When I was an interim dean in 2010, I was asked to serve on a search committee for the permanent dean. After a year in the temporary position, I was intimately aware of the skills needed to be successful in the job. I was also aware of the catchphrases and buzzwords that potential candidates could throw around to endear themselves to the search committee.
Our five-member committee knew its charge: We would be making the final recommendation at the college level to the provost. I wanted our panel to be in a position to make the best hire possible, and that meant having a detailed plan for how to structure the interview process.
While hiring a dean is an academic hire, it is much different from hiring a faculty member whose primary duties are teaching and research. Candidates for faculty jobs are usually asked to present their research and give a teaching presentation. Members of the hiring committee can use those in-person, behaviorally based data points to glean enough relevant information about the candidates to make a decision.
A dean's primary responsibilities are much harder to assess in a data-driven manner. A dean acts as the visionary of a college, making personnel decisions and securing money by making connections with people outside academe, among other duties. The success of every college is directly tied to the success of its dean in those respects. But those qualities are difficult to pin down during an on-campus interview.
So how can a hiring committee ensure that a candidate is the right fit for the vision and the mission of your academic unit?
We need to move away from esoteric inquiries and toward specific behaviors necessary to be a successful dean. More important, a good dean needs to demonstrate those behaviors during the hiring process. The question is: How can a search committee get candidates to demonstrate concrete behaviors that are necessary for success in the job?
First, the committee members must reconsider the types of questions they are asking candidates. In Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman (Doubleday 2008), the psychology professor Allen Huffcutt describes "poor questions" that are based mostly on emotional pretense. Questions like "What do you consider your greatest strengths and weaknesses?" and "What attracted you to this position and why?" are asked all too often during interviews but provide little useful information as to how a candidate will lead an academic unit.
Those types of questions, because of their open nature, also open the door for an emotional bond to develop between committee and candidate. Astute candidates can endear themselves to a committee by giving the answer that they believe the panel wants to hear. All too often, a committee asks such vague questions, becomes seduced by the answers, and, subsequently, is trapped by a hire who does not meet the college's expectations.
Instead, our committee used a technique called "behavior description interviewing" or BDI. What separates weak interview questions from BDI questions is that the latter are linked to specific behaviors about a position that ground a candidate's answers in actual events from his or her history. The idea is that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.
Sample BDI questions include, "Describe a situation where you used your communication skills to resolve a misunderstanding with a colleague," or "Tell me about the most frustrating faculty member you have had to deal with." Once those initial questions are answered, the committee asks more specific follow-up questions, relating to the resolution of the problem. Your goal is to pinpoint behaviors that highlight whether a candidate has the necessary skills for the deanship.
Even armed with stronger questions, however, a search committee can face the problem of "selective recall" in this interview technique. What actually occurred in a situation, and how a candidate remembers it, might be incongruent or purposely fabricated. It is difficult to hold a candidate's feet to the fire on a tough personnel issue when you are relying solely on the applicant's recall of a past event.
Because of those concerns, our committee turned to the case-study method to limit the personal bias of a past event and obtain a better understanding of how candidates might behave in concrete situations. Before the interview process began, our search committee chose a case study involving a difficult personnel decision and decided it would serve as the basis of our two-hour meetings with candidates.
The case study we chose (called "Never Again: The Promotion Denial," published in 2009 by Measured Reasons) was divided in three short parts. We gave Part 1 to our dean candidates the night before their interview to read over and become comfortable with the case. Each candidate was told that we would spend a majority of the interview discussing the case and we were looking forward to his or her insights. Part 1 introduced a seasoned department chair who went up for promotion to full professor, was denied, and then decided he would step down as chair if his appeal was opposed by his dean.
At the beginning of each interview, we prompted the candidates to discuss how they would proceed with the employee's appeal. Then we gave them Part 2 to read. It detailed how the president of the university had denied the chair's appeal, thus creating a disgruntled employee who was combative and had retreated to a faculty position. In our interviews, we followed the same process with the candidates and asked them to walk us through their decision-making process on the case. Finally, Part 3 detailed a conversation in which the dean was admonished by the president for not supporting her new policies and standards by having a weak case appeal sent to her level. Once again, our search committee let the candidates walk us through the case and explain how they would proceed in finding a resolution.
Throughout this process our committee was able to see each candidate in action, making decisions in a present-tense scenario. The case-study method trumped both BDI questions and the typical "weak" interview questions in terms of telling us what we needed to know about each candidate.
As a committee, we also asked other relevant questions, of a BDI nature, in other parts of the interview. But the focused nature of the case-study format was integral to helping us make a recommendation on a hire.
I cannot impress to you enough how helpful it was to see each candidate's concrete demonstration of specific behaviors (or lack thereof).
That being our first attempt at using the case-study method in the hiring process, it was not a perfect exercise. I have since moved to a new position at a different university, but I plan to use this approach in the future when I am part of a hiring committee. And I would encourage others to do so as well.
The case-study approach provides a behavioral "window" through which to view your potential hire in action. Like any assessment, it should not be used alone but it can contribute greatly to the success of your search. Case studies are readily available om academic publications, on the Web, or from consulting firms. I urge you to choose one that reflects the trials and tribulations of managing your campus and your division.
