Epoch.ai is a research organization focused on benchmarking the current capabilities, and predicting the future effects, of AI. They came to Otherbranch looking for a head of web development to run the public presentation of their research.

After signing with us, their recruiter was out of town the next week - and when she came back, we'd already referred the candidate they'd eventually hire.

We asked if they’d be willing to talk about their experiences. This is a transcript of that conversation, edited for clarity and organization [but not for content].

Rachel Wolford [Otherbranch founder/CEO]: Hi Isabel! Thanks for taking the time to get on a call with me. 

Just so folks reading along have some context, let’s start with the background - who are you, what is Epoch, what do you do there?

Isabel Johnson [Epoch recruiting manager]: Hi Rachel! I'm Isabel; I manage recruiting and hiring and onboarding for Epoch. We’re a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating better discourse around AI, so informing both the general public and policymakers and people in tech about what AI can do, what it might be able to do, and the rates at which those things are changing.

Rachel: So primarily benchmarking, right? As opposed to developing the models themselves?

Isabel: Yeah, we’re interested in the details of how the models work, but the most popular research is about what the models are capable of, measuring their knowledge. And we were hiring for a couple of senior engineering roles around presenting that information.

Rachel: What were you hiring for and what were you having trouble with?

Isabel: We needed a head of our web development team. It's always hard to hire for a role more senior than the ones you already have occupied, because you're missing the structure to really evaluate talent at that level [at top of funnel].

We knew we needed a better process for that - our existing process was working, but it was working much too slowly. We had a lot of candidates who we kind of thought were “fine”, but weren't too excited about for senior roles.

Rachel: The classic “a maybe is a no”.

Isabel: Exactly. I’ve always been very bullish on - I want the team to be actively excited about working with this person, and hopefully it's an investment in a long-term relationship with this person to help shape the future of the organization. So we had kind of hunkered down for a battle of attrition with the head of web dev role. It was kind of a pleasant surprise that we made a hire as quickly as we did!

Rachel: Good segue into how it was working with us! So yeah - how did you hear about us, what were your expectations coming in?

Isabel: We were introduced to you by an engineer we’d been using to flesh out our interviewing capacity. I thought we had an excellent first meeting and was excited to work with you, but we almost didn’t. We’d already onboarded quite a few recruiting agencies who were giving us those candidates that were just “fine”.

Rachel: What were your rough pass-rates for candidates from other agencies?

Isabel: I think they’d send us maybe four candidates a week on average, and then two of them we wouldn’t even be interested in, one would fail a preliminary interview (like a HackerRank kind of thing).

Rachel: Okay, so maybe one in four people from other agencies even passed that basic smell test.

Isabel: Yes, simple coding stuff that I would have expected them to pass.

Rachel: What about with Otherbranch?

Isabel: You sent us seven candidates total. One of them we hired, and two of the others were the “silver medalists”. And they were curated. I wasn't getting some LLM generated summary of how their resume matches on to our job description that I could have made myself, I was getting data about their performance on an actual interview. And I didn't have to sell these people to our engineering team - they were excited to talk to them based on what you sent us.

And - okay, I’m going a little off of your question here, but I felt like you were finding people who could actually get excited about the organization, which was something I didn’t see from other recruiting agencies.

Something that I had to learn through working with other companies is to be very skeptical of when they say we suggest such-and-such many people, which results in such-and-such many interviews. Because “interviews” doesn't necessarily mean that you're going on to the next step or that you had a good interview experience on either end of that deal.

Rachel: Yeah, it's easy to get swamped into raw numbers like that and not think about that more intangible sense of quality or whether someone's happy with the people you send them.

So - you got a few candidates you liked through us, one of which you hired. How long did that take?

Isabel: We signed a contract with you on Friday and then I was out the following week, but when I came back we had [counting Slack messages] one, two, three, four candidates that Tuesday. Two of those made it to the final round, and one of them we hired.

Rachel: I’d love to take full credit for that, although if I’m being honest being remote helps! It’s part of why I’m such a big advocate for it.

Isabel: Well, we’ll take it! This is actually the first time I’m looking back at it and - wow! That was so good.

And this is off-script again, but I felt like it took a lot less effort. At a certain point I had been like, I'm spending a lot of time communicating with these recruitment agencies and we're not really getting candidates who are significantly better than who I think we could get ourselves. We were constantly having to explain to them what we wanted. But I felt like [Otherbranch] was a significantly smoother experience than I was used to, where I wasn’t spending all my time communicating details about the role (in a good way).

Rachel: I’m honestly glad we could help. Anything else you’d like to say about your experience with us, or to someone who is considering working with us?

Isabel: I’m trying to come up with the most truthful and effusive compliment.

Rachel: Screw it. Say what you mean.

Isabel: The thing I’m thinking is that I wish [Otherbranch] had domain knowledge of all the other things we’re recruiting for. I’d only have half a job left because I could just come to you. You made it too smooth and now I don't know what I'm going to do when I'm not hiring for a technical role.

Rachel: [laughing] That’ll do for the blurb!

Isabel: I guess the only other thing is - I was going around to all of our hiring managers asking what we should focus on improving for future hiring rounds and what are some pain points in their experience. And [the hiring manager for this role] was - we knew that he did not enjoy the hiring process. Less so than the average person does, even.

So I was excited to talk to him about this. I figured he would have lots of ideas for improvement. But everything had been handled so smoothly throughout the process of finding who we would eventually hire and evaluating them that he didn't have anything to say. He was so hands-off and has ended up with somebody he thinks is brilliant despite having so interaction with the early process…which is his ideal amount of interaction with the process.

Rachel: I think that’s everyone’s ideal amount of interaction with the process. I do this for a living and that’s my ideal amount of interaction.

Anything else you’d like to say?

Isabel: No, I think that’s it!

Rachel: Okay, great - well thank you again for being willing to get on a call with us, and congratulations on the hire!

Isabel: Thank you so much!