Rob Wiblin

For people who might like to get involved, what roles are you currently trying to fill?

Yeah.

Did the jobs mean moving to India or is there going to be a London office consistently as well?

Yeah.

Are there any particular skills that are most limiting your ability to grow, like technology or management expertise or familiarity with logistics and so on?

Yeah.

To what extent is it useful to have a background in global health and development versus just having, you know, really developed some particular strong skill in whatever area?

Yeah, hiring is difficult.

What fraction of your total work hours go towards hiring?

Yeah, I wonder, maybe it's not so bad if you're spending a huge amount of time on hiring.

I've heard stories that many very successful organizations early on, an astonishing fraction of staff time was spent on getting exactly the right hires and figuring out exactly what roles you actually need to hire for.

It makes some intuitive sense because the cost of a bad hire can be pretty famously quite large and the benefits of getting exactly the right person into exactly the right role can be huge in terms of then unlocking this potential to grow more.

So maybe it's not, you could spend half of your time on hiring and actually that's getting you a lot of leverage maybe.

Yeah, someone told me a story recently that in the early days of Google, the senior staff was spending 40% of their time on hiring, which I think they also thought was extremely high.

But then I guess it seemed to work out for Google.

So do you need people who have experience in India, perhaps working with health authorities in order to build and develop those relationships with health departments who seem really essential potentially to scaling up at least the SMS part of things?

Yeah, yeah.

And I guess for those who can't see themselves moving to India or working for Civita, but are earning to give and want to fund this sort of thing, there's a whole bunch of information on your website.

You link off to the J-Power papers and you've got your review up there.

And I think there might also be a review of the evidence on this topic on the Charity Entrepreneurship website if people are interested to learn about the intervention.