Academic hiring panels must manage the tension between effectiveness – hiring the right person for the job – and efficiency – making the search process reasonably quick and low-cost. Some universities prioritise the former: their lengthy multi-stage selection processes seek to assess a candidate’s capabilities and fit. Others prioritise the latter. Their streamlined selection processes seek to be the first to capture the best candidates in highly competitive labour markets, missing an opportunity to learn more about a candidate.
Whichever approach is chosen, the time and information constraints inevitable when hiring for early-career academic roles encourage reliance on anecdotal evidence and cognitive shortcuts. They also promote unconscious biases, which are often hard-wired into those cognitive shortcuts. The outcomes of such decision-making can disadvantage any candidate who does not fit a narrow cognitive frame of a panel – most often this means that the candidate that is not subconsciously perceived as “in-group” has a low chance of being selected.
Paradoxically, an approach that includes multiple interviews (or full days spent on campus, as is typical for the hiring process in the US) can exacerbate cognitive biases, because subtle social cues become more apparent, reinforcing unconscious preference for social similarity in selection.
What can be done to help hiring panels make selection decisions that are at least partly informed by evidence rather than gut feeling? To answer this question, we analysed the career histories of hundreds of academics working in research-intensive business schools globally.
Our main focus has been on research outcomes, which often define whether a candidate gets shortlisted, and on understanding how early-career choices (which can largely be observed in CVs of early-career candidates) relate to long-term career outcomes. So, what do our empirical analysis and the literature in our field tell the hiring panels about some of the key questions they consider?
What do early-career publications tell us?
A publication record shows hiring panels:
- Whether a candidate can produce research outputs of a particular standard
- What are their networking preferences and capabilities
- How quickly a new employer could expect new publications to emerge.
Publishing as early as possible has become an ultimate goal of many early-career academics, who seek to signal their research capabilities through a peer-reviewed track record. Besides giving a candidate a better chance to get a job, early publishing is also associated with a higher number of lifetime publications and citations. If early publishing is so important, is it acceptable for a candidate to sacrifice the quality of a journal in favour of getting their work out there? Our research shows that initial journal choices are indicative of different publishing orientations. Those who publish their early work in top journals produce fewer publications in the long term. But they have more scholarly impact than those who started with publications in lower-ranked journals.
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What is more important: the prestige of PhD origin or prestige of current workplace?
There is a powerful belief among many hiring panels that the prestige of a candidate’s PhD institution is a good proxy for their research capabilities. However, panels need to remember that PhD prestige is created by past performance of a candidate’s colleagues, but what they are looking for is the future performance of this individual. Hyperfocus on elite PhD schools misses opportunities to hire qualified people from younger institutions who did not have time to establish their reputation in mainstream rankings.
In addition, the predictive power of PhD origin is short-lived: research performance eventually converges to the mean performance at the current institution. We found that research-intensiveness of PhD origin has a positive effect on academics’ ability to produce highly-cited research, but little to no effect on their ability to produce a high volume of research. In other words, you don’t need a PhD from a top school to be a highly prolific researcher, but it helps in getting work published in highly visible and better-cited outlets.
Should universities hire their own graduates?
While some universities have policies preventing “academic inbreeding” (hiring own PhD graduates), many have a more relaxed approach towards this practice. Familiarity with the institution and panel members certainly benefits candidates who have a good record of teaching and collaboration within their PhD school. The panels often feel more confident about the teaching capabilities of these candidates – something that is notoriously difficult to assess through a CV and an interview, especially when the recruitment process does not involve a teaching demonstration.
Nonetheless, evidence shows that hiring their own graduates can lead to comparatively lower research performance and produces more locally-oriented research. For some institutions that prioritise local impact over international visibility, this is less of an issue. Others view this as a drawback, but face challenges in hiring from the international market (due to local language, culture or academic norms) and from other local institutions (because these institutions are not graduating sufficiently qualified candidates). In some labour markets, any mobility away from a top PhD institution is downward mobility. In such contexts, academic inbreeding might be a rational option for top universities and for PhD graduates seeking to pursue a research-active career.
Should we completely ignore demographic characteristics?
In some regions, a candidate’s gender and nationality are legally protected categories which cannot be used in making hiring decisions. Yet, there is a sizeable research stream that shows the influence of demographic characteristics on outcomes relevant for academic hiring. Ignoring these insights can be equally detrimental to unbiased decision-making.
We believe that taking demographic characteristics as contextual factors in interpreting the information in the CV can be helpful in several ways. For example, female academics tend to produce fewer publications, but their work is as impactful as their male peers’, which suggests that their publications are, on average, more highly cited. Since citations are hard to observe for early-career researchers, it is important to keep this evidence in mind when there is a temptation to make an unfavourable decision purely based on the lower number of research outputs.
Equally, when looking at the number of academic collaborators, there might be an argument that those with smaller international networks could be less attractive candidates. Academic network size is indeed an important factor driving scholarly impact and recognition. However, we found having smaller co-authorship networks with repeated collaboration to be more productive for non-native English speakers than having large and diverse networks of short-term co-authors.
Ultimately, panels can reduce bias by grounding decisions in evidence about how early-career choices shape long-term outcomes, rather than relying on prestige or gut feeling.
Olga Ryazanova is associate dean for strategy and governance in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Maynooth University. Peter Mc Namara is a professor and dean of social sciences at Maynooth University.
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