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On Meeting the Legitimate Needs of Mid-Career Talent

careers Philanthropy AI assurance hiring

Investors and large foundations have already solved the problem of attracting senior talent. They offer multi-year job security, prestigious roles with real decision power, and compensation that competes with industry. Yet organizations they fund regularly struggle to offer any of those things, and mission-driven projects fail to hire the people potentially most relevant to them.

This write-up was triggered by the Peregrine Report interview series I conducted last year. A consistent sentiment from senior people in AI assurance: existing and upcoming organizations don’t meet the legitimate needs of exceptional mid-career talent. The pattern extrapolates well beyond AI assurance to other public benefit domains.

Three needs come up again and again:

  1. Job security — project funding for 2+ years.
  2. Legible career capital — objectively impressive role profiles.
  3. Reasonable compensation — relative to total compensation elsewhere.

Funders should not pamper grantees. But they have a responsibility to set projects up for success, and a useful framing for grantees is: “You want me to succeed. So I need to be able to compete with you for top talent.”

The rest of this post unpacks the three needs, then returns to how funders already meet them internally.

1. Job Security: 2+ years of runway

In academia and philanthropy, one-off or 1-year grants are the rule. Funders want to hedge risk and spread bets, so they err on the side of funding more projects with less per project for shorter horizons.

This often works — especially for people early in their careers. A 6-month project with uncertainty about what comes next is fine when you’re optimizing for exploration, have few commitments, or need to set up research projects for groups of (under)graduates.

But just because you can hire someone doesn’t mean the system works well. Even startups, not exactly known for job security, usually raise 18–24 months of runway. One reason is to attract talent that would otherwise say no to shorter horizons.

At a certain point in life, people deserve predictability: family, mortgage, commitments accrued over time. A 12-month role becomes a risky and unattractive prospect. Replacing great staff is also a real hassle, so current employers go out of their way to invest in keeping them comfortable. The cards are stacked against mid-career professionals leaving existing comfortable roles to enter uncertain mission-driven organizations.

Yes, sometimes a skilled mid-career professional ends up in a transition phase and luck strikes. But even then, 18–24 months is the lower end of what makes sense.

It is a legitimate need at a certain stage of life to expect a 2-year horizon for your next role. For organizations, that means at least two years of runway. Anything below that bar is almost categorically excluded by these candidates.

Insufficient runway puts a project at a clear disadvantage. Implementing evaluation gates at 6 and 12 months to catch a derailed project is fine — even motivating to talent who like proving themselves under pressure. Focused Research Organizations operate this way: up to five years of secured funding to tackle a problem end-to-end, with mechanisms to catch FROs that aren’t working. People can focus on doing great work instead of managing career uncertainty.

2. Legible Career Capital: objectively impressive roles

People tell a story with their CV.

Early in your career, without a significant track record, you have freedom. Eventually, recruiters and peer groups judge that story harshly. Career steps need to be appropriately impressive and challenging.

Strong role descriptions make the story more compelling. The ingredients are familiar:

  • Position: a step up — title (team lead, manager, executive team) or scope (larger budget, more reports).
  • Organization: $X in funding; $Y conditional on milestones.
  • Adoption: tool used by Z people.
  • Partnerships with prestigious institutions (universities, labs, major corporations, governments).
  • Publications in top-tier venues (Nature, Science, leading conferences).

A concrete example:

“You will oversee a $2M budget, hire and manage at least 5 team members, and engage senior leaders at prestigious organizations globally. You will be responsible for at least two tested interventions, a prominent publication, and the equivalent of X lives affected.”

The details vary, but the gist is the same: the role description needs to give a “whoa” impression. Give outstanding people outstanding challenges and responsibility. They feel engaged, can proudly talk about their work, and earn recognition from their peer group.

Without sufficient resources, organizations cannot shape such roles, and they become significantly less attractive to senior candidates. Enabling projects to create attractive senior roles is key to their success — and I would love to see funders account for this when evaluating investments and grants.

