Photo: Pexels
- What is the salary range? While your search firm consultant should be able to give you some feedback on the salary range for any leadership position, doing some internal benchmarking for the role and some investigation as far as the budgetary restrictions will save you time and headaches once you’ve started. Keep in mind that salary transparency is a law in some states and certainly a sign that schools are prioritizing equity even in states that have not made that shift. Of course, offering salary transparency in a posting means that other school employees will see that range as soon as the posting goes public.
- When was the last time you updated the job description? Do you even have a job description? If so, is it just a rudimentary document or is it fairly fleshed out? Search consultants support their school clients with both tasks, but knowing your starting point is good context to bring to your search firm discussions.
- Will role responsibilities stay the same or shift? Assuming you have a job description, together with your leadership team, go through a brief reflection on the responsibilities listed. Are there responsibilities that better align with a different role? Are there responsibilities missing that are more strategically suited to this role? Even if you don’t have a job description, you and your leadership team should still go through this reflective exercise basing your discussion on what work your current leader takes on. Hiring a key leader is a good time to think about the overall supervisory structure as well.
- Who is the decision maker? Obviously, if you are replacing your Head of School (HOS), the board is going to make the final decision. Even if you are doing a HOS search, thinking about whether the search committee is sending a recommendation to the board that will be tacitly approved or whether and what evidence will need to be demonstrated. If you are replacing a leadership team member, will the HOS be the decision maker? Will the HOS be on the search committee? Will you even use a committee approach?
- Have you thought about internal candidates? Will you have any? If so, how compelling are they and how will you manage them supportively? A thoughtful search firm partner should help you navigate these potentially sticky situations in a way that the internal candidates feel valued, respected, and supported to stay at the school and continue to grow and develop regardless of whether they get the post. It’s not uncommon for school leaders to think that hiring a search firm would be a waste if there is a compelling internal candidate. And yet, even if you think that you have an heir apparent, a thorough search process may set them up for more success with the community at large both with healthy comparisons and to delineate helpful areas of support.
- Who will you include in the search committee? Even just starting to think about community members who are trustworthy, reliable, collaborative, good at keeping the big picture in mind, and represent diverse perspectives can save you some time when you are ready to start. Besides, if you do some of this thinking early, you can include a few select members to help you choose your search firm partner!
- How broad do you want your community involvement to be? Is this a position for which you can involve a small subset of your community only or does every employee need to have a voice? Is it important to have parent involvement? Students? Board members? It is important to think beyond hiring a great candidate to the level of community involvement that will best set your new hire up for success.
- What’s your time capacity? Leading a thoughtful search takes time. A good search firm partner will save you significant time overall but more importantly will allow you to conduct a broader, more inclusive, more data-driven search and allow you to treat every participant in the process with dignity. Being the school’s search chair does require time, open communication, and flexibility – if you know you have limitations with respect to prioritizing those fundamentals, perhaps there is someone better suited to lead the search. If you have any concerns about your bandwidth (and what school leader doesn’t?), a dedicated search consultant should save you an enormous amount of time on screening, candidate and community management, communications, interview planning, and even end-stage negotiations, to say nothing of the more expansive pool they should attract.
- What considerations do you need to ensure a diverse candidate pool? Today, most search firms are touting their ability to build a diverse talent pool. Part of your role is to think about whether your community is set up to support a new hire that is part of an underrepresented group in your community. Are there examples in your community’s recent past of success or failure in those transitions? Are you open to examining ways in which aspects of your search process have unnecessarily limited the diversity of your finalist candidate pool in the past? Are you open to taking a competency-based approach to your hiring?
- Where have past searches not met your community’s expectations? School folks tend to have a broad range of feelings toward using a search firm, most notably around the cost. At times over my career, I certainly doubted the efficacy of search firms and often pointed to the cost as a key mark against using them. In fact, I use those past concerns to inform how I make sure to show up for schools I serve. I strongly recommend having a conversation before you start the process to identify where search firm partners have fallen short for you in the past. Where have you been disappointed? Where have you been frustrated? What are some baseline expectations you have from the search firm you are looking to work with?
Jennifer Fleischer, Senior Talent Consultant
