A new start: Searching for the right match
You ran, and you won. Now you have to figure out how to govern. What you do with your time in office, and how you do it, will largely be determined by the team you hire. From your central office to your cabinet, your staff can make or break your term—so choose wisely.
My hiring philosophy emphasizes finding the right match over the right credentials. The best search confronts an agency’s real needs head on—its divisions, politics, and problems—and uses them as the basis for finding the right candidate. The worst hopes naively that the right candidate will solve all the agency’s problems. Open communication drives the best results.
The basics: Five principles to guide your search
The hiring process is an educational process—as much about you and the administration you want to run as it is about the candidates.
Be clinical. This is a diagnostic process that benefits above all from objectivity.
Engage stakeholders. Dialogue among them, your team, and others who understand the agency will reveal its true needs.
Expect contradiction. It will surface—and it is far easier to unearth it now than down the line.
Be open with all participants. Direct communication now is the best strategy for results later.
The game plan: Designing the hiring process
Before recruiting, consider two questions: How much control do you want over the process, and how public do you want it to be?
Most governors delegate control to a trusted advisor—a chief of staff, campaign manager, or old friend. Executive recruiters are an option but not a necessity. What matters is placing someone objective in charge, someone focused on presenting you with the best possible options rather than narrowing your choices to serve their own interests.
Early in any administration—and to some degree throughout—core team members will engage in power plays as they establish their domains. Will policy be set in your office or driven by cabinet officers? What access will cabinet officers have to you and your chief of staff? The person running the search should parse these internal divisions rationally, with you as final arbitrator. Otherwise, each new hire risks reflecting whoever won that day’s power struggle.
How much public input the process should include is largely a matter of ideology. Some administrations prize control and efficiency; others value transparency. A more public approach can sharpen your administration’s understanding of its priorities, but it can also become unwieldy and run long.
Throughout this note, I distinguish between “you,“ the governor, and the “recruiter,“ the advisor you put in charge of the search. The same philosophy applies regardless of who runs the process: use openness to get the best results.
Starting your search: The Rolodex fallacy
The best searches begin with internal diagnosis: What is going on in the agency, and why? What was the previous head like as a manager? What forces—internal and external—blocked critical goals? Where are the fault lines?
Do not let your recruiter commit what I call the Rolodex fallacy: the belief that some magical person exists whose qualifications will meet all your needs, if only the recruiter had enough contacts to find them. A recruiter’s real value is not a thick contact list—it is objectivity. The recruiter’s job is to diagnose the agency’s illness and find the right candidate to cure it. Hiring driven by a fixed set of credentials rarely succeeds. It should be a dynamic process that engages with an agency’s specific needs at a given point in time.
Diagnosis: The doctor is in
A recruiter’s first task is to look behind the defining circumstances of an agency and name them. I start every search by approaching all relevant stakeholders—senior management, office staff, unions, and outside advocacy groups—with the same simple request: “I know nothing. Fill me in.“
Previous administrations typically leave briefing books, but these only address formal circumstances. To understand what is really going on, the recruiter must also listen to individuals. Small, one-on-one conversations—where people feel safe being honest—allow for full disclosure.
Over time, these conversations generate hypotheses. I once recruited a state secretary of transportation and found, through these conversations, that the previous leader had been brought in for his political skills but was a poor manager who had lost control of his senior team. The agency had fractured into competing fiefdoms with no central authority. Further conversations revealed the agency was also under the sway of an overbearing legislative leader, with staff deferring to whichever force—the cabinet official or the legislator—seemed more threatening at the time. That diagnosis allowed me to present the governor with a clear picture of what a future agency head would face—and to recruit accordingly.
Finding a candidate: Skip the cat-and-mouse
With a clear diagnosis in hand, the recruiter brings in candidates who personify the strategic choices facing the agency. For that transportation department, I identified three distinct approaches: a former politician who could serve as a counterpoint to the overreaching legislator; an unflappable manager who could ease away from legislative interference without confrontation; and a technical expert who could broker a power-sharing arrangement. Each candidate represented a different direction for the agency.
To find these candidates, I use networking—but not the Rolodex kind. I start every search from zero, with no pre-built talent list. Instead of naming a set of qualifications, I describe the circumstances a successful candidate will need to address. For the transportation search, I began with the American Public Transit Association, and person-to-person networking quickly led me to construction companies, highway safety groups, design firms, rail transit advocates, and federal officials.
When I approached these groups, I was direct: “In our state, the legislature has overreached and the agency has lost direction. We’re looking for someone who can address these challenges.“ People respond to that kind of candor. They suggest candidates—or point you to someone who can. And the politics, while sensitive, are rarely secret to anyone close to the agency. The only surprise is that the recruiter is willing to discuss them openly.
Describing an organization’s environment—rather than listing qualifications—is a powerful recruiting tool. “Do you know anyone who could meet these challenges?“ opens minds in ways that a credential checklist never does. This approach takes no more time than conventional methods. A good search takes 80 calls, not 150 or 1,500.
Laying it bare: Naming without blaming
Once candidates are identified, it is crucial to bring them into a frank discussion of the agency’s problems—not hide those problems in the hope a new hire will quietly fix them.
I was once hired to recruit the president of a national family planning organization caught in a major identity crisis. Some factions wanted to maintain its role as a national advocacy organization; others wanted to reposition it as a women’s health provider; still others wanted to return power to its independent affiliates. Rather than paper over these divisions, I encouraged the board to use the search process itself to work toward resolution. When the board could not reach consensus on its own, each candidate was asked to demonstrate how they would manage the disagreement.
