What the candidates who got away can teach us
An Assistant Head of School at an established independent day school shared with us his efforts to diversify the faculty to better reflect and support a diversifying student body. Why, he wondered, were many of the most highly desirable candidates still opting out, sometimes even after an offer? We interviewed these former candidates to elevate their perspectives and create insights to improve the school’s hiring process.
We heard that the hiring experiences for these candidates across schools were overall less relational, less engaging, and less attractive. Based on their feedback, we were left wondering: Why would candidates interpret their interview experiences at these schools as unfavorable? Are the ways in which anti-bias approaches to hiring are being implemented in schools unintentionally signaling to candidates that the organizational culture elevates a rigid check-the-box type process; that a school values conformity over diversity?
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 during the hiring process into the things that they say are priority for them.
What was going well: Our client has a warm and accessible hiring manager who is the first point of contact for all candidates. In our recruiting experience, we find that candidates value having a direct personal connection with someone with authority in the hiring process. This Assistant Head - because of his academic credentials and administrative experience, his familiarity with the school and its needs - holds credibility and has systems in place to help him build genuine relationships. He is already doing all of the right things: anticipating hiring needs, being responsive to applicants, and even proactively connecting with future potential candidates who are not yet looking.
What wasn’t clear: Former candidates reported being sold by members of the interview team on features of this school and the qualities of the particular position they were exploring. But great classroom technology, more autonomy in course design, and other elements weren’t always key differentiators for these candidates. Candidates are listening closely to how the school talks about the issues they - the candidate - cares about most.
“How does the school respond when I ask difficult questions? How uncomfortable are they addressing the main questions I have, including those related to: ‘Will I fit in here?’
What you can do: Don’t guess on what’s most important to each individual candidate. And once you find out, customize their interview experience to provide appropriate transparency. We heard that sometimes for candidates that it’s the commute and childcare considerations that are top priority. For an up and coming debate coach, maybe it’s understanding how the school celebrates and invests in its debate team. Some candidates might be looking to apply a skillset and prior experience - in designing and delivering a project-based applied physics course, for example. But across the board, former candidates wondered with us how they can know during the interview process how inclusive and welcoming a school community truly is.
“I assume that when a school interviews me, it’s because I am queer and part of a cultural minority group, and they want me to join their community. But I don’t always feel like an interview process gives me a chance to understand how my identities will be received once I am working for a school. Kudos to your client for following up with me to learn; not a single other school I interviewed with has done that.”
How to do it in three steps:
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The purpose of following standardized scripted interview questions is to make things fair across candidates, and to avoid forming a quick impression with incomplete information. In unstructured interviews, an interviewer’s first gut sense developed in 2 or 3 minutes is often followed by a series of intuitively customized questions that, in a sense, are designed to confirm the interviewer’s initial instinct. This disadvantages people for whom the interviewer doesn’t have automatic personal affinity. Mitigate this risk, but understand it’s one of several risks in a hiring process. Because of how candidates can interpret their experience of your interview process, it can be a disadvantage to overuse this tool, or to use it in isolation.
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Don’t just send out an online survey link after the first screening interview to discover what candidate priorities are. Knowing that, say, having access to affordable local housing options, or opportunities to move up within the lacrosse coaching team is relatively meaningless - unless you also know why that’s important to the candidate, and what it might take to win their continued attention for your opportunity. That requires a conversation.
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Each interaction should communicate what it will feel like to work for your school. For the people you are inviting to campus to interview, invest the time before, during, and after to connect individually and personally. And prepare your team so that candidates with lots of options feel invited to ask potentially uncomfortable questions about belonging. Will candidates hear congruent answers across their conversations? If not, invest before a search begins to generate the organizational self-awareness necessary to land the best candidates.
Take away thought: If your interviewers are trained to implement an impersonal and check-the-box style process designed to screen out the ‘bad-fit’, you can expect the most talented and sought-after candidates - who are listening carefully for clear and consistent signs that yours is a welcoming inclusive community where they can specifically thrive - to continue to look elsewhere to invest their professional talents.
More to explore
Edward Chang and Bonnie Levine. To Drive Diversity Efforts, Don’t Tiptoe Around Your Legal Risk Harvard Business Review Magazine, July-August 2022. “Many DEI initiatives are scuttled because DEI leaders and legal teams feel themselves to be at odds over questions of acceptable risk. DEI leaders see lawyers as guardians of the status quo, whereas legal experts, trained to anticipate the worst, believe they are protecting the company from legal risk… Absent a foundation of trust and support, lawyers are skittish about signing off on initiatives, and the business is more likely to waste resources on performative exercises. And bad DEI poses a greater risk than does good DEI. When it comes to establishing a productive partnership between DEI leaders and legal counsel, the key is to collaborate early and often.
Jason Kim-Seda. Retaining Teachers of Color at Predominantly White Schools NAIS article, March 29, 2022 “In the survey, teachers of color [at predominantly white institutions] more often than white educators reported being called names, insulted, threatened, or harassed because of their race or ethnicity. One-third of teachers of color strongly or somewhat agreed that they “regularly experience microaggressions at school.” Additional challenges that women of color face stood out: 19 out of 44 women of color (as compared to three out of 10 men of color) reported that a school leader committed a racial microaggression against them. These experiences create an emotional toll that may hinder a sense of belonging….When I asked one Asian-American teacher what advice she would give school leaders regarding the retention of teachers of color, she posed this question: “Am I being invested in or harvested?” The implication is that teachers of color are more than a statistic to “harvest” for schools’ superficial diversity efforts.”