The Operations of School Hiring Committees: Committees’ Preferences, Agreement, and Hiring Outcomes

This study explores the operation of school hiring committees using data from one district in Illinois, including candidate rankings, handwritten interview notes, and hiring outcomes. We find that the hiring committees we observe demonstrate high agreement about candidate rankings. Then, text analysis identifies several committee-assessed characteristics associated with candidate rankings. Lastly, we find that committees typically seem able to hire their most favored candidates. To our knowledge, this is the first study to use authentic data from hiring committees to examine the school hiring process quantitatively, thereby deepening our understanding of collaborative endeavors in school hiring.