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.
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37 Responses to A Fitting End
jenniferbille - June 21, 2011 at 8:44 am
After six years of working in the educational field, this year’s graduation was one of the most touching heartfelt moments I have experienced. As a young woman’s name was called, her son who was sitting across the building yelled, “Yay Mommy, we did it!” Tears actually came to my eyes as I thought about that statement…so much sacrifice happens throughout one’s education…not only for the student but for the family. As a teacher and an administrator, I have given speeches that talk about all the support and sacrifice that occurs to make dreams come true, but this little boy said it all in those five little words, “Yay Mommy, we did it!”
ronhunsberger - June 21, 2011 at 9:22 am
Congratulations to Allie, her daughter, and all of their classmates on their very significant accomplishment – and to Endicott College for seeing a need and acting on it.
coco_rico - June 21, 2011 at 10:48 am
Awwwww, she’s a little princess! Congratulations. My daughter was born while my wife was struggling to write her dissertation — I know what an accomplishment it must have been to do this! I wish you a great career.
11196496 - June 21, 2011 at 5:30 pm
Congratulations to all thee single parents who are graduating this term and to their children too.
As the economy falters more families will see multiple members in school at the same time. Every college education is a family project, especially when a family member is a parent and returns to school after a hiatus. Both the person in college and the other family members give up something in the present and get something in the future.
My husband (also an academic) and children (daughters 8 and 15 at the time) stayed at home when I went on to a doctoral program in another state in 1985. One of the best things I did was to consult the school psychologist at my M.A. institution about literature on the impact of such a move on family dynamics. When he found very little on anything but dual-career couples, a different dynamic, my husband and I found this lack of literature both scary and liberating. We decided to try arrangements for a semester at a time, evaluate them and feel free to change them.
We posed the project as a family project, one each member could be responsible for by their efforts and proud of in the product. Our children took well to this, realizing that their turns would come too when the whole family would support their times in college and later grad school. In this pre-internet era, telephone conversations were too costly to be more than occadional. We all made tape recordings every day and posted them (by snail-mail) twice a week. Our daughters’ participation in this family project paid off. They learned how hard but rewarding graduate work might be. One of them said (with no disparagment), “If Mom can do it, so can I,” and both of them did get advanced degrees in their fields.
sabbaticalprof - June 21, 2011 at 6:41 pm
very inspiring. congratulations, Allie!
nyceducator - June 27, 2011 at 9:08 am
Yes @ Jenniferbille
There is so much sacrifice…It’s an untold story! I was one of those single moms who graduated back in 1995…Today I have an MA and I am a Director for Student Programs. It is my goal to pursue a PhD in the Fall of 2012. During my undergraduate days there were so many that supported and motivated me while others condemned or criticized me for being in college. I guess some preferred that I stay at home and live off public assistance. To this day I am confused by the lack of support in Higher Ed for single mothers…
Trust me, collegs should invest in us more because we are a persistent bunch!
aegiscapital - September 7, 2011 at 1:27 am
Why doesn’t this link work? Allie tell me your story….
electronicmuse - September 13, 2011 at 6:32 am
Presidents of colleges have embraced online courses because it saves bucks.
The public may be skeptical because they are aware that “correspondence” courses (inaugurated in 1890-gee, how “progressive” are online courses after all?) have always had a slightly malodorous whiff to them-right or wrong though this may be.
pkling5596 - September 13, 2011 at 6:48 am
Agreed — online saves bucks but — and it is an important one in my opinion — it also addresses the attraction or addiction modern kids have for technology. We have changed nothing in higher education that makes a difference in today’s world. Instead of identifying the barriers — the same ones that always have existed — we should be talking about how to change. Unless of course, the orginal premise in this article is true. We don’t change because it works. I, for one, don’t think that is true.
jsouza - September 13, 2011 at 9:02 am
Another barrier to change in higher education is suggested in George Keller’s “Transforming a College” (2004). Change is sometimes hindered by a general distrust and distaste for business terms and strategies applied to the academy.
jeff_winger - September 13, 2011 at 9:30 am
The teleological belief that education of the future will be and should be different than education of the past (not content, but structure, process, pedagogy, and university structure).
