A Fitting End

Chronicle A Fitting End:

Shouldn't we seek a totally objective process of decision making?

That may sound great, but it ignores -- indeed, seeks to eliminate -- the essential human factors that characterize any search process. Most hires turn on issues of 'fit.' A candidate may have the right credentials and brains, but does he or she mesh with the organization? Fit is soft, subjective, intuitive, and very, very personal. It is the factor that leaves the institution most vulnerable to accusations of bias.

And it is perhaps the most critical.

Fit is the reason you cannot take the human out of the hiring process, why that process will never be perfect, and why it sometimes fails. Fit is a miraculous and dangerous combination of personal characteristics, professional behavior, history, temperament, and, yes, even appearance, that is impossible to catalog.

In a recent presidential search, my colleagues and I introduced to the search committee a candidate with impeccable credentials. His background was ideal: excellent experience, unsurpassed educational credentials, superb scholarship, and strong strategic sense. The candidate met every item on the search committee's list of ideal qualifications.

Yet the search committee hated him. To the committee, this man was hopelessly arrogant, self-absorbed, and even a bit condescending. That he had successfully led similar institutions in the past spoke not at all to this committee in its specific environment. The members of the committee asked him how he conveyed his authority as a leader. His response was that he is very smart and people almost always recognize that in him and defer to his judgment. His answer was directly on point for several of the requirements articulated in the position description. In an objective process based totally on credentials, experience, and effectiveness, it would have constituted an almost dispositive case in favor of hiring him.

In this case, however, it demonstrated to the search committee how very wrong this candidate would have been for its institutional culture. Instead of earning him the job, his response only served to illuminate his path to the exit. He was enormously well qualified, and that mattered not at all at the end of the day.