Craig Franklin wrote:
... it would be grossly unprofessional for Erik, Jan-Bart, or anyone else to publicly discuss the relative merits of people who may or may not be involved in a confidential hiring process....
No, the Board resolved to "consult the community as necessary to assist with identifying, evaluating, and selecting candidates" as per http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Appointing_and_authorizing_a_...
How is it possible for the community to evaluate and select candidates without a transparent discussion of their individual merits? There is nothing which requires confidentiality in the hiring process. What would be unprofessional would be if the Board doesn't follow through with their own resolution, but we all know how well the resolution to maximize financial support of the projects fares as soon as the budgeted fundraising goal is reached since a couple years ago.
We should be discussing the merits of individual candidates in the open.
On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 12:55 PM, James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
We should be discussing the merits of individual candidates in the open.
No... we should not. That would greatly hamper the board's ability to get good candidates. Most people who are already in a current job are not going to be willing to have open debates about the job opportunities they are seeking. Not only because their 'boss' will know but also because if they are in a public company that could cause large issues in the market etc (all for naught if they don't get selected).
On 31 Jan 2014, at 21:14, James Alexander jamesofur@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 12:55 PM, James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
We should be discussing the merits of individual candidates in the open.
No... we should not. That would greatly hamper the board's ability to get good candidates. Most people who are already in a current job are not going to be willing to have open debates about the job opportunities they are seeking. Not only because their 'boss' will know but also because if they are in a public company that could cause large issues in the market etc (all for naught if they don't get selected).
There are ways of having community input into this sort of thing without outing the candidates. When the WMUK Chief Exec was hired, the penultimate step of the recruitment process was having the three shortlisted candidates attend a London wikimeet to talk with some of the community, who could then share their thoughts with the WMUK board so that they could be taken into account in the hiring process. It’s much more difficult to do that on a global scale, of course, but some sort of anonymous on-wiki or on-IRC Q&A session could be organised that might enable the community to gain insight into the candidates and provide their thoughts without naming or outing the candidates.
(I’m not saying that *should* be done here, just that it *could* be done, of course.)
Thanks, Mike
On 31 January 2014 12:55, James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
Craig Franklin wrote:
... it would be grossly unprofessional for Erik, Jan-Bart, or anyone else to publicly discuss the relative merits of people who may or may not be involved in a confidential hiring process....
No, the Board resolved to "consult the community as necessary to assist with identifying, evaluating, and selecting candidates" as per
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Appointing_and_authorizing_a_...
How is it possible for the community to evaluate and select candidates without a transparent discussion of their individual merits?
Easily; I think you're simply reading the resolution incorrectly. It can
be interpreted as "each individual candidate should be publicly outed and discussed", sure, but I don't think that's what it means.
I interpret the resolution to mean candidates, plural, as a group, not candidates as a collection of singular subjects. Or to put it another way: the community can help with identifying candidates by suggesting people who should be invited to apply (we did that) The community can help with evaluating and selecting candidates by explaining what they'd like to see in the new ED (we did that too). This doesn't extend to "the community should be involved with every candidate as part of their individual interview-and-hiring processes"; for all the reasons James gives below, that would be a startling thing to see from the board, and something they'd say explicitly if they actually intended to say it. I think the error may be on the part of the reader and not the writer.
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