Some things do not change just because technology advances. Love, friendship, etc are more the same across time than they are different. Education is this way as well.
nlasla - September 13, 2011 at 11:04 am
I think other hurdles include the need to maintain the autonomy of higher education and tenure. The first is basically an excuse for the resistance to change and the second helps maintain the status quo.
jcas3309 - September 13, 2011 at 11:27 am
The interesting thing about change in higher education – many senior leaders and academics at institutions talk about it, many see the need, but very few put the real resources behind it and have the stomach to make real strategic change. The history, tradition, governance model, and security makes all feel safe. The academic and business models need to change, otherwise, higher education will never be affordable, accountable, or efficient in the public’s eye. I hope boards, presidents, senior administration, and academic leadership start to understand – change is needed…now!
F. John Case, President
FJ Case Consulting, LLC
http://www.fjcaseconsulting.com
_perplexed_ - September 13, 2011 at 11:28 am
Barriers to what kind of change? How can you have a serious discussion without specifying what you would like to change? Do you want to increase access? Increase faculty involvement in teaching? Improve student learning? Reduce time to graduation? Barriers to each of these are all rather different.
kgodwin - September 13, 2011 at 1:09 pm
Except education has changed. How many students completed 8th grade 400 years ago? How many students needed even a high school diploma to be able to find a job 100 years ago?
Maybe education hasn’t changed over time. But it looks to me like it sure needs to. In 1940, less than 10% of the US population had a bachelor’s degree or higher. Today, it’s closer to 25% of the US population has a bachelor’s degree. That’s akin to doubling the size of an honors program without increasing the quality of the students…there have to be some changes to education in order for it to be successful in its mission.
MChag12 - September 13, 2011 at 2:08 pm
I think that there are actually many colleges in the U.S. where shared governance is strong and the college is seen as innovative. They are mostly small, elite liberal arts institutions, and unfortunately, they are only available to a limited population. But certainly the model is there, and despite their usual nit-picking at each other (faculty and administrators) they work quite well, and are almost always enjoyed by their students, who get innovation AND attention, with rigor.
MChag12 - September 13, 2011 at 2:12 pm
In general, this article seems very vague and off-kilter. It keeps on repeating the mantra THERE MUST BE CHANGE. But the mantra is chanted without context, reason, or any analysis that would give the reader a reason to read on. What needs to be changed? What are the variables? Who is in charge, how does this all fit into the larger picture. None of this is discussed, and the article comes off as faddish piece on the “crisis in higher education.”
jselingo - September 13, 2011 at 2:22 pm
Good questions to ask, although I think the barriers are related and not necessarily different. At its basis, I think the problem we’re trying to solve is access and completion.
jselingo - September 13, 2011 at 2:25 pm
This is not an article. It’s a blog post meant to generate a longer conversation about change in higher ed. As I said above in response to a reader, the basis of change is to improve access and completion.
MChag12 - September 13, 2011 at 2:29 pm
What’s the difference. Same complaint.
unusedusername - September 13, 2011 at 2:33 pm
Then the blog should have entitled something like, “Why can’t we increase competion rates?”
“Change” is just too vague. Everyone is for change, we just don’t all favor the same changes. I happen to think that completion rates are too high…too many people are going to college. If I wrote a blog entitled, “What are the Hurdles to Change?”, the factors would be things like too many online degrees, not enough rigor in the classroom, and laws forbidding companies from giving aptitude tests to prospective employees, forcing them to use a college degree as a proxy for the attributes they are looking for. That is obviously a different list than the one above.
_perplexed_ - September 13, 2011 at 3:42 pm
I fear that at selective insitutions, access and completion rates are inversely related, and prioritizing between these is a serious institutional problem.
jselingo - September 13, 2011 at 3:46 pm
Good point. I agree on some of your factors, especially rigor. Enrollment is the lifeblood of many colleges, so getting students in and through is most important. So what are your hurdles to improving rigor? Perhaps I’ll do a follow-up.
jselingo - September 13, 2011 at 3:48 pm
Tell me more — give me an example about how those two are in conflict and how that sometimes competes with institutional priorities?
_perplexed_ - September 13, 2011 at 4:05 pm
Increasing access at selective insitutions often means admitting students who are less prepared to do the work. Even if sufficient resources are available, getting these students through to graduation is more difficult as they require, on average, more remediation and/or attention. At the state supported research 1 where I work, the full cost of additional students will not be covered by state funds. Increasing access means larger classes, and more demand on ancilary and support programs (e.g., tutoring). It is hard to maintain graduation rates under such circumstances. One innovation that would help: funding equations based not only on enrollment, but also on graduation numbers.
unusedusername - September 13, 2011 at 11:35 pm
“Good point. I agree on some of your factors, especially rigor.
