sense the rejection was actually a source of confidence that this might be a realistic avenue for me in future. 

I think applicants tend to believe that they need more prior experience than they do (we've had multiple excellent participants in their very early 20s), and perhaps underestimate the value of flexibility, particularly in your organisation's first 12 months. Several of our organisations have made significant early pivots from what the preliminary research report suggested might be the best path, and people's preference for which charity idea they'd like to found often changes during the program.

Hey Toby, yeah I'm not best-placed to answer this but a few quick thoughts:
- I think the skills to build and run an excellent organisation transfer quite strongly across, though the day-to-day nature of the work and 'product' might differ substantially
- This is a bit of an experiment! We think there could be incredible value to a program like this if we can make it work, but we're not claiming 100% confidence that this will work as well as hoped
- For a variety of reasons, the number of charities we can found a year currently has a clear cap: the founding to give program offers both an opportunity to scale AIM's impact, and potentially to help reduce the cap on top charities we can incubate through additional mid-stage funding availability

Thank you! This is something we're thinking about at AIM in terms of fostering an openness to shutting down amongst our charities where this makes sense. Strong public examples certainly helps. I think providing evaluation and research support to charities so that they can draw conclusions on impact they're confident enough in to make shut down decisions makes a differnce. 

I also think fostering a culture that places less emphasis on founders as the ultimate driver of success or failure would help. Organisations succeed for a combination of several key reasons - one of which is the talent and skill of the founders - and highlighting some of these other factors more (the idea; the timing; luck!) makes it easier for founders to close an organisation without feeling like it's a huge personal failure

A good question - we try and make our application effectively 'EA-neutral' but in practice I expect that our recruitment process is a little skewed in favour of people from an EA background. My guess is that's down to a greater familiarity with the types of questions or tasks we ask for (e.g. making a weighted factor model), and it being easier to pick up on key things we care about - like a commitment to cost-effectiveness - when people communicate this in an EA way.

Ultimately, we care about finding people who have the base traits we care about - we're equally open to a 0% or 100% culturally EA cohort if we feel like that's the best group of people who applied.

Excellent question! Running an organisation really stretched my strategic thinking and ability to choose a coherent path through a lot of uncertainty. Your time, and the time of everyone who works for you, could be used on seemingly 100 different highly valuable things. Often you don't have robust information to differentiate between these and decide which to prioritise, making it easy to try and do too many things simultaneously. I think one of the biggest lessons I learnt from MHI is being ruthless in prioritisation - choosing a very small number of things and doing these as well as possible. It's easy to choose to 80/20 a whole lot of stuff instead that all seems necessary but in hindsight you could have, and should have, scrapped maybe 75% of it. 

I'd like to think this is a skill I got a lot better at with time, and that this sort of strategic thinking and prioritisation applies to almost any kind of role - e.g. it's a big emphasis for me at the moment in thinking about the many different ways AIM can look to recruit and selecting a few key avenues to execute.

I'm glad you found this useful! It's something we've tried to highlight more this cycle. A purely personal recommendation would be a grounding in Stoicism - e.g. reading some of Ryan Holiday's books. Founding requires a lot of grit and perseverance, and some of the principles of stoicism and exercises for practicing these are the most practical guidance of finding on how to cultivate these traits.

We definitely have done this and we look to recommend late-stage applicants for consideration for potential job opportunities at AIM-incubated organisations where this is a good fit. I think exposure to a startup organisation - whether non- or for-profit - is a great way of getting a better sense of personal fit for founding yourself