Faculty Search Committee Manual

Section 3: Interviewing the Candidates

The Interviews

Knowing and Courting Candidates

Reprinted with permission from The Search Committee Handbook, a publication of the American Association for Higher Education, Washington, DC, © 1988 AAHE.

This longest of the Handbook's chapters will help your search committee work through an important set of near-the-end questions: how do we learn more about our finalist, how many should we bring to campus, what happens in a visit, how can we make interviews effective, and what follows next? By chapter's end, the committee should have gathered all the information it needs about candidate qualifications and availability to proceed with recommendations to the appointing officer.

At this stage, with perhaps eight candidates on the table, the work of the committee takes on a new focus. The need is now twofold: to know these eight "better than their mother does," as a veteran advises, and to court them. The object is to find the person who best fits the job as you've described it, and to do so in a way that disposes him or her to respond favorable to an institutional offer.

This knowing-courting process can be tricky. A committee can be detective-like in its inquiries and drive a candidate away; or it can so defer to a candidate's reluctance that it learns too little.

Each of your eight candidates is in a sensitive position: up to now, everything has been confidential, nothing at risk. Now by letting you telephone references or by traveling for an interview, each risks exposure and scrutiny, and for what? One chance in eight? At least seven in your group won't be hired, as each knows; none wants to jeopardize or be undercut in an existing post.

Often at this point search committees hasten to arrange on-campus interviews. But wait: the bringing of eight people to campus puts too great a strain on the time, budget, and arrangement-making capabilities of too many parties. It necessarily means, too, that each visit may be too hasty for good learning on the part of candidate and the institution. Most importantly, it over-estimates what you'll be able to learn through interviews: you can learn 80% of what you'll need to learn about each of the eight before any of them sets foot on campus, through good investigative techniques. Using those techniques you'll find three or four to invite to interview, then use interviews for the limited things they do best, which we'll describe as "match-making."

Initiating Inquiries

A cardinal rule at this point is that the committee must have a full agreement with each candidate about the who and what of committee inquiries.

From your standpoint, of course you'd like a green light to contact anybody with potential knowledge of the candidate's abilities, to ask any question on a presumption of full, declared candidacy. A committee that's done the right things up till now — provided good information aims at motivating candidates, that's kept in touch, communicated personal caring, and been professional about its work — has a better chance of enjoying candidate confidence and of getting that green light.

Often, and for good reason, a candidate has to ask for limits: a sitting academic dean, for example, may be seriously undercut back home if committee members suddenly rain long-distance phone call upon his or her faculty and staff. Even so, at this stage that dean must allow your committee some access to people familiar with his or her work, or withdraw.

Since neither party yet wants the latter alternative, a creative arrangement may be called for. For now, for example, perhaps a given faculty member and co-administrator might be called, plus two former colleagues who recently left the institution, maybe the dean of a neighboring college, people in the prospect's former institution, a professional-society contact, and so on. The committee might agree in turn to certain discretions in talking about "the nominee." With good questioning techniques, even a few such calls can elicit information that may be adequate for now; but they are candidate-controlled, and any candidate so protected at this stage should realize that the committee will have to make less-restricted checks before any offer can be tendered.

Telephone Interviews

Assuming full permission, search professionals like at this stage to complete six to ten phone calls about each candidate (or enough for a full picture to emerge). They do want names of references supplied by the candidate ("three persons who know you best"), and they call those people, as a courtesy and in the interests of balanced reporting, but that's only a start: they'll call people they think should know the candidate, then the candidate's supervisor, staff, and colleagues, then do a blitz of former institutions, then pursue extra leads or a hunch.

Along the way, knowing that an active administrator cannot please everybody, executive recruiters aren't put off by any one person's "negative" comments; the search is for patterns of strength and limitation, for indications of "fit" between person and your task. Nor is every remark accorded equal weight: the inquirer evaluates "where the respondent is coming from" how credible and candid a source this is, how recently and well the respondent knew the candidate, and so on, all in the interest of a fair picture.

As people in personnel know, there's an art to telephone interviewing. The people you're calling may be busy, suspicious, or protective. Your need is to convince them that you're a bona fide caller with an organized, professional purpose, that you have a sincere interest in the candidate, and that their report matters. Explain your purpose, take time to chat and establish rapport, ask credible questions, and be a good listener. Don't interrupt or rush on; leave pause for volunteered remarks. Probe as necessary to get beyond strings of adjectives to specific incidents and how they were handled — reports of critical events add depth and concreteness to the larger picture you're trying to build.

What is it that you want to ask people in these telephone interviews? Two things: most importantly, about the knowledge, abilities, and traits you've identified as important to the post, and then also about significant gaps or missing elements in the candidate's materials. You learn about the former directly by asking about them, and through inference raised by prompted accounts of past performance (relevant past performance is your best predictor of future performance). As for "gaps," again, you learn by asking.

What you don't want to do is waste time asking respondents about what you already know — ­that the person is a good writer, for example, or has experience with collective bargaining. Ask instead for examples: how does the candidate behave at the bargaining table? What should I read that this candidate has written?

Note that telephone interviewers cannot ask informants questions about a candidate that it would be illegal to ask a candidate directly (about age, marital status, etc.) Keep the questions job-related.

For a search committee, the frequent bane of telephone interviewing in inconsistent information — too many members are making the calls, asking different questions, recording responses in varying ways and so on, so that it is difficult back in committee to have well-founded information that allows fair comparison of candidates (which is the task). Here are three strategies that committees have used to overcome this hurdle.

The first — strongly recommended — is use of an interview guide or protocol by callers. This assures that important, core matters are covered with all respondents, and provides for a more consistent, easy-to-use recording of respondent information. The best interviewers always use such a guide, but in a free, conversational way, so that the respondent never has a sense of simply being led through obligatory questions.

A second strategy — this one consumes member time — is to have two or more committee members conduct all interviews (or at least the more important ones), perhaps with one person doing the questions and another recording answers, then both agreeing at the end on the accuracy of a resulting record. The intent of the procedure is to reduce bias in the recording of responses and achieve a fuller record of the interview. The disadvantage is that with two members on the line it's harder to establish a trustful relationship with an informant that promotes candor.

Short of using two callers, you can reduce bias and achieve better information through attention to interviewer preparation, possibly via practice interviews done with other committee members present or by having the chair (who may be making no calls) sitting in on the first call or two placed by each committee member. Whatever option is followed, the issue is that of quality control and needs address by the committee.

Option three — this is what a search firm would do; it requires a talent, and trust – is to have one person do all or most of the telephone interviews. The advantages of this, especially if there is a person on hand with the time, knack, and confidence of the committee, are obvious: better overall questioning, consistency of information across candidates, and a great saving in committee-member time. The negatives are as easily imagined, not the least of which can be that it may take one person too long to complete a hundred or so 20-minute calls.

An alternative: have two or three members — people with the knack and time, who will agree to training and quality-control steps — do all telephoning on the committee's behalf. Whatever the case, it's a good idea to assign calls about a given candidate to a single committee member, so that questions and leads can be followed up and a composite picture drawn.

This article was reprinted with permission from The Search Committee Handbook, a publication of the American Association for Higher Education, Washington, DC, © 1988 AAHE.