Enrollment is the lifeblood of many colleges, so getting students in and
through is most important. So what are your hurdles to improving rigor?
Perhaps I’ll do a follow-up.”
Well, here goes: My hurdles to improving rigor
1) Student Evaluations–Actually, I do think student evaluations have some value. If a professor gets bad evaluations, he is usually a bad professor. However, the converse isn’t true. You can be a bad professor and still get good evaluations, if you are easy. Student evaluations are valuable as part of a larger evaluation process, including peer evaluations, but if they are used as the sole measure of effectiveness, this can lead to grade inflation and loss of rigor.
2) Legislative pressure to increase completion rates–Right now, public colleges are being pressured by state legislatures to improve “student success”, which basically means completion rates. The pressure rolls downhill from legislators to boards to administrators to faculty. Pass them, pass them. Since my view is that too many people are going to college even now, I think this is a wrongheaded policy.
3) The assessment movement–We’ve already seen what micromanagement does to K-12 education. The most creative teachers are driven out, and teachers teach to the lowest common denominator so that students can pass the standardized tests. Any teacher that wants to push the students a little harder will find opposition from administration. “You need to focus on what the test covers.”
4) Differences in pass rates between ethnic groups–We all lament the “achievement gap”, and schools are looking for ways to close it. The 2 easiest ways to close the gap are to (1) make classes so hard that nobody passes or (2) make them so easy that anyone can pass. Nobody wants option 1, so 2 prevails.
5) Money–More students in the seats means more short-term revenue. Eventually, colleges that are too easy will be found out, and fewer people will go, but this takes time. In the meantime, keep the seats full!
blowback - September 13, 2011 at 11:37 pm
What are the obstacles to change? Why not begin with this publication and the function it seems to play as The Wall Street Journal of Higher Education–of the status quo–of the DC lobbying and special interest whores who pay the AD dollars of this publication. What are your and the mass media’s failures–let me count the ways:
1. A mass media that fails to cover higher eduction at all. Reviewing the coverage in the NYTimes and other national media one would think that middle school is the highest grade level Americans aspire to.
2. political leaders at all levels that seem so uninformed about the nature of higher education in America that it speaks to their utter incompetence.
3. This publication whose lack of reporting and analysis on just obvious issues is disgraceful. It would be difficult to know from reading CHE that there are in fact OTHER HIGHER EDUCATIONAL SYSTEMS IN THE WORLD THAT YOUR READERS COULD LEARN FROM IF YOU WOULD POINT OUT IN THE ARTICLES AND ANALYSIS THAT YOU OFFER THE WAYS THESE SYSTEMS DIFFER FROM THE AMERICAN SYSTEM AND HOW OUR SYSTEM IN AMERICA IS INFERIOR IN MANY WAYS. YOU COULD REMIND YOUR READERS HOW SO MUCH MORE EXPENSIVE AND WASTEFUL THE UNIVERSITY SYSTEM IN AMERICA IS COMPARED TO OTHER NATIONS
4. Unlike any other western nation there is no national centralized authority with oversight of Higher Education in the U.S and without this there will never be any of the changes or reforms you have listed. How can you reform a system made up of 4,500 individual institutions that are accountable to no one. How many corruption scandals do you have to report on whether it concerns university presidents who steal(Stevens IT) or staff administrators who steal and never go to jail. Higher education would put the Mafia to shame when one takes into account the level of misdeeds one finds being reported and the many others that are never uncovered.
5. The double standard in which talking heads speak about how overpaid public school teachers are never paid enough but who ignore the slave wages that are earned by adjunct professors who do most of the teaching at the college level.
6. A President who calls for more students to go to college but who is silent on the obvious question of who will be teaching all these additional students? And who never gets called on it by the mass media or even this publication!! A president who wishes to spend billions on college buildings but who will not spend a penny on the people who do the actual teaching in college. Stop over praising public school teachers who get far too much money for the poor job they do considering the quality of students who enter through my classes semester after semester. And Jill Biden who is herself a community college professor should know better but whose silence on the issues can only be a testament to her ignorance.
