Misguided Transparancy

The cost of transparancy

TL;DR: Documentation of reasons for decisions for transparancy purposes seems to be a worthy goal, but is nonsensical and extremely costly in practice, if performed only as an administrative exercise.

Ah, transparancy! I have not thought a lot about this innocently seeming little principle recently. It seems to become more and more important, but what is not too like about being open about the reasons for decisions that you take? Especially, if documenting them by writing them down, this will help you take the right decision. After a recent hiring process I had to ponder this - and it seems yet another of the things that are slowly going wrong - not ony in academia, but everywhere.

An important case is hiring someone. Choosing one applicant over another has huge implications - for the people applying for a job, but also for me as their future supervisor, my institution and colleagues, etc. And the case of academic hiring is bad. After months of work on a proposal we sometimes get a project funded. Hurrah. However, the work we have proposed is ambitious and needs a certain expertise - typically one that very few people have, and if they do, they are not looking for a PhD position in Norway… Instead, we get a lot of random applications (often quite literally applying for a different position, at a different university), and a lot of desparate people. That is a topic for a different talk, however. In the end, from about 150 applicants, there is nobody really suitable, but maybe 2-3 persons could maybe work out.

So we get their master degrees evaluated - since we have a legal requirement that we can only hire people who have an “A” (exceptional) or a “B” (very good") during their MSc studies (again, something I am critical about and could talk a bit more about sometime else) - and we do interviews, and prepare a ranking of the candidates. Obviously, we only do this with a shortlist of candidates, say, five of them.

How do we choose those five people to be shortlisted? Now this is where things get interesting. The process of selection of quality has many similarities across different disciplines and settings. Selecting candidates for hiring is quite similar to reviewing proposals for funding, actually.

Now here is a first, philosophical question: Are we allowed to make mistakes? So, are we allowed to take not the best candidate, but second- or third-best, or just someone that has a funny name or went to the same university as we did? In the case of a proposal review for a funding agency, it should be obvious that some responsibility is involved - we should try our best. In the case of hiring a PhD student this is similar - we have a responsibility to make the project successful. However, the key issue is that innocous sounding little word “best”. What do we mean by “best candidate”?

Philosophically, what we are looking for is some kind of quality in a person. A potential for doing something great - ah, well, or maybe just a potential for doing what the work plan is asking for!