The ND AD Search 411

Executive search firms are crazy expensive. The firms that help colleges and universities hire presidents and chancellors can charge up to 30% of the new hire's salary (so, if the university president is offered a salary of $300,000, the search firm gets $100,000) plus expenses. If the president and trustees already have a shortlist of candidates, they'd save a lot of money by just running the search in house and hiring a staff member to help the trustees with the organization of the search.

I believe they hired this firm to avoid any unfortuante errors like the George O'Leary hiring. Money isn't an issue whatsoever in this case.

Yeah, kinda figured $$$ is no issue, but if they already know who their finalist pool is, they're basically paying for some really deep reference checks and fact checking. On the positive side, though, they're getting a fresh outside perspective, too, which in hindsight may have been the perspective needed to avoid something like what happened with O'Leary (as in having a person in the room who insists on verify degree information after all...).

The search firm is also looking outside the box, or ND family in this case. ND's in-house list would not even mention the likes of Jeremy Foley (Florida), Castiglione (Oklahoma), Bob Bowlsby (Stanford), or Craig Littlepage (UVa). With this firm, they are searching for the best possible candidate out there, whether he has ties to the university or not.