If your institution is going through a leadership transition, you might find yourself with the opportunity to serve on the search committee. Having worked as a search consultant for nearly a decade, I can say that one of the best parts of my job is getting to know the members of a college’s or university’s leadership search committee. Whether a search for a dean, vice president, or chancellor, without fail, committees are made up of a community’s most passionate, thoughtful, and dedicated members who are deeply committed to what is best for their institution. While committee members work extremely hard and dedicate a large amount of time to the search, most also feel glad to have participated and find the experience to be meaningful and insightful. So should you consider joining? My advice would be a resounding “yes!” but only after thinking carefully about what the commitment entails.
What to expect: Search committee members have different responsibilities at different phases of the search. While the below items are not comprehensive, they represent some of the major time commitments over the course of the search, which typically lasts between three and nine months:
- Search documents: If your school is working with a search firm, the search consultants will spend many hours engaged in listening sessions with all of the school’s constituencies. You may be asked to participate in these sessions as well! From the information gathered, your consultants will craft an advertisement and a job description. As a committee member, you will be asked to review, perhaps edit, and ultimately sign off on these documents.
- Meetings, lots of meetings: We all may dread another meeting, but meetings are a necessity for search committees. Meetings early in the search might focus on the committee getting to know each other, building trust, participating in conversations minimizing bias, and learning about the overall search process. In later meetings, the committee will evaluate and discuss candidates, and, ultimately, select your interview slate.
- Reading, lots of reading: Committee members will read many pages of applications. At a minimum, an application will consist of a resume or CV (which vary drastically in length) and, typically, a two- to five-page letter of interest. Your search consultants will help screen candidates. In Diversified Search Group’s Education Practice, we operate in a completely transparent way. All applications will be shared with the committee for their review. However, with the committee’s permission, we also use our understanding of your institution and its needs to sort candidates, identifying those we think are highly qualified and worth a careful review and those that do not meet the minimum bar of criteria set by the search committee. Even just focusing on the highly qualified candidates, this work entails many hours of reading, as each candidate’s application typically takes 10 to 20 minutes to review.
- Interviews: A typical search committee will interview between six and ten candidates, usually for an hour or 90 minutes. Interviews are generally spread across a few days with breaks between candidates. There will also be a preparation meeting, an end-of-day debrief, and a final extended meeting at the conclusion of interviews to select candidates advancing in the process. This adds up to about a 20 hour commitment in a single week. Some committees also do a second round of interviews on a smaller number of candidates, but for a two- or three-hour period of time. First-round interviews are often virtual, and second-round interviews are frequently in person in an off-campus location, so travel time would be a consideration as well. Committee members may also participate in the referencing process, depending on the wishes of the hiring officer or search chair.
- Campus visits: Typically, one or several finalists will come to campus to meet with constituents outside of the search committee. The search committee often participates in the visits to aid in continual recruitment efforts. The commitment will depend on the format of the visit and the number of finalists.
Questions to ask yourself: You now have a sense of the work and time commitment of serving. Here are some other questions to reflect upon.
- Representing the whole institution: Committee members are asked to operate not as a representative of your constituency (e.g., faculty member, student, etc.), but rather on behalf of the entire school. You will be asked to be open to a variety of candidates, rather than adhering to a preconceived notion of what the best candidates “should” look like. Is that something you are comfortable with?
- Ability to work outside of “normal business hours”: We all know that finding a mutually available time to have dinner with a single friend can be challenging. Now imagine your dinner is not with one friend, but 15. And you need to schedule multiple dinners in the next few months. Well, that is essentially the challenge of scheduling for a search committee. Finding times when everyone is available is tricky! Ask yourself, “Is my life flexible enough that I could attend meetings in the early morning or evening to help ensure meeting times work for everyone on the committee?”
- Ability to shift previously unshiftable commitments: We already discussed the difficulty of scheduling. If you are a faculty member, are you willing or able to get coverage for a few classes this semester? If you are a student, are you able to miss a few classes?
- Overall time commitment: A simple question: do you have the bandwidth to dedicate this much time to service this semester?
- Confidentiality: Different schools and searches will operate with different levels of confidentiality. Sometimes, a search is confidential until a finalist is announced. Regardless of the level, is the search operating with a level of confidentiality you can support, and can you maintain this confidentiality not only during the active part of the search but in perpetuity?
In short, joining a search committee is a fantastic opportunity to meet new colleagues, learn about the perspectives other constituencies hold on your institution’s direction, and engage with wonderful candidates who will have innovative ideas and best practices to share. Committee members also often find unexpected connections, both personal and professional. For example, students might get to meet a board member who has a connection to a well-suited internship, or a faculty member may learn from a staff member about a previously unknown useful college resource. However, serving as a committee member is a significant commitment and one that will ask you to be flexible in potentially challenging ways. If life at this moment has you already spread thin, this might not be the moment to serve. But if you have some space for an intense but time-bound commitment, it will very likely be a richly rewarding experience.
By Anne Koellhoffer, Managing Associate
Storbeck Search | Diversified Search Group