Giving Compass' Take:

• The Effective Altruism Forum takes a look at the talent market for those who want to work at EA-focused nonprofits: What is the supply and demand situation?

• Employers and employees alike will find the discussion useful, since much of it revolves around the best use of people's skills for the greater good of the community.

• If you're still new to the EA world, read this article to get acquainted.

In the talent market, there are differences among many more dimensions than in the donation market. People have different skills, different levels of experience, different preferences for hours worked, geographical locations, pay and their flexibility with regards to those, different levels of risk aversion in terms of career capital and different preferences for cause areas.

Let’s look at differences in comparative advantages in skill. Imagine two people are interested in solving factory farming. One of them has a biology degree and a lot of experience as an anti-factory-farming activist, while the other one has a history degree and only a bit of experience as an activist. Due to the principle of comparative advantage it is still best for the experienced activist to go into meat replacement research and the less experienced activist into advocacy.

However, this argument depends on how scarce talent in advocacy and meat replacement research are relative to each other. If the world had an excessive amount of people capable to do good meat replacement research (which it does not) but a shortage of anti factory farming activists, our activism experienced biologist should go into advocacy too.

In general, when we think about comparative advantage and how to allocate talent, this is a good heuristic to use: which traits are we short of in the talent market? If you have one of those traits, maybe you should go in and fill the gap.

Read the full article about comparative advantage in the nonprofit talent market by Denise Melchin at Effective Altruism Forum.