Hiring: Are You Good or Just Lucky?
Let’s take a look at two simple questions about hiring that appear similar but that elicit two surprisingly different answers.
Question #1: Can you tell me about how your hiring process works at your school?
If you ask this question you are likely to hear a well-rehearsed and unshakable narrative about all of the ways that the responder’s school goes about hiring to ensure for:
Fairness
Diversity
Innovation
Finding the best and brightest
Community Involvement
It makes sense that the obvious outcome of this narrative is announcing that, as a result of this process, this school has the best teachers. It is commonplace when we speak with schools for them to espouse that what makes them unique and special is their teachers. They are not always sure how, but they have managed to secure better teachers than their competitors.
Question #2: Can you tell me about the process you went through to hire Ms. Smith, the Spanish teacher you hired last Friday?
When you ask this question, a simple shift from general to specific, you often get a response that starts with, “Well that hire was a bit different,” and sometimes this is followed by “We just got really lucky (or unlucky) with that one.” There is a gap between what we think we do, and what actually happens, and this gap is worth exploring more deeply.
Our intent in hiring is to: Diversify the professional community or add strategic skill sets to our faculty, but what schools end up doing, in reality, is far more reactive. The intended process is not designed to generate lucky hires, it aims to meet specific strategic goals that matter to the school for very specific reasons. When you pose questions about why there is a gap between what we think we do and what we actually do, the most common response is that we lacked time. “We just don’t have the time to really do that, and at the end of the day, we just need a (__fill in subject___) teacher.”
The psychology that explains this gap between what we do in reality and what we say we do when asked generally leads to Resulting.
Resulting, according to Annie Duke, former world champion poker player and author of Thinking in Bets, is the act of judging our process by the results we get. So, if we are happy with teacher A, we must have done a good job with our hiring process. In this scenario, we ignore the gap between what we say we do and what we did because we are happy with the result. Conversely, when we are not happy with our hiring or when someone doesn’t work out, we often chalk it up to bad luck or we tell ourselves that there just wasn’t much of a pool to work with. The same logic that justified our gap when we get “lucky” is used to let ourselves off the hook when the result is poor.
The net outcome of Resulting is a perpetuation of the status quo. In this case, the status quo is a false narrative about what we do that bears little resemblance to what we actually do followed by a complicated psychological process that ensures we don’t confront this gap. Instead, we internally justify our process, or lack thereof, so as to avoid discomfort. We get a lucky hire. We like the person we hire. We assume our process is good. We falsely associate our comfort or us liking the result with having run a successful process. This cycle of confirmation bias plagues organizations and creates systemic cycles of hiring that disallow growth, diversity, change, and most of the goals espoused in the idealized narrative we tell people. We trade what we say we want for comfort. Ironically, this makes many of us uncomfortable.
Like others using Resulting to wrongly explain their successes or mislabel their mistakes, we must face the reality so aptly captured by Dr. Edward Deming of the Deming Institute when he said, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the result it gets.” Our current systems are designed for our comfort and they create results with certain patterns, and these patterns are a call to action to actively and intentionally redesign our hiring practices. Some of these patterns you might recognize are:
Pattern #1: Every school has a certain portion of educators that are experts in content but struggle to connect with students, other faculty, and parents. These teachers are difficult, and they cause problems, and they often poison the attitudes and morale of other teachers. We hire them, and we keep them because 15% of what they do is excellent, and the other 85% becomes an institutional liability holding back innovation, fairness, diversity, and change initiatives. This is not a fair trade.
Pattern #2: We perpetuate racial and gender norms that make it less likely that students will be able to access the most forward-thinking and relevant teaching as well as see themselves reflected in their teachers and leaders.
Pattern #3: Certain types of candidates are attractive but incapable of making it past internal hiring barriers making it almost impossible for someone that is different to seem like the best fit.
Pattern #4: Instead of hiring people that will push our internal systems to change for the better, we unconsciously hire people that fit with behaviors and mindsets that already exist in our school. We label this as "fit", but it really is code for would create tension. Even though we know we need that tension, we avoid creating it, and we say, “they just aren’t the right fit.”
Pattern #5: We get lazy, tired, or comfortable with the status quo and make excuses for not being able to do the work necessary. We will try again next year when we have more time. Next year comes, and time still seems equally fleeting. The pattern repeats.
If we are willing to admit that what we actually do is different than what we say we do, it opens up the possibility to design new ways of being with different outcomes. Hiring has been, is, and will continue to be one of the most strategic opportunities that school communities use to evolve and grow. We hope you will join us in our work to unbuild the systems and behaviors that perpetuate this gap and build new ways of being as it pertains to how we find, sort, woo, and eventually hire in schools.
Our hope is that the phrase, “We have the best teachers” can turn into “We have amazing teachers that reflect an intentional effort to deliver on our specific mission and vision.”
If, after reading this blog post, you think you might need some outside help designing your process - and this is a year where you just might need some help - we are launching a new program for small school teams who want to devote some time to think intentionally about hiring. Design for Hiring is a five meeting process designed for schools that recognize the opportunity to be intentional, creative, and strategic.
