Do’s and Don'ts of Running a Hiring Committee

In this Chronicle of Higher Education article, Chicago executive-searcher Dennis Barden has ten suggestions for search committees as they interview candidates:

            • Understand the job. It’s vital to know the day-to-day responsibilities of the position in question before conducting interviews.

            • Prepare. Read candidates’ materials and decide on the structure and guiding principles. “Group interviews work better when the panel agrees on a line of questioning that is intended to elicit substantive, useful responses and that can be replicated for every candidate…” says Barden.

            • Keep the purpose of preliminary interviews in mind. That is, to take an expansive view of possibilities and expand options, not decide on the best candidate.

            • Don’t represent just a narrow constituency. Every committee member should keep the good of the whole organization in mind.

            • Loosen up. “It is deadly when a panel is so focused on process that it feels that it must ask the same questions, using the same words, in the same order, with every candidate,” says Barden. “Interview conversations go better, and institutions get a far better sense of the personality of the candidate, when they flow naturally, like a conversation.”

            • Talk about the elephant in the room. People are sometimes too polite. “For goodness sake, just ask!” says Barden. It’s important to address difficult or contentious issues while the candidate is there.

            • Recruit as well as interview. “In an optimal search, the institution and the candidate find themselves at the same stage of mutual consideration at the same time,” he says. “So, not only should the candidates be telling the institution that they want the job, but the institution should be telling them how interested it is in them.”

            • Don’t treat candidates like supplicants. “Talent is hard to find,” says Barden. “It needs to be invited in and to be given a reason to stay.”

            • Understand that leaders don’t make everyone happy. “A search for candidates who have a track record of keeping everyone happy is a search for an appeaser,” he says.

            • Don’t let the process become more important than the outcome. “Process is intended to serve result, not be a result itself,” he concludes. “When institutions become so immersed in the process that they come to believe that it’s more valuable than the outcome (the hire itself), things tend to go awry – and they do so very, very slowly.”

“Treating Candidates Like Supplicants, and 9 Other Recruiting Mistakes” by Dennis Barden in The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 24, 2013 (Vol. LIX, #37, p. A36-37),

http://chronicle.com/article/Top-10-Mistakes-in-Recruiting/139351/

From the Marshall Memo #487