Faculty Recruiting
I've had the opportunity to serve on various faculty hiring committees over the years which has forced me to think through the hiring process a bit: how can we make good decisions about the call we want to send out, whom to interview, and ultimately whom we make offers to? I thought that now that this year’s search is coming to a close I would reflect more on the specific criteria that I use around hiring: jealousy, ascendancy, and redundancy.
In part, I’m offering this as a counterpoint to the things written from the perspective of the candidate. I've always been fascinated by written reflections of faculty candidates after they navigated through the hiring process. These reports were extremely useful to me when I was going on the market, and I regularly point others to them as well. Nonetheless, it’s worth acknowledging that these are framed from a certain perspective: usually one of an immediate “debrief” after the process.
One of the “jokes” of becoming a faculty member is that once you’re on the other side you’ll be shocked that you were hired at all. To some extent this is true. The sausage making of faculty hiring is not a pretty thing: many moving parts, many values, many needs, many constraints. My hope is that this can be useful to others involved in the process: both committees, and candidates. If you’re an upcoming or recent candidate, maybe it will give you some sense of what happens on the other side.
Jealousy
Try to find someone who is doing research you are jealous of.
This one is a bit of a thought exercise. Imagine the areas of research that you are most jealous of. Things that are so awesome/exciting/inspiring that you wish you could be working on them instead of what you’re doing. Then ask yourself: why am I (or my unit) not working on these things? If the answer is “time” (or alternatively, “money”) you’re probably not using your time or money well: you did say you would rather be working on this topic!
If the answer is something else — some skill, some perspective, some secret weapon, that you, or someone in your unit, have no real hope of easily attaining — go advertise for that area, find the best person, and do everything you can to hire them.
Ascendancy
Find someone better than you.
We often talk about whether a person clears “the bar” when making interview or hiring decisions. Some take this bar to be some kind of average of whoever we already have. My take is that a new hire should be well above that bar. When they join as faculty, the average should move higher.
This naturally begs the question: what dimension is this bar on? This is something that the current faculty have to agree on. In part, it reflects the aspirations of the unit: what kind of place do we want to be? This can be along research dimensions, teaching dimensions, producing higher social impact, changing the field, etc. As long as there’s some agreement you’re probably good to go (if not, you probably have bigger problems).
I will say that candidate “quality” may be the most important gating factor but is probably the least interesting piece. If an application is “good” it probably passes the first of many hurdles. Good means publications, statements, experience, school, letters, and 50 other metrics that you can rattle off. My sense is that most hiring committees often share a definition broadly, but they’ll certainly vary the weights and individual differences are common. Pragmatically, I know there are a zillion metrics and “altmetrics,” but my experience is that they are often correlated and that someone who is good tends to be good across many metrics. Fishing around for some obscure measure that makes a person look good is probably just that: fishing.
Again, the dimensions need to matter to you, and you should feel that people you are considering move your group in the positive direction along that dimension.
Redundancy
Hire for economies of scale.
The one thing I always seem to bring up with incoming PhD students considering a school is to find a place with at least two people you could work with. There are too many unknowns and it’s simply too high of a risk to go to a place where you could only imagine ever working with one person. The consequence for faculty is that if they are so far removed from what everyone else is doing in their department, they will not be able to attract students as easily, find collaborators, obtain funding, and generally allow for economies of scale.
My belief is that when making hiring decisions it’s worth treating the process as an opportunity to build redundancy into the system: hiring someone who is close, in a very high-level sense, to current faculty members. We’re not looking for a perfect copy of course (see Jealousy, above). Perhaps a different way of saying this is that we’re looking for complementary hires. The goal here is not to create competition but to use hiring as an opportunity to build strength. The decision to go from one to two people working in the same (again, high-level) area is a crucial one that can make a unit into a serious “contender” in some research area. I think this is critical if you want an area to succeed.
In Practice
I think the most difficult thing with applying these ideas is that they require a self-criticism that is often difficult to employ. The goal is to find people better than you, that have the potential to be more famous than you, but that will ultimately add to a dynamic environment that you would like to be part of. For candidates, I think awareness of these objectives might be useful. It means providing evidence about why your field is exciting (why others should be jealous of what you’re doing) and how you would add to the unit you might be joining.
