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I'm on a faculty search committee in a large department at a large university. We can typically recruit 4-6 new faculty per year. We would like to recruit the "best" faculty available each year, regardless of their focus. Best is highly subjective, so we have a search committee to help rank candidates.

Here's the problem: our field has several sub-disciplines. If we were a math department, this would be something like algebra, geometry, topology, applied math and combinatorics. Faculty on our search committee tend to rank people in their sub-discipline higher, and others lower. This is likely due to a mix of faculty finding their own field most interesting and important, leading to bias in rankings, and also an intentional desire to recruit people to their own area to get more good colleagues.

The result is that our largest and noisiest areas usually win, so we keep recruiting people in these areas. It would actually be even better if we could recruit people into areas where we aren't currently as strong, to improve the breadth of our department, but these candidates seldom have advocates.

Is there a good game-theoretic approach to ranking or voting for candidates that would help us find optimal candidates regardless of their sub-discipline? Our faculty, generally, are of good will and want to do well for the department, so if we can give them good guidance I'm hopeful they might follow it.

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    There is no 'optimal' way that everyone will agree with. However, getting broad agreement that more diversity in areas is needed will help. Then perhaps not allow members to vote for candidates in their area. Or intentionally set aside 1 or 2 positions for acknowledged under-represented areas.
    – Jon Custer
    Commented Jan 4 at 20:27
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    If you're recruiting four to six faculty members per year shouldn't you (maybe not you personally, but your department) have a decent idea of where the shallow coverage in sub-disciplines is already, and you hire to that end? I've only been involved in this on the student end, and at only one institution (so I don't think I can really answer, merely push back against the idea that you should be sub-discipline agnostic in a comment) but this is how it always seemed to me: "This year we're interviewing for a Graphics professor and a Machine Learning professor."
    – Anonymous
    Commented Jan 5 at 1:50
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    Can you request current faculty members recuse if the candidate works in their area, or scale their ranking somehow?
    – Allure
    Commented Jan 5 at 5:50
  • Just count the rankings from some area with the weight inversely proportional to the number of people in that area (or you may want to use some more or less aggressive discounting function than $1/x$). That is a universal rule that applies to anybody in the same manner, so it seems fair to me but, depending on the choice of the discounting function $g$, it will enforce some small or large amount of balancing automatically assuming that the area of the "truly best" candidate is random enough. You can play with the corresponding probability problem yourself before suggesting some particular $g$.
    – fedja
    Commented Jan 5 at 12:32

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It seems like identifying "gaps" in domains of faculty expertise needs to be done separately from ranking candidates. And it seems like this should be done by department leadership, not by hiring committee members. If you categorize applicants by domain, the committee can rank and identify the "best" candidates in each domain. Presumably, you would then prioritize interviewing the best candidates in the under-represented domains.

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    Yes. The issues are distinct so separate policies are indicated. Welcome to the site.
    – Buffy
    Commented Mar 29 at 20:46
  • Better yet, chose the subfield and then appoint a committee of faculty in that subfield to hire the next faculty member in their area.
    – Brian Borchers
    Commented Mar 30 at 4:47
  • @BrianBorchers, yes, or at least get advice from such faculty fed into the committee. That might work in a more collegial department than the one the OP seems to suggest, though. I've been at such a place.
    – Buffy
    Commented Mar 30 at 12:05

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