"If you hire this person I will beat the crap out of you." Strong words directed at our search committee from a midlevel administrator who normally respects the panel's autonomy and good judgment. And it was still well before noon on the main day of the candidate's interview.
Technically a search committee doesn't hire anyone. It announces its pick to the administration, which must approve the recommendation before any contract can be offered and negotiated. So there was no chance of the search committee circumventing the powers that be in this process. The administrator's remark was just a reflection of how poorly the interview was going.
People were actually sparring over whose experience with the candidate had been the worst. "I picked him up at the airport," said a member of the committee. "I was stuck alone in a car with him for over an hour."
"Yes," the midlevel administrator rejoined, "but you haven't seen him eat." Absent specifics, that seemed to trump all.
In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell describes the power of initial perceptions, the work of unconscious thoughts based upon momentary observations or "thin slices" of reality. Like most management books, it perhaps takes its central conceit too seriously. Arguably, it recapitulates some timeworn truths in the trappings of newspeak, current events, and recent scientific findings. As with his previous bestseller, The Tipping Point, we are reminded that small things can matter in big ways.
Some people do seem to have strong intuitive abilities, correctly sizing up a situation from a brief glance. At the same time the dangers of making impulsive decisions on inadequate information are obvious. Most adults at one time or another experience the tension between instincts that say, "Run for your life!" and rationalizations that say, "Don't judge too quickly; maybe everything will work out fine." Jumping to conclusions will sometimes be hazardous, but other times might save us from harm or grief.
As we conducted a search this year to fill a tenure-track position, the members of our committee spent a good deal of time talking about our first impressions. One mentioned a sexist remark that another candidate had made in the car, only minutes after being picked up at the airport. "At that point, I was ready to drop him off right there," the faculty member said. "He can find his own way back, because, for me, the interview was over."
The other committee members chuckled at the impulse, which turned out to be prescient. The rest of the campus interview confirmed that the candidate was, if not sexist, then at least a pedagogical and social bully who made several female students and faculty members uncomfortable.
But rapid cognition is certainly fallible. Yet another of our candidates was from overseas, a fact that we hoped our students from red-state, rural America wouldn't count against him, if hired. I scanned the passengers exiting the terminal, holding a sign bearing his name. Oh no, I thought, as a walking stereotype approached, whose hair, glasses, and facial expression called to mind the old "Sprockets" sketches on Saturday Night Live. This guy has no chance, I said to myself, remaining stone-faced as he walked right up to me and, at the last second, shook hands with someone standing next to me.
A few minutes later our candidate approached, surprising me by looking about the same as any of our students.
One of the faculty members on our committee was a recent hire, who had himself made a less-than-spectacular first impression at his interview on our campus two years prior. He first met the members of our department at breakfast. A faculty member who would work most closely with the new hire arrived late, and visibly steamed. It turned out he had just gotten a speeding ticket he felt was undeserved, and intended to protest. The rest of the committee members responded with some sympathy and good-natured ribbing, but the candidate, now my colleague, freaked out inside.
At the time, our committee noted how terribly stiff and even a little dull the candidate seemed at that breakfast. Racing through his mind, I found out later, were ominous thoughts about the professor with the most say over his hire having had a rotten start to the day of his interview.
Classroom demonstrations tend to make or break candidates for jobs at our teaching-oriented college. The core of our programming is the undergraduate classroom, so if you don't excel there, you won't excel here. My colleague, the candidate who seemed such a dud at breakfast, came to life in the classroom and presented a topic so engaging that the audience wanted him to continue the discussion past the allotted hour.
Other candidates have shone or flubbed in the classroom, too. One allegedly presented several weeks of material in a single hour, none of it persuasively; another clearly misunderstood the test cases raised to support lecture points; some merely read their PowerPoint presentations to us, as if we weren't capable; one belted out a sample lesson as if to a lecture hall, in a small room with 20 people in it.
The ill-fated candidate of the opening paragraphs left a wake of bad impressions all across campus. The committee collected enough of Gladwell's "thin slices" to make a thick stack -- a veritable deli sandwich of bad impressions.
So how did the poor soul get an interview in the first place? In this case, we were hiring in an area in which a senior administrator on our campus had more of a background than the members of the search committee. The candidate's initial interview had been uninspiring. But he trained at a program similar to the senior administrator's, and back-channel communications yielded a firm endorsement. The senior administrator felt confident the candidate was worth serious consideration. That was the committee's cue, and when one of our finalists withdrew from the search, we bumped this one up and scheduled a campus visit.
The candidate's performance was mediocre to poor for much of the day. In the afternoon, the senior administrator who had pushed the candidate to the shortlist was scheduled to interview him. A lot was riding on that session. Surely, we on the committee thought, the administrator would end up with the same poor impression as we had.
But a lot would depend on how thick or thin a slice of the candidate the administrator saw. A schedule conflict could easily cut their meeting short. What if the administrator's second blink at the candidate merely confirmed the original favorable impression? Then things would get tricky.
After the interview, the senior administrator stopped by the office of the head of the search committee, slumped against the wall, and said, "OK, if you want to slap me now, you can."
"That's actually pretty tempting," came the reply.
We were pleased to offer the job to the best candidate we interviewed, who thankfully accepted.
We don't yet know how our new hire will do on the job since we haven't really seen enough to know for sure. Even the best full-day, on-campus interview provides scarcely more than a blink at a candidate's true potential. As Gladwell's book shows, decisions made on such a basis can go either way. But sometimes a blink is all you get, and you go by it the best you can.
