Q: Please open up hiring Community Manager positions to experienced members of the community There have been some recent hirings for new Community Managers and the Community Team in general recently, including Ayo and Rosie, which is great! The CM team has been severely understaffed for years on end now, so seeing some new hires is great.
However, taking a look at the current members of the team, I'm admittedly a little bit worried. There are only around two current members of the team who were ever deeply involved in the community prior to becoming staff - Catija and JNat. After the removal of Shog and Robert Cartaino, and the leaving of Jon Ericson and Tim Post, there's a distinct lack of institutional knowledge in the Community Team - to the point where some people feel the team was gutted.
Having a knowledge of what it takes to be an active user of the site, including getting involved in moderation, or becoming a moderator, is invaluable when dealing with those moderators. If you don't understand what being a moderator entails (it's a serious commitment and you don't get paid) and how it feels, it makes working with those mods much less effective. With the recent hirings from outside the community, active members of the community have created some resources to assist in bringing those outside hires up to speed, but that's no replacement for extended hands-on experience.
Of course, external CM hires have proven to be great in the past, but - in my experience at least - have not had the same rapport and mutual respect that CMs such as Shog, Jon, and Cat have had, by virtue of having been respected and active members of the community before being hired.
CM experience elsewhere can't beat hands-on experience with the very community you're hiring people to manage when it comes to establishing trust and cooperation and learning how the system and people work.
This is all slightly concerning, though, in the context of the wording of the CM job position. The job listing states as a requirement:

At least 3-5 years of professional community management experience for a large technologically-focused user base

...which excludes almost all of the existing user base right off the bat, including the moderators.
This is a stark departure from the past, where it was said that putting in your cover letter that you were applying to "have more diamonds than ChrisF" would get you at least through the initial screening. (If you don't know who ChrisF is or why it would be a well-known joke that he has a lot of diamonds... here.)
Having this requirement excludes many of the people that the community would most trust to take the CM position - the people who already understand the needs of the community, are experienced in communication with the community, and already have established mutual trust. It makes no sense from my point of view to explicitly exclude these people from even being considered. Community moderation and activity on Stack Exchange should count as experience when applying for a CM job at Stack Exchange.
Can we please open up the CM listing to have either professional CM experience or experience in managing the very community you're hiring people to manage?

A: I think I've brought this up to both staff (privately) and openly where the avenues existed. As someone both personally interested, and of the opinion that we need to recapture some of the closeness to the community previous CM teams have had.
We've had many CMs from the community for the better part of the decade, and very few of them started with community management experience. Generally the main failing we had was not in the quality of the CM teams, but rather the general lack of value that the company seemed to put in them, and their ever dwindling numbers. In a sense SE built a very effective, community team, then kinda went all Harrison Bergeron on it
We've lost nearly 40 years of community management experience in a year - including folks who ought to have been in mentorship roles for new folks - and a lot of that mentoring would be in terms of network and site cultures
And while creation of new sites has slowed down - some of the roles that CMs perform include helping new mods (and we have 2 CMs with Mod experience, and one more with experience in building a community that's now part of the network- over the whole network of sites) - these sites still need help starting up, and knowledge of the platform and tools is helpful there.
But there's a lot more that's forgotten - that they were also the folks who helped resolve differences between folks in the network and that requires a certain knowledge of social dynamics. The relationships that CMs build up is helpful there - and that's something that takes an extended amount of time.
And I'm not entirely talking about in community hiring, Our initial community managers, and in a sense, the rock upon which our model of community managers were built, were essentially Jeff and 3 moderators who got hired. Many of the CMs who have passed through the halls of the company started in the community - but not all. While apparently the company didn't feel it was a success, team chaos was the foundation for many of our smaller sites. They had good mentorship from people who knew the sites and learnt the ropes quickly. But "experience" wasn't a factor - they were folks right out of school. I personally felt that was one of the best things that happened to the network as a whole, and... they wouldn't be eligible now.
This isn't just about mod eligibility to me - its about getting folks who are the right fit, no matter the background.
And of course - the really hard part to talk about. Trust.
I think that the company needing to earn that back is a given. But there's also often been a lack of trust from the company to its users and moderators.
Trust is kinda why there's not that much excitement when there's an opening, as there was in the past.
As I am often wont to do, I'm looking back at the past
In Jeff's original blog post on the theory of moderation

As a moderator, your actions now represent the community, so you will be held to a higher standard of behavior. You are an ambassador of trust, with the same sorts of rights that the official development team and community coordinators have.

And often that meant that many community managers (and some of those folks ended up elsewhere in the company) often knew many of the communities, not just stackoverflow well.
It also means, well, that the company is showing a lack of trust in its moderators - to do a job that historically preferred them. And we do run communities writ small, mentor and pass on institutional knowledge on our sites, and even to a small extent often do community growth and outreach. And these are all things we expect of our community managers on a network wide scale
I'd even go as far as saying that the experience requirement is a bit of a barrier to hiring folks who're interested but don't meet that requirement. So to me, its ok to hire out - but its also important to get people from the community in as well as non traditional candidates in either sense of it who might be a great fit.
Many places in the industry also do consider community experience either a good to have, or in this opening someone linked to me, an essential requirement for those roles.
I realise that there's big plans for the quarter and quite a few of the hires are set in stone. That said, I'd really like to see the role to be attractive and available to members of the community, and the role opened up to more than folks with a narrow band of professional experience. In building the future, lets not forget what got us here.

A: This question came up in our Moderator Face Time meeting this month, and I'm glad it's being asked here more publicly.
Our goal with this round of hiring was to give the team more robust Community Manager experience. The reason this is valuable is that we have learned many similar companies' communities have faced challenges like ours in the past, and learning from them is helpful. Additionally, Community is an established discipline and having a diversity of backgrounds is always ideal. That being said, experience in our particular communities is also helpful.
In terms of onboarding, I think of it as similar to the experience I have had hiring computer science new grads, and bootcamp graduates. Computer science new grads usually need to spend their first few years studying practical applications of code in the workplace, as their knowledge is fairly academic. Bootcamp graduates usually need to spend their first few years learning more about computer science fundamentals, as they didn't learn those as much in their bootcamps.
People that join us with a community-centric background spend time learning about Community Management as a discipline, through many resources online but most recently CMX Pro. Similarly, people with CM experience at similar companies need to spend their first few months with us learning more about our communities. They do that through blog posts, documentation, working with the team, and talking to our community directly.
We plan to continue to focus on a balance on the team, which means we will be relaxing the opening requirements and likely hire people with experience in our specific communities in the future.

A: I have to say that I'm also quite concerned.

*

*On one hand I do appreciate the benefits of bringing "new blood" into an organization


*On the other hand, I would feel a lot more comfortable if the process for hiring CMs was a lot more open, and if input from the broader SE community could be considered even if just a little bit.
