The Search Is the Preview: What This Year's Candidates Are Really Evaluating

Every hiring season has a tell. This year, candidates are watching you as closely as you're watching them, and they're drawing conclusions long before the offer stage.

I asked our team what they're hearing from candidates in nonprofit education and charter school organization searches right now. The patterns were striking - some are elements that have come up recently, and others are timeless, but they all point in the same direction: the search process has become the single best preview a candidate gets of what it will actually be like to lead your organization, and the strongest candidates know how to assess opportunities accordingly.

What's new this year

The first shift is emotional. Candidates are naming the toll of the job search itself and, increasingly, their anxiety about AI: what it means for their work, their teams, and their own relevance. People are arriving to conversations more depleted and more uncertain than they used to.

The second is a hunger to be treated as a partner in the process, not a supplicant. As Mara Cooper on our team put it, too many candidates feel they're expected to be grateful just to have applied, and the silence that follows from prospective employers (no update, sometimes not even a rejection email) only confirms the worst version of that story.

The third is about support. Serena Moy has noticed candidates asking, plainly, what they'll have to lean on once they're in the seat, for example, will they have access to board partnership, internal capacity, and increasingly, coaching and leadership development written into the offer itself? This doesn’t indicate reluctance; instead, it reflects a leader doing due diligence on whether they'll be set up to succeed.

And the fourth is a quiet loosening of the traditional profile. Some clients are more open to less conventional or more junior leaders than they were a year ago; for example, one network we work with has focused on recruiting specifically from their teacher ranks as those candidates are already integrated into their culture and expectations. The more organizations understand what it really takes for someone to succeed in their context, the better off they will be in finding and hiring the right fit talent.

What hasn’t changed

Then there are the concerns that never go away, the ones that we find organizations consistently undervalue.

Feedback is the big one. By the finalist stage, candidates have rearranged their lives - they have completed work products, taken time off, and prepared for finalist interview days. To be notified of a decline with no follow-up, not even the offer of a conversation, reads as a lack of respect. As Mara notes, the cost isn't only to the candidate: it can shape how they describe your organization for years, and it can follow you into your next search.

Transparency is the next area of concern. Candidates want the real story, i.e., why is this role open? What is the board actually like? How is staff morale? Is the organization growing, stabilizing, or facing hard decisions? Serena puts it well - a savvy candidate will do their homework and find out anyway. The only question is whether they hear it from you first.

And then the unglamorous logistics that quietly sink searches. For example, maybe there is a lack of clarity on whether the role is in-person, hybrid, or remote or maybe it is unclear if the listed compensation figure includes benefits, not just salary, and whether that is enough to make it worth a move. As my colleague Taylor Bostock has flagged for me, the persistent reality is that most strong candidates simply aren't looking to relocate. Pretending otherwise will lead to frustration and challenges in getting the hire over the finish line.

The through-line: the process is the relationship

Candidates are no longer treating a search as a gate they pass through. They're treating it as a window. The board member who gets lost on the way to the school he's supposed to govern - a real moment one of our candidates described to us recently - isn't just an awkward anecdote. It's data. The vague interview question with no clear sense of what a good answer looks like is data. The week of silence after a finalist interview is data. Every one of these tells a candidate something about how this organization communicates, how engaged its leadership and board are, and what it will feel like to be its leader.

This is why I keep coming back to hiring for the organizational moment and why the process itself has to match that moment honestly. If you're in a turnaround moment, it’s important to say so and show candidates you'll have their back. If your board is hands-on, demonstrate it in how the search is run. The way you behave during the search is the most credible promise you can make about the partnership to come. Candidates believe what you do, not what your job description says.

What this means for boards and hiring committees

A few things worth doing differently this season:

• Close the loop with everyone. A short, human note to every candidate costs almost nothing and protects everything.
• Offer feedback to your finalists. They earned it, and the goodwill outlasts the search.
• Tell the truth early. Name the organizational moment, the board dynamics, the morale, the reason the seat is open. The candidates you want can handle it; the ones who can't aren't a match for you anyway.
• Answer the logistics before you're asked. Location, hybrid expectations, total compensation, and what support exists once they start.
• Remember, the interview goes both ways. The candidate is evaluating you as much as you are evaluating them. Give them a reason to choose you.

The leaders worth hiring have options and aren't desperate to move. They're going to read your process for signs of what the job really is. The good news is that this cuts both ways: run a search with care, honesty, and respect, and you've already started doing the most important work of the partnership before your official work together even begins.