Managing Searches With Internal Candidates

On his blog, Confessions of a Community College Dean, Dean Dad recently took up the topic of turning down internal candidates. His advice is excellent, particularly his exploration of the implications of how internal candidates’ take the bad news that they won’t be offered the job.

Internal candidates pose a massive dilemma for many hiring committees. Often, they are friends, longtime colleagues, and effective teachers, scholars, and campus citizens. Sometimes, they are known to be weak in some or all of these areas, and even though they have already been employed, the committee is convinced it can do better with a new hire.

Then there is the glamor of the novel. A candidate from outside the institution seems fresh, exciting, and dynamic in ways that even someone who’s only been around for a few months may not. In such an instance an internal candidate’s competence and institutional expertise may be seen as a detriment, rather than an asset, to their being hired.

I have participated in more searches that had internal candidates than I care to remember. It can be truly heartbreaking when a colleague whom you really like personally but who isn’t doing a good job or a colleague who doesn’t fit the posted job description, even though she is really strong, or a colleague who has made a great and sincere effort to be part of the place, if only for a short time, isn’t hired. Such candidacies put everyone involved into uncomfortable positions.

Of course, institutions could simply ban internal hiring. The attraction of such a policy is that it would preempt some serious unpleasantness, but the costs would be (I think) too high. Such a policy would make the discomfort of internal candidates and hiring authorities a higher priority than hiring the strongest available person for the position.

Every search is different, whether it includes an internal candidate or not. But when there is such a candidate, the hiring committee must go out of its way to be fair to both internal and external applicants and keep in mind that the purpose of the search is ultimately to bring the best teacher, scholar, and campus citizen — whomever that may be — to the institution to serve its students and its programs.