Just wondering about searching for a Principal

At the beginning of the school year we created a Search Committee to recruit the best Founding Middle School Principal for our school. For about a month or so we searched and talked to top quality educators from everywhere in the world for that position. We then invited our top two finalists at school for the last interviews. Two amazing educators. Two persons that we all felt we could work with. Two world class school leaders who could do the job. We even joked about this several times and said: “let’s hire them both!”. Of course, the reality principle won that battle and one of the two finalists will join our community next year. Since this happened, I had time to think and reflect upon the process and what I got out of this experience.

First off, since we received sixty plus applications, I learned how to read and analyse resumes, letters and philosophies efficiently to be able to give my opinions on each applicant for the Search Committee members. This reinforced something that is obviously not new, but quite timely in this time of recruiting season: crafting those resumes, philosophies and letters to make them relevant to the individual schools is indeed crucial. It does not take long to make the difference between an applicant that not only has the expected application documents but also has a video directed to the school’s job description and needs and a conventional application that a candidate has probably sent to several other schools.

Then, when we had identified some candidates who could be a good fit, some Search Committee members made some time to talk to those applicants before bringing them to the whole group for the big interview. Even though these first conversations were meant to be informal, I managed to learn a lot about those educators as much as they learned about our community. I really enjoyed those discussions and felt that they were powerful moments. When I say that those conversations were meant to be informal, this is what we say to clarify that this is not a big interview, but those chats inevitably have a certain level of formality. It is an interview after all.

In the meantime, the committee went through a couple of steps to craft a set of questions for the main, big interviews. We started with brainstorming all the different categories that we wanted to address and we wrote some questions for each category. It was interesting to see the level of questions and the high expectations of each of the committee members who contributed to those questions in the light of their expertise. We ended up, of course, with too many questions, but all were probing potential candidate’s practice. Therefore, we had to boil those questions down to a smaller set of very detailed questions. These, asking not only for theoretical approaches but also practical illustrations, triggered many reflections that helped us identify our top two candidates. On a side note, I am keeping a copy of those questions to practice when the time comes.

Finally, our top two candidates came to Quito and that was a crazy two-day interview for each of them and a mad week for us. It is obviously not new either that in those several formal interviews and less formal gatherings candidates are constantly on the watch and I can only imagine the relief when they get back to their hotel room to some more work/reflection/relaxation/sleep etc.

I am very conscious of the fact that some candidates who got involved at any point in time and at any level with our search might read this and while there is only one getting the job in the end, c’est la vie, I feel privileged to have got the opportunity to connect with such fabulous educators from around the world. For everyone still searching, be true to yourself, ask the right questions, do your homework and bonne chance!