I’m on record here as favoring fuller disclosure of salary parameters to candidates. I think it saves a lot of time on both sides of the hiring table if candidates know in advance whether or not the potential salary for a position is within an acceptable range, though I also certainly recognize that institutional factors often make it difficult to provide such disclosures.
If there has been a discussion with candidates or potential candidates about the salary range for a particular position, however, there’s one thing such candidates must not do: They should never go over the head of the search-committee chair to the department chair, dean, or vice president for academic affairs to ask if it’s possible to increase the salary range. Such an action is problematic in all sorts of ways. First, it’s seriously presumptuous. The requester is suggesting that his or her application is so valuable or even transcendent that it’s time to start negotiating salary even before an interview is offered.
Second, it’s disrespectful of the search chair’s role. Up until the point of a campus interview, or maybe even the actual offer, the search chair is the primary mediator between the institution and the candidate pool. Candidates are making a serious strategic and political error if they bypass the chair to go up the chain in search of a better deal. This practice smacks more than a little of children playing one parent against the other in order to get permission to do something they probably shouldn’t do, and childhood behavior should not be the template for adult professional action.
Finally, it’s disrespectful of an institution’s processes. I know that when we set a salary for a position, we do so with a lot of factors in mind: We look at the compensation in comparable positions across the institution and salary data from various professional organizations and consider our overall budget situation. We don’t just slap a number on the job description and go forward. We also try very hard to make our salaries equitable and competitive.
For a candidate to try to bypass these processes is seriously bad form, and does not bode well for their future. Doing so will reduce a candidate’s chances for success on the market, and, these days, anything that does that without a strong rationale is an extremely bad idea.
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4 Responses to One Thing Candidates Should Not Do
orthgc1 - September 17, 2009 at 4:35 pm
While I agree that a candidate going over the head of the search committee chair is certainly presumptuous, the “end-run” has become so commonplace at many institutions, few would be surprised to see the strategy surface in the hiring process.
danhimes - September 17, 2009 at 6:35 pm
The advice in this column is only applicable if the search committee chair is the “yes man,” the person with the authority to say “yes” to a salary increase. Many times that person is not, and in those cases, interviewees should ignore the advice in this column. It’s almost always futile to negotiate with someone who cannot say yes.I’m not sure what to make of the quote, “Doing so will reduce a candidate’s chances for success on the market.” It sounds a little like a threat.
panacea - September 17, 2009 at 11:29 pm
It’s not a threat. It should be a fact of life; going out of the chain of command undermines the authority of the search chair.Do you really want to hire a faculty member who’s going to constantly be going over his department chair to the Dean? Or the President?If a candidate does not like the salary range he should either bail on the job or wait until further in the selection process to negotiate for higher pay.
David Evans - September 24, 2009 at 1:33 pm
In my previous entry, I explained why it’s a bad idea for a candidate to go over the head of the search chair to discuss salary matters with a department chair, dean, or vice president. But one of the commenters countered that candidates may need to bypass the search chair if she or he isn’t in a position to say “yes” to their requests. I respectfully disagree. It is not the search chair’s role to negotiate salaries with candidates, especially if he or she isn’t the ultimate salary authority (which he or she often is not) and when the offer hasn’t yet been extended. That said, candidates should be able to ask the search chair about salary without penalty or opprobrium, and it is the chair’s duty to take the issue to a higher power, unless there is a known, absolute limit on what is possible in a particular search. In the incident that inspired my previous entry, that’s exactly what happened—the search chair came to me, we conferred about the entire set of circumstances, and decided what to do. A search chair should not sit on this kind of inquiry from candidates. If the chair does not know whether discussing salary is appropriate (by institutional standards and protocols), she or he should ask. If the chair knows that it is acceptable to discuss salary, and encounters a question from a candidate about it, the chair should confer with the person who can actually make the decision. In such circumstances, the ultimate salary authority might decide to talk directly with a candidate rather than go through the search chair, but the decision about whether or not to include the search chair in the discussion is up to the hiring team, not the candidate. During a search, it’s not unusual for an institution to test candidates’ knowledge of how to act. Sometimes such testing can seem like a petty game, and candidates may be cut for ridiculous and inappropriate reasons. But it is not petty and inappropriate to expect candidates to respect institutional structures and protocols, and as another commenter notes, institutions do not want to hire people who have an excessive sense of entitlement or lack savvy. So, I stand by my original points, but with the caveat that the search chair needs to act right as well.