Because we were honest about the challenges, we attracted candidates who approached them differently—an activist who championed a strong national organization, a health care executive who wanted to reposition it as a business, and a leader who favored affiliate autonomy. This gave the board the chance to test both strategies and candidates simultaneously. The most successful searches are ones in which unresolved tensions are named and examined, not buried.
Talking points: How to structure an interview
By the time candidates arrive for interviews, both the organization and the candidates should be deeply informed. For the transportation search, our final pool included a former elected official, an attorney with utility and policy experience, a state highway official with an engineering background, and a mass transit executive—each representing a different approach to the agency’s needs.
The interview panel should ideally number between seven and nine people: the recruiter, chief of staff, key members of your core team (policy director, political advisor, budget director), and one or two outside advisors. If you are running a more public process, include one or two stakeholder representatives—on the condition that they commit to the same direct, open exchange.
The recruiter should open by naming the dynamics in the room—who favors which direction, what competing priorities are represented. No secrets going in; whatever goes unacknowledged now will surface more uncomfortably later.
The sequence
Start by asking the candidate to speak about herself—her background, her experience, and why the job interests her. This is both an icebreaker and a chance to understand her as an individual.
Then move directly to the substance: How will she do this job? Because the candidate already understands the agency’s dynamics, this is not an abstract question—it is an open-book test. Make clear that she is expected to confront the agency’s problems head on. Give her time to ask her own questions about the agency and the perspectives in the room. Fewer constraints on the candidate make for a more candid exchange.
Avoiding the pitfalls
Interviewers tend to form opinions in the first half of a conversation and mentally check out in the second half—then fill in the gaps with assumptions on the way out. Resist that instinct. Use the second half of the interview to revisit the doubts and negatives that surfaced in the first half, and give the candidate a direct chance to address them. Be blunt. It is not disrespectful—it is the standard of honest exchange you will want from your team throughout your term.
Discuss, too, the future hires who may be needed to supplement the candidate. A visionary may need a strong deputy manager to execute; a political veteran with limited executive experience may need strategic and managerial deputies to put their skills to work. Ask directly how the candidate plans to compensate for their weaknesses. Everyone has them—better to surface them now than three months later in the press.
Finally, interviews should be consistent in platform but not necessarily identical in structure. The same challenges will draw different responses from different candidates. Explore those differences; don’t flatten them for the sake of uniformity.
The friends-and-family dilemma
It is not uncommon to have a political loyalist or personal friend in the candidate pool. Loyalty and familiarity have real value—this process allows you to weigh them—but it also demands that the questioning be tailored to that person’s particular vulnerabilities. A longtime environmental advocate, for instance, should be asked directly how he would navigate tensions between his advocacy background and the administration’s obligation to support business development. What would cause him to resign? Raise the issues specific to that individual and test them now, rather than later.
Soliciting referrals: Honesty is still the best policy
References are necessary, but many people are reluctant to be candid. As with everything in this process, directness helps.
Include the candidate in the referral process from the start. People who run cabinet agencies must be able to handle criticism; if they have held previous leadership positions, critics of their work should exist. The key is to gauge the nature of the criticism—is it about poor performance, or about making hard choices under difficult conditions? Whatever surfaces now is likely to surface again if they are hired.
Speak openly with the candidate about what you plan to ask referrers: “We’re going to talk to people who can speak to your creativity and brilliance—and to people who worked under you, who we’ll ask how you treated them. What do you think we’re going to hear?“
Use the same directness with referrers themselves. Rather than asking whether a candidate gets along with co-workers, say: “We have an impression that he may not treat people well under pressure. Can you speak to that?“ Even a non-answer tells you something. You will strike out half the time—but the other half, people will be responsive.
Making your decision: Finding the pattern
Your final choice is a choice among strategies for the agency—none will meet every need perfectly. But the advantage of this process is that you have already thought through the tradeoffs.
What you want at the end is a pattern: a clear, defined sense of each candidate’s approach and character. Ideally, the candidate knows how they have been characterized as well. The final interview—which typically takes place in your presence—should deepen your understanding of the finalists’ plans, not reopen settled questions. Stick to the same direct, reactive format as earlier interviews.
It's the efficiency, stupid: Investing in future harmony
This process is not sophisticated—it takes no airs. It is built on frankness and humility, on the recognition that this is a process of discovery, one that fills in what a new administration does not yet know about itself.
The conventional approach to recruiting will surface the same problems—only farther down the line, in a more brutal and less controlled fashion. Dealing with inefficiency, internal battles, and scandal that stem from the wrong hire is far more costly than the initial time investment this process requires.
The best payoffs, though, are the positive ones. I once helped a Western governor hire the head of his human services agency. The previous leader had been an efficiency expert who cut costs but gutted morale. We found two very different candidates: a steady, balanced manager who would stabilize the agency, and a visionary who would push bold new ideas but draw more heavily on the governor’s political capital. Both were capable, but each made very different demands on resources. The choice came down to the governor’s vision for his term.
He chose vision.
When I returned to that statehouse years after he left office, I came across a small bronze plaque beneath his portrait. Out of all his accomplishments, it recognized above all the work he had done to reform human services. With clear choices in front of him, he made the decision that became his legacy.
Ted Webb is the founder of Ford Webb Associates, Inc., a leading nonprofit executive search firm. He has recruited cabinet officers for 47 governors and over 100 CEOs for nonprofit organizations, Fortune 500 companies, professional service firms, universities, national membership organizations, and others.