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June 25, 2007, 01:16 PM ET
A Fitting End
In today’s Moving Up column, Dennis Barden, senior vice president and director of the higher-education practice at Witt/Kieffer, explains why the issue of “fit” is so critical in hiring.
The idea of having “a totally objective hiring process in which every aspect of the job and the qualifications of the ideal candidate” are catalogued and tallied, sounds great in theory, but not so great in practice, he writes. Simply hiring the candidate with the most check marks on the list disregards “human factors” — e.g., personal qualities, professional behavior, history, temperament, and appearance — that are central in every search, Barden writes.
He uses a recent presidential search, in which he and his colleagues introduced to the search committee a candidate with outstanding credentials and qualifications, to illustrate his point:
His background was ideal: excellent experience, unsurpassed educational credentials, superb scholarship, and strong strategic sense. The candidate met every item on the search committee’s list of ideal qualifications.
Yet the search committee hated him. To the committee, this man was hopelessly arrogant, self-absorbed, and even a bit condescending. That he had successfully led similar institutions in the past spoke not at all to this committee in its specific environment. The members of the committee asked him how he conveyed his authority as a leader. His response was that he is very smart and people almost always recognize that in him and defer to his judgment. His answer was directly on point for several of the requirements articulated in the position description. In an objective process based totally on credentials, experience, and effectiveness, it would have constituted an almost dispositive case in favor of hiring him.
In this case, however, it demonstrated to the search committee how very wrong this candidate would have been for its institutional culture. Instead of earning him the job, his response only served to illuminate his path to the exit.
While fit is certainly “subjective” and can, at times, be “misused to bias a selection,” it’s a legitimate factor in hiring, Barden writes. “In fact, fit is the sine qua non, the factor that ultimately separates the well-suited candidate from the merely well prepared,” he concludes.
Categories: Faculty-hiring, Administrative-hiring
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