3. Reasonable Compensation: relative to total comp elsewhere

Let’s assume you need the competence and work ethic of a neurosurgeon for your project. You make this by far the best paid role in the organization at $200k yearly compensation.

I’ve seen organizations with the almost delusional aspiration of hiring the very best talent for senior roles at minimal compensation. The number of times I’ve seen demanding executive job descriptions paired with bottom-of-market packages is wild.

A neurosurgeon can earn $1M+. They have real opportunity costs and are likely solving real problems elsewhere. Just because you can’t afford them — even after heavy discounts — doesn’t mean the other person is greedy. Most outstanding mid-career individuals I’ve interacted with are entirely fine with a lower total compensation for mission-driven work. But at a certain point, they tap out.

Designing effective compensation policies is genuinely hard. There are several components to weigh: salary (the central one), bonuses, benefits and training, and equity that may sell at some future point. Policies usually differ by career stage (associate vs. senior manager), deliverable complexity (50th vs. 90th percentile), and organization size (10s vs. 100s vs. 1,000s of employees).

What is a reasonable cut for someone switching to a mission-driven organization, possibly a non-profit, while owning similar deliverables? Let’s say the maximum is around 50%. Compensation tools like Carta suggest that going from a higher to a lower percentile and from a large to a small organization adds up to roughly a 50% salary cut.1

That’s “just” the salary component. Exceptional talent typically benefits the most from bonuses and equity — often exceeding their base salary. This works at startups, but is almost entirely omitted in non-profit compensation.

Put together: non-profit compensation disproportionately disadvantages the most talented individuals. The better you are, the less you earn in relative terms — because non-profit compensation policies often don’t account for performance incentives.

Instead of accepting that you cannot hire top talent, I’d encourage thinking through the option space. A few examples:

  • Increase salaries to compensate for missing equity or bonuses. Explain your reasoning and secure additional funds from investors or grantmakers.
  • Consider public benefit companies rather than pure non-profits, so people can hold equity.
  • Get creative. One bonus model: a percentage of salary that the employee directs to the charity of their choice.

The list goes on. Leadership means meeting all the legitimate needs of the team, and thinking carefully through compensation is key to that.

Funders already meet these needs — for themselves

Writing this, I realized investors and philanthropic foundations have already implemented all three points. For their own staff.

  • Job security. You are literally sitting on and distributing a pile of money. VCs and foundations have higher job security than the average for-profit organization.
  • Career capital. Senior positions at VCs and foundations allocate millions, oversee teams of grantmakers, hold real decision power, and often a playground to incubate new areas. Brand image is broadly well-perceived; networks run deep across industry, stakeholder groups, and politics.
  • Compensation. Nobody needs convincing about VC pay. What may surprise: large philanthropic actors also pay generously.

Very high — but reasonable for people carrying that much responsibility. A note on legal constraints: non-profits often have to follow compensation rules private companies don’t. US 501(c)(3)s must pay “reasonable” compensation or risk losing status, so 90th-percentile salaries require documentation on comparables. Additional overhead — but not a major hindrance, as the examples above show.

The asymmetry is the point. The needs are legitimate when funders meet them for their own staff. They don’t become illegitimate when “offspring” organizations raise them.

Conclusion

Can you find exceptional people without considering any of the above? Yes, occasionally. But those are outliers, not a strategy.

For investors and funders: Ask yourself, what resources does this team need to compete with our organization for top talent?

For leadership in organizations: when you fundraise, make a strong case for the resources required to attract talent. The three asks aren’t luxuries — they’re the floor.

Footnotes

  1. Because of copyright I can’t share the numbers here, but in research and operations: 90th to 50th percentile is roughly a 25% drop; 90th to 25th, around 40%. Small (<25 employees) to medium (<500), and medium to large (>500), each tend to add about 10%. ↩