7. I could go on and on but then I would be doing your job and if I am going to be doing your job them maybe I should be collecting your salary. Obstacles? Why not look at your staff, at the editors who work at your publication, and at the people who you have writing for this publication and the people who you exclude. And maybe–just maybe– you will have your answer as to why nothing ever changes in Higher Education.
dale1 - September 14, 2011 at 9:09 am
The hurdles to rigor are well known. Essentially enrollment is the lifeblood of institutions, as you state, Mr. Selingo. Public institutions are rewarded for enrollment either explicitly through funding streams that privilege access for all (so-called input measures) or by output measures such as number of graduates. Both of these, of course, rely on input measures – the number of students an institution attracts. So the policies that are in place now reward larger class sizes and a factory mentality to higher education – get them through, get them out. Very little regard for industry needs, for significant enhancements in quality (which takes time, money, faculty, and support services), and so on are in this model, because the point is not to create high quality graduates. It’s to create graduates, period. Many states, such as Ohio and Indiana, are under these “performance funding” regimes, where they are rewarded for creating more widgets (graduates). These funding formulas do not take quality or rigor of education into account.
So the administrators say very rational things – get them out so we can get funding to do more of what we want. To me, it’s pretty simple. Rigor means we fail people because they don’t live up to the standards. We are encouraged to set low standards because we have to get people out. We have to get people out because we have to have money to survive.
In other words, the incentives are against rigor in a major way. Until the incentives change, behavior will not.
dale1 - September 14, 2011 at 9:16 am
@chronicle-946c10afd267e31dc792e726586a8810:disqus : Wow, that’s quite a list.
Higher education has been successful in America for decades. It’s less successful now on a number of metrics. I would say the number one issue is per-student funding. If we can solve this problem, we can (a) lower tuition and become a high-aid, low tuition model and (b) provide full-time position to the literally thousands of academics who are unemployed.
Now, that doesn’t mean we’ll all hire US PhDs, but I would say that we could fill these new buildings with students and faculty, if the per-student funding were restored and (I know this is a big if) health-care and other expenses could be flatlined. One can dream, I suppose.
jwsommer - September 26, 2011 at 12:49 pm
Godwin is correct in his observation, however, as I look over what was expected of a student to have learned after eight years of elementary education 100 years ago and what is expected today it isn’t clear to me that there has been much progress despite the credentialing.
kgodwin - September 27, 2011 at 1:22 pm
Isn’t that the truth! If my grandmother had taught some of the stuff that my sister is expected to teach, she’d've been run out of town on a rail (I’m specifically thinking about sex ed here). And if my sister teaches what my grandmother had taught, such as rote memorization of the presidents, she’d be run out of town on a rail.
The K-12 curriculum has changed drastically as we’ve pushed more kids through that system. In my opinion, we in higher ed should expect nothing short of that kind of drastic change if we continue to “grow”.
abbiatti - November 10, 2011 at 8:50 am
The key to success for our students is not the infrastructure. The key is what you DO with the infrastructure. Kudos to the organizers of the international meeting.
clgillham - November 10, 2011 at 7:52 pm
The concerns of Cisco’s VP are echoed around the country about the skills students are graduating with. I hope that Cisco can begin working with more institutions to help facilitate the development of necessary skills for success in the workforce because I see far too many students lacking in effectives communication and the ability to work with diverse populations.
Irfan Shah - November 14, 2011 at 5:59 am
Join hands, prioritize education and get the world moving on right course.What we have to focus on more is that how we can collaborate with our various research projects. This can help in minimizing the problem of re-inventing the wheel again and again. We can orient our attention toward areas that matter the most and that confront commonly to the whole world. Discovery of new Eco-friendly resources could be one such area where global collaboration among the universities could do wonders. Further more online and campus education could be another area to look out for, given the potential it promises especially to third world countries. By embracing diversity, we can expose countries to new education systems and hence a pure learning culture will develop.
riddle - November 17, 2011 at 9:06 am
Today Global education has become really important. Today every company wants the best employee for them self.
Thanks.
Doug Havens - December 6, 2011 at 2:49 pm
stories like this make me want to quit my current job and work in higher education – so inspiring. I work on the periphery of higher ed now, and get to interview students as part of that – education is changing peoples lives.
Where do I apply?
Great story.
cynthiamblain - February 8, 2012 at 8:40 am
There is competition in every field to get the best job, even there is competition among companies also to hire the Best candidates. Everyone wants the best for them.
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