How you reference candidates is a clear sign of your values

Imagine the high performing candidate: they are happy and effective in their work, they have established relationships and routines in place. They also have lots to lose if their current employer discovers they are exploring your senior leadership job opening. They want assurances about their confidentiality in any search process - not just during but after.

Yet your board member - the involved one who knows from experience that ‘interview is theater’, and that what you see is not always what you get - spies a way to help manage the search committee’s risk. Why not activate their outside network of trusted sources?

Enter: the perils of uncoordinated back-channel referencing.

The case study begins with unwelcome news on a Tuesday…

You were probably nominated for your role as board chair because you were good at getting things done. And of all the tasks ahead, you probably look forward most to having the compensation negotiation with the ‘one employee of the board’ completed, in-the-bag, done.

The case study starts with a Wednesday afternoon email from the board vice-chair, about two years after the new leader started in the role.

“This year is off to a terrific start, thanks to our new leader and his team. As I shared with you previously, he is doing a great job, and he’s becoming very valuable to the organization. You may not recall this from the search, but his employment agreement does not include automatic compensation adjustments. So … in our effort to make sure we’re compensating him fairly and wisely, I’m reaching out now with the hope that you can provide some helpful marketplace data that may …

The board chair was losing sleep, this time about the chatter. The Head of School search committee hadn’t even been formed yet. But already a well-connected, vocal, and opinionated graduate of the school - also a current parent and volunteer - was rumored to be talking up their favorite prospective candidate.

“We need someone who get us, who understands our community.”

It’s just a common truth: someone impacted by the search will…

The questions that a search committee receives from the community after hiring someone new are revealing. They hold the organization’s hopes and fears. Be prepared with your answers, and use the…

Speaking with a head of school recently, we were asked the question: how would we design our hiring process to attract more of the best candidates?

The first thing to remember is that the candidates are interviewing you, as much as you are interviewing them.

We all want the hiring process to be efficient, timely, and engaging for all of the right stakeholders.

And if success depends on remembering that you are being evaluated by candidates, what is the right design choice for the first step after…

A main job of the Head of School is to persuade supporters that gifts are put to their highest purpose, applied effectively in support the mission of the school. The case for the efficient functioning of the school rests on leadership from the CFO or Business Officer to foster a culture of continuous improvement.

What conditions allow the ethos of administrative excellence to slip?

Because most leaders do not...

Your goal is to get development, admissions, and the marketing & communications functions operating together in a coordinated way. You are also reinvesting in outside talent responsible for leading that effort. How can you create the conditions for someone new to be successful when the Director of Advancement role is new to your organization?

Finding the best candidates happens more consistently when you clearly articulate the new person’s remit. What are you asking someone new to do? That’s true for both interim and permanent roles. So what do you really need?

The key thought experiment is: What will you wish...

What should the salary range be? You have likely heard the term ‘market competitive’ salary. In HR parlance the idea of market competitive is connected to the concept of ‘P50’ (the 50th percentile mark, the amount that half of survey respondents say they make less than). The concept is beguiling.

To be clear, we agree 100% with the principle underpinning the bell curve approach to salary ranges: don’t overpay for talent. It’s worth being patient and working to generate options instead of overpaying.

But there’s sometimes confusion about...

"Even though I had help and vetting from 2 trustees with a finance background, the worst mistake I ever made as a Head was hiring the wrong CFO"

It’s a sentiment we heard here at a conference for independent school professionals just yesterday. Why would recruiting for the Business Officer or CFOO role prove unusually daunting for a Head of School? In these cases, the standard questions prompt some unusual answers.

What will this person do?

The role definition for the business officer isn’t stable or standardized across institutions. It’s not unusual for...

Too many of the most highly desirable candidates were still opting out of the school’s hiring process, sometimes even after an offer. We wondered: what might these former candidates say about their experience in the hiring process?

We were left wondering: are the ways that anti-bias approaches to hiring are being implemented in schools unintentionally signaling to candidates that the organizational culture values conformity and process rigidity, over relationships and unique perspectives?

Bottom line: You can gain advantages by taking a page out of the recruiter’s playbook: systematically build relationships, elicit what’s important to candidates, and provide visibility…