I am on a Search Committee. Applications closed last week, and yesterday we sat down together to trim our list of twenty-odd names to an even dozen whom we’ll plan to interview. (A preliminary interview, after which we’ll whittle the list down further–it’s a long process.) The co-chairs of the committee asked us to come to meeting having categorized each candidate as a plus (should definitely interview), a minus (shouldn’t bother), or a neutral.
We began by looking at the pluses. Most people designated six or seven candidates as pluses, which is a reasonable figure; but one not-so-reasonable committee member listed sixteen. Okay. We’ll deal with it. A few applicants, it turns out, got six or more pluses, which is to say that more than half the committee members want them interviewed. “How about,” I suggest, “we move these candidates immediately into the to-be-interviewed pile? They’ve got a lot of support. We’ll need to discuss them thoroughly later in the process, but there’s no need to use up time talking about them now.”
“That’s a great idea,” someone says, “but I just wanted to point out that I gave a plus to [candidate with 8 votes] because I thought she was [long explanation of many of candidate’s virtues].” “Oh, that’s interesting,” says someone else, “because I also thought she was wonderful, but I was especially struck by [some other great virtue of the candidate].” “I was neutral about her,” chimes in someone else; “I was concerned about [small and probably quite trivial issue]; do we think this might be a problem?”
“Um,” I break in, “remember that these candidates have broad-based support among the committee members. We’re just choosing the top twelve, and these people are clearly in the top half. We have a lot of deciding to do; can we just say yes to them and move on?” Heads are nodding. But one person’s got her hand up. “I just wanted to say that one of the reasons I supported [candidate with 7 votes] was that…”
We get through that finally. I suggest we next look at the people with exactly one plus in hopes of dropping them from the list. (Every applicant got at least one plus, including the guy who submitted a resume on which the name of the street he lives on and the names of his most recent employers were all misspelled.) I am met with general agreement. “Let’s look at the minuses for these people,” someone suggests. Okay. Turns out that in almost all of these cases at least half of us gave them a thumbs-down. One plus, five or more minuses: The nays would seem to have it.
“All right,” I say, trying to bend over backwards to make sure no one feels unheard, “those of you who said yes to these folks—are you saying that this candidate’s really, really strong and the rest of us are missing something? Because otherwise I think we should eliminate them from consideration.”
“Well, I just think that [candidate opposed by six of us] might be better than some of you think,” says the committee member who had sixteen pluses, including several of the candidates who received exactly one vote of confidence. “And I really liked some things about [candidate opposed by five of us] too.” Enough to consider them one of your top two or three? “Well, no, but…”
We get rid of nearly all of these eventually and skip back to the best of the rest: the candidates who got four or five pluses. I suggest we hear from any naysayers in each case—anything they noticed that the rest of us didn’t, anything we should have taken into account? We start with a candidate with five pluses and a single minus. The single no voter says, “She just didn’t grab me, but there’s nothing really wrong with her; I’m fine with going with the flow and moving her over to the interview pile.” “Okay,” I say, “everybody down with that?” Another committee member raises her hand. “I had her as a very strong plus,” she says, “and one of the things I really appreciated about her was…”
We do have a list now. But boy oh boy was it an ordeal. And people wonder why I don’t like group work…
