I’m on staff in an academic medical department. I’m Chair of the department’s effort to revamp our residency applicant selection process. Our goals are to better select candidates that match our needs/desires and to sell our department more effectively to the candidates.
I have some ideas of how to proceed in both areas but wanted to draw on the giant pool of doper wisdom. Mainly, I’m looking for insight into the science of selection; any general recommendations for books or conferences to learn about the science/art of selecting the “right” applicant?
I know nothing about music, but the very first thing you need to do is to decide what you’re looking for - and do it with some precision. Otherwise you are likely to hire the first candidate who appeals, who may not be a match.
Are you looking for a teacher, a researcher, or a combination? How much experience? Someone who does well on committees? Someone who can help market the department by going to lots of conferences?
When I’ve sat in on interviews in research groups, a lot depended on the presentation - a thesis review for new PhDs. For you it might be performance.
Some places I’ve been had rating sheets, which was filled out by each interviewer. It helps focus the minds of the interviewers, and lets you get deeper than “I liked her” responses. The form of course depends on the criteria in step one.
But this all lets your snap judgement, which might be very good, be more data driven, and let be able to justify it to yourself better. It’s not scientific in the least.
Thanks for the suggestions. We are interviewing dermatology residency candidates and think we could do better. They are interviewed by a large panel of faculty, none of whom have formal training in selecting candidates. The result, as you may guess, is a mixed bag of “gut reactions.”
My thought is that a smaller number of faculty could be trained to do this better. I plan to speak with directors of other dermatology training programs to get dermatology specific advice. In the meanwhile, I’m interested in finding pedagogical books, articles, or lectures on the topic of selecting candidates, especially if an empirical approach is emphasized (We did this, we tested it against that, and this was better)…
No special training, but I’ve done a fair amount of hiring in my career, and I have one piece of advice: go with your gut. If your instincts say “no” on a candidate, don’t say “yes” in an effort to be fair or whatever – your instincts will be right, 99% of the time. (The reverse is not necessarily true, alas – there was one memorable occasion when my gut said “yes” and was wrong. Oh well.)
The problem is that gut approach is what we’re doing currently and it isn’t working well. In part, this is because over 10 faculty interview each candidate giving us 10 different “gut impression.”
My preference is to gut the current approach in favor of something structured and, ideally, evidence-based.
Nothing quite as fancy as what you’re suggesting, but if every faculty member interviews every candidate, you can use Condorcet or approval voting to pick the winner(s).
It’s simple really. All you need to do is find out the answer to these questions:
CAN this person do the job? In other words, do they have the skills and background>
Does this person WANT to do this job? Does it sound like they want to do this for a living?
Do you actually want to work with this person? No matter how talented they are, if you don’t like them in the interview, it will probably only get worse when they start work.
Dermatology is a bit of a different animal, though. It is one of (if the the most) competitive residencies in the medical field. All the applicants are academic superstars. Furthermore, dermatology is interesting, well paying, and affords a high quality of life; all of the applicants want the job.
Our candidate picks generally come down to who was the best-liked candidate, which is often based on a gut reaction. This might sound fine but when we look where our rejects get positions, often they land at more pretigious programs than ours.
The residents we select turn out to be a mixed bag of people; some fit in well and some make trouble. And they’re selected with our “do you like them in your gut” methodology.
Perhaps we can’t do better selecting candidates. Still, since I’m Chair of the committee to look into this issue, I hoped to find some resource.
Recently I’ve been kind of lobbing verbal grenades at applicants, just to see how they deal with total nonsequitors. The last several interviews I’ve guggested that it might be better to kill our unsuccessful applicants rather than disappoint them with a rejection letter. I tend to vote for the ones who get it’s a joke quickest and respond wth some nonsense of their own – all things else being equal of course.
First of all, I apologize for misreading medical as musical. I don’t know anything about medicine either.
I went to an interviewing class once, when we weren’t getting a very good hit rate on our offers. It mostly consisted of watching a John Cleese industrial, where he interviewed in the wrong way, and someone else (Idle?) interviewed the right way. I’m not sure it helped.
Is your major problem offering and getting people that turn out to be bad matches, not offering people you really want, or offering people and having them turn you down?
That a candidate you reject goes to a more prestigious program is not necessarily a sign you’re failing. That program may be a better match, or the candidate might not do well there, and you were right all along.
Have you tried a post mortem (pardon the expression, but I guess you don’t deal in them too often) looking over the resumes of the candidates you have offered and not offered? If you do some sort of ranking, you can see if the individual decisions come out the same as the decision would have been if they all had interviewed at the same time. It might be interesting.
the current approach in favor of something structured and, ideally, evidence-based.