The use of search firms to fill vacancies at universities is increasingly becoming a staple in higher education, but some Illinois lawmakers are questioning the cost of that practice and seeking to end it at public institutions in their state.
A bill pending before the State Senate would prohibit public universities from “contracting with outside search firms, executive search firms, or similar organizations.” Supporters of the legislation say that paying consultants to find candidates is a poor use of taxpayer and tuition dollars, and that hiring is a responsibility that should fall to those on the university’s payroll.
Search firms may be “nice but they’re not necessary,” says State Rep. Chapin Rose, a Republican who sponsored the legislation. The House of Representatives has already passed its version of the bill, by a 91-to-9 vote.
The University of Illinois, though, says that removing search firms from its arsenal of recruiting tools would put the system at a competitive disadvantage, hamstringing its ability to fill vacancies with talented and well-qualified candidates.
“To suggest that you could put some ads in newspapers and have a search committee sift through all the responses doesn’t reflect the current state of affairs in recruiting personnel in higher education,” said Thomas P. Hardy, the university’s executive director for university relations. Consultants play a valuable role in complementing the work of university search committees, which often do not have the time needed or vast network of contacts required to complete a thorough search, he said. For instance, a search firm may be able to uncover a qualified candidate who was not necessarily in the market and actively looking for a new position.
Universities across the country have increasingly turned to outside consultants, at least for hiring at the presidential level. Search consultants were used to recruit nearly 60 percent of recently hired presidents, a jump from 49 percent four years ago, according to an American Council on Education survey released this year.
Even though the use of outside consultants is becoming more widespread, Illinois appears to be one of the first cases where the practice is drawing the ire of state legislators.
The University of Illinois selects search firms from a group of pre-qualified firms that have already demonstrated their credentials, Mr. Hardy said. The firms do not compete for the university’s business, but rather the university selects a company that it deems most appropriate for a particular search, he said.
Before a search committee brings in an outside firm, it must receive the permission of the hiring manager, according to Maureen M. Parks, the university’s associate vice president for human resources. Though the university has no stated policy or guidelines on when such approval ought to be granted, it typically contracts with outside consultants only on searches that are international or national in scope, Ms. Parks said.
Over the past nine fiscal years, the University of Illinois has paid $5.6-million to 23 different search firms. During that period, the university system filled chancellors’ and provosts’ positions on all three of its campuses and experienced turnover in its presidency, Mr. Hardy pointed out.
But in some cases, the university employed firms to conduct searches lower down the administrative hierarchy. The News-Gazette, a newspaper in the Urbana-Champaign area, reported on Sunday that in 2008 the university hired a search firm to help select new deans at its colleges of law and business. After the first searches yielded no suitable candidates, the university hired another firm to conduct new searches, only to end up hiring internal candidates for both jobs. In another instance, the university contracted with consultants to help it find a new associate director of housing, The News-Gazette reported.
“It’s gotten completely out of control,” said Representative Rose. “It’s insane.”
Reining in the range of positions for which the university contracts with outside consultants is part of the impetus for the legislation, according to Mr. Rose. But, he said, there is also “serious concern about the quality of the work” that the search firms produce. Two of the past three presidential searches at the University of Illinois employed search consultants, and both, he says, were “abject failures.”
In addition to banning the use of consultants, the Senate version of the bill takes specific aim at some of the perks conferred on the system’s departing president, Michael J. Hogan, who resigned in March amid widespread criticism from faculty members. The bill explicitly bars universities from hiring “life coaches, executive counselors, or similar individuals or groups.”
Another problem with search firms, Mr. Rose argues, is that administrators sometimes use them as cover, to “justify a decision that they already want to make but don’t want to take the flak for.”
Mr. Rose said he encountered this problem firsthand when he served as a student-trustee at the University of Illinois from 1994 to 1996. During that time, he said, a campus chancellor wanted to step over a senior official in a hiring decision, so he “concocted this sham search” and hired a consultant to choose the person he wanted. “And for the privilege of hiring who he wanted to hire in the first place,” Mr. Rose said, “we all paid $40,000 to a search firm.”
But supporters of search firms say they add significant value and perform an important role in keeping a university’s hires competitive.
Jan Greenwood, who is president and chief executive of Greenwood/Asher & Associates, a firm that specializes in higher education, said that of the roughly 1,000 searches her company has completed, only about 5 percent have resulted in internal hires. In the vast majority of situations, she said, a university receives a list of qualified candidates as a result of an exhaustive search that a company like hers is better suited to conduct than an internal committee.
As universities have faced, over the past decade, an increasingly competitive hiring environment and an aging pool of talent that is reluctant to relocate to new jobs, search firms are playing a larger role, said Ms. Greenwood.
As a result, the legwork required on a typical search has increased dramatically, she said. Ten years ago it would take her firm about 150 calls to produce a list of 20 qualified and interested candidates for a position, she said, whereas today it takes between 400 and 500 calls.
Representative Rose’s bill, HB 5914, is pending before the Senate’s higher-education committee, which is scheduled to hold a hearing on it on Wednesday.
The University of Illinois says it is still in conversations with Mr. Rose and other legislators about the proposal. Mr. Rose says that he would “begrudgingly” be open to amending it to exempt presidential-level searches and searches for other high-level positions, like the head of the medical school. He concedes that in those situations, the Board of Trustees may be well-served by the outside expertise.
Nonetheless, he said he expects some sort of restriction on universities’ use of the consultants to pass the legislature this year.
