The Hiring Diet: Saying No to Fast Food Hiring

Forget about Atkins, South Beach, Whole 30, or Intermittent Fasting. The real question is whether your hiring diet is producing the health you want? Have your hiring habits left you unsatisfied and hungry for more? Is your school health lacking after your hiring efforts? Does your school feel flabby from hiring low-performing teachers? Are you feeling lethargic because your teacher interviews don’t deliver the nutrition your school needs? You are not alone! The problem isn’t you, it’s your hiring diet. Maybe you didn’t know it, but you are feasting on a diet of fast food hiring. This food is expired, ineffective, and void of nutrition. In fact, fast food hiring specializes in the empty calories of traditional interviews. Sure, the food is cheap, well known, easy to find, and delivered quickly. But let’s be honest, this food is not healthy, cost-effective, career-advancing, or good for students. It offers no school energy-boosting benefits and leaves you malnourished from low-performing classrooms, parents frustrated with the new teacher, friction with staff who refuse to work with the new person, and low staff morale.

Perhaps you have been feasting on fast food hiring for a while? Want something better? There’s a new hiring diet available that will help. It’s called Healthy Hiring, and it specializes in non-cognitive interview measures. The diet information is below. It’s worth your school’s health to check it out.

Better Ingredients

The Healthy Hiring diet is based on three things- better ingredients, better recipes, and a better meal plan. Better ingredients come from research in medicine, industrial-organizational psychology, business, and other fields. This research understands good and bad hiring ingredients. Fast food hiring feeds us bad ingredients because it gives in to cravings involving the four “no’s”: no time, no research, no consistency, and no lies. No time tempts us to indulge in fast food hiring with traditional interviews. No time happens when principals must divert time from demanding daily work for hiring. This added work came from the lasting effects of NCLB which decentralized hiring and defined teaching suitability through content knowledge alone- a cognitive measure- as sufficient ground for hiring decisions. School districts followed the legislation but rarely shifted practice even under ESSA. We are also tempted by no time with growing teacher shortages which influence competitive hiring timelines nationwide. Sutcher, Darling-Hammond, & Carver-Thomas explained this well in the Education Policy Analysis Archives (2019). If you and your district haven’t started a healthy hiring diet by late April, you are late and risk missing out on larger candidate pools and prime candidates. 

Another bad ingredient is no research. This is a big issue. There is no research indicating that traditional one-to-one interviews or panel interviews effectively predict teacher performance on the job. They simply don’t predict. Tasty morsels in Klassen and Kim’s meta analysis in Educational Research Review (2019) show how traditional interviews can’t satisfy our hiring cravings. This means fast food hiring decisions are based on a gamble. Ask yourself, is that what students, families, and communities should be depending on for healthy schools- a gamble? Hiring gambles didn’t work in medicine, nursing, business, police work, and other fields. That’s why these fields switched hiring diets a long way back, but education has been holding out.

The bad ingredient of no consistency is also a problem. Inconsistent hiring practices in interviews cause problems for results. Research has shown principals’ variability in preferences for traditional or non-traditional preparatory programs, teaching experience(s), interpersonal characteristics, and even gender. Diamond, Abernathy, & Demchak’s findings in The Education Forum (2022) can wet your appetite. Or, examine the malnutrition described by Goldhaber, Quince, & Theobald in the American Research Journal (2018) showing how many principals lack knowledge on how teacher quality gaps impact disadvantaged students. Other problems arise with principals focusing on pedagogy without consistent ways of measuring it in an interview. These inconsistencies flourish in fast food hiring.

Last is the bad ingredient involving no lies. Lies are bad just like high cholesterol. The truth is interviewees want to impress and get a job. This leads to interview faking and the phenomena of impression management. Interviewees make real and persistent efforts to influence the results by withholding or emphasizing certain words, jargon, facts, behavior, etc. It may seem harmless, but the underlying problem is principals can’t spot faking consistently. If we think we can, we are fooling ourselves and we give in to poor hiring decisions. Impression management fools our taste buds as Bourdage et al. identified in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology (2020). With all these problems you may wonder: Is there a better diet? Is there a healthier solution? What is it? I’m glad you are asking. The Healthy Hiring diet has better recipes designed to help.

Better Recipes

The Healthy Hiring diet offers better recipes to satisfy your hiring cravings. Healthy Hiring offers more nutrition for your school by emphasizing four starter recipes called the four ‘highs’: high fidelity, high scenario, high fit, and high context. These highs come from better measures- non-cognitive measures- which focus on an interview candidate’s dispositions, moral or value judgment(s), actual performance, or measures of sociability. These recipes deliver the hiring nutrition and energy your school needs because they show the real person. You can start with high fidelity. High fidelity involves interview tasks (not questions) that mimic the actual job. The more it’s like the job, the higher fidelity. Teach a lesson, grade a paper, write an IEP goal from given data, or respond to an angry parent’s email. The options are endless. See how interview candidates actually perform. Make them work, turn up the spice, and prove themselves.

Healthy Hiring recipes require high scenario too. High scenario means designing interactive situations that require immediate responses, role-playing, and/or incorporating situational judgment tests. Don’t give out interview questions in advance. You need to minimize opportunities for planned answers and get candid responses. High scenario gives you the benefit of seeing how they respond, interact, and work under pressure in real-time. Let them simmer just like your Instant Pot. Design your scenarios for collaboration, possible conflict, or problem-solving. You choose. Pack in some extra calories and cook multiple recipes. The more the better. High scenario is helpful because it involves actual interactions.

Healthy Hiring involves high fit and high context as two more crucial recipes. High fit requires you, the principal, to tailor the interview tasks, scenarios, and processes to match the unique needs of your school, grade, team, students, community, etc. Who will best fit in with the personalities, interests, dynamics, demographics, and needs of your school context? To ignore this for fast food hiring negates the mountains of research on job fit, person-organization fit, and the knowledge, skills, and other abilities of interviewees that should be considered in hiring. Let your school’s taste buds sample these matters in Perrone & Eddy-Spicer’s research in Leadership and Policy in Schools (2021). High fit and high context also require team involvement in the process with candid conversations about fit, context, and needs. After all, maximum health requires honest self-assessment. Now, with these four highs you may wonder: Is this doable? Can I really switch hiring diets? You can! In fact, the Healthy Hiring diet has a wholesome meal plan that will lead you to success.

The Wholesome Meal Plan

The Healthy Hiring meal plan involves the four ‘rights’: right timing, right training, right teaming, and the right talking. These rights require self-discipline, changed behavior, and savory determination. These rights are also interconnected. So, if you cheat on one, the others suffer. It all starts with the right timing for Healthy Hiring. Right timing for healthy hiring is late Fall. This is when you prepare your whole team by introducing the differences between fast food hiring and a Healthy Hiring diet. Invite your team into the kitchen and train your team on the differences between cognitive and non-cognitive measures. With this timing you build understanding, buy-in for participation, and a common language for dieting together when you form interview teams in Spring. Right training requires you, the principal, to initiate the right talking amongst your team about values, needs, personalities, context, etc. Right-training also requires you to identify priorities for hiring, inviting the team members onto an interview team, and focusing the process on non-cognitive interview measures.

Right teaming in the Healthy Hiring diet requires your active participation in interviews, listening to others’ observations about interviewees, and inviting candid analysis and discussion. Right-talking tells candidates their interview will take at least an hour, maybe two. Right-talking also remembers that fast food hiring talk is cheap. So, ignore the empty calories of traditional interview talk and focus on how the candidate performed, what they did, how they rea