Moving Up

Demystifying Hiring

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By Dennis M. Barden

I have spent some time this summer on the conference circuit. National organizations that provide training for aspiring campus leaders bring them together at the close of the academic year to share lessons learned, to calibrate the value of their programs, to compare war stories, and, most important, to figure out how to put all of those experiences to use on the job market in the year to come.

Academe celebrates the nurturing of leaders even when those leaders will probably end up leading other institutions. I consider that a noble and ennobling aspect of the academic life.

I try to contribute, as do my fellow consultants throughout the executive-search profession, by volunteering to speak at those conference events. We truly believe in the process of nurturing leaders. We also do it because we believe that the better both sides -- candidates and clients -- understand the search process, the more efficient and effective it will be.

In that vein, here are a few thoughts, stories, observations, and other musings from the recent conference season.

The Other Side of the Coin

At one meeting, a panel was demystifying the search process for a room full of aspiring administrators. The questions were rapid and pointed, many of them clearly the result of painful experience: How do you approach a search committee? What should be in the cover letter? What should I expect of the interview process?

About halfway through the exchange, a question occurred to me. I asked the assembled, "How many of you have served on search committees?" Every person in the room raised a hand.

I was struck by the disconnect. Everyone in the room had served on a search committee and yet everyone had questions about the process and about how best to deal with a search committee. Shouldn't they already know the answers to some of those questions? Is the passage from one side of the hiring table to the other really a journey to a different dimension? Or are we so ineffective at preparing our search committees for their tasks that they really don't know what they want or how to get it? I can't help but think the answer is a little bit of both.

Don't Ask, Please Tell

Institutions receiving most kinds of federal aid, and many of those subject to national or professional accreditation, are required to consider a diverse slate of candidates in open searches. Most search consultants believe in the benefits of a diverse community and want to satisfy their clients.

At the same time, consultants are legally barred from asking for, or seeking out, information on a candidate's gender, ethnicity, or other protected status, and many of us are advised by lawyers not to keep an open record of those factors in our databases lest we break the law, become exposed to litigation, or both.

A discussion of those issues at one conference session became a sort of "don't ask, please tell" conversation: We seek diversity in all of our searches. Help us. If you as a job candidate are a member of a protected class, please find a way to bring that to our attention.

The Devil's Favorite Candidate Wears Prada

I have personally had to tell a very distinguished scholar and senior administrator at a top research university to buy a new pair of shoes before a campus interview. I thought that was a singularly humorous anecdote until the sartorial questions started at these conferences. The strategy for interview attire is apparently only slightly less complex than the endgame strategy for Iraq.

That seems to be particularly true for female candidates. The amount of jewelry and its coordination, the volume of scent, the style and height of shoes, and, particularly, hemlines are issues ripe for discussion.

While men can fall back on the predictable blue suit and wing tips, women face wardrobe dilemmas come interview time for which there are no clear answers. Pants or a skirt? Heels? And if so, how high? How much makeup? Pearls or gold jewelry?

Those are not trivial issues. Most female candidates know that committees are (rightly or wrongly) scrutinizing their judgment in such small matters, and those judgments are being analogized to the judgments they will make on the job.

How do you keep a level playing field from a gender perspective when the men in your candidate pool are not faced with deciding whether or not to wear dangling earrings?

Bad Questions

How old are you? Are you married? How many children do you have? Where do you go to church?

How can it be that after 20 years of successful employment-discrimination litigation, people still ask questions that they are legally not supposed to ask? It is bad enough that members of hiring committees ask us, the search consultants, those questions out of the hearing of the candidates. (Yes, they do.) But too many committee members also ask those questions out loud in the interview, putting search consultants, human-resources officials, and lawyers at great risk of cardiac arrest.

You might think we can guess who will ask the wrong questions. It might be the ancient trustee who thinks that Plessy v. Ferguson was perfectly sound law; the full professor with tenure who thinks that she can ask or say anything she wants given the protections of lifetime employment; the student going through the search process for the first time; or the long-serving president who forgets that the federal courts are not as forgiving as a campus community that has become inured to his brutally blunt style.

The problem is that while we can watch certain folks with an eagle eye, some perfectly innocuous line of inquiry will sneak up on us and take a very litigious turn.

Candidates for top positions in higher education face a truly alarming array of questions, innuendo, and double entendres regarding their family situations and personal lives. Some of that is because of the increasingly public nature of leadership in our institutions, which blurs the line between what is private and what is public. Some is because institutions are increasingly and, rightly, interested in finding leadership that fits their environments, missions, and values. Some of it is may be bias and discrimination.

All of it undermines the fairness of the search process and makes otherwise excellent candidates reticent to participate.

In the end, I don't know if the panelists at any of those conferences really succeeded in demystifying the search process. Maybe we only succeeded in providing those present with a sense that the mysteries they encounter along the way are so deeply entrenched that they must be accommodated.

Either way, forewarned is forearmed, and sometimes that is the best outcome for a conversation with job candidates in a hotel ballroom at the end of a long academic year.