Confidentiality creates information asymmetry: I know something that you don’t. Sometimes this secrecy facilitates a successful outcome. Sometimes it protects vulnerable parties. Sometimes it imposes high costs.

To fully understand the ramifications of confidentiality, it’s helpful to ask: Who benefits from confidentiality in an executive search?

It benefits the executive search firm. The search firm knows the candidates for all of the searches under its purview, but each of its clients knows about only one. Privileged information creates commercial power, including the ability to sell access to this information or to selectively reveal it as a means of control. The reputation of the executive search firm also benefits if confidentiality contributes to a successful search outcome.

It benefits the decision making body. Secrecy obscures any embarrassing elements of a search process and also enables only the desired aspects of the final decision to be revealed. It smooths decision making and allows influence to be exerted in unmonitored settings. Confidentiality eases stress by giving a feeling of control. It concentrates the soft elements of decision making power. By expanding the pool of applicants it can raise searchers’ expectations for the outcome of the search. Confidentiality also concentrates responsibility for the outcome (this last aspect is not necessarily a benefit to the deciding body).

It benefits the applicants. Many applicants fear (often rightly) that awareness of their explorations could damage their position at their current employer. This means that confidential searches tend to attract a larger number of applicants, especially high visibility individuals who are willing to hide important facts from their current employers.

In every case, it’s the party with more information in a given relationship who receives the benefit of information asymmetry. The hope is that the institution as a whole will also benefit from confidential searches, even though its general membership is on the short side of every asymmetry. Keep in mind that every party to the search process – the firm, the search body, the applicant – obtains private benefits from confidentiality. Unless everyone is a saint, these private benefits will affect the design of the search and its progression.

The advantages of opening up at least the final stages of an executive search to public view include broadening the sense of ownership of the search process to create a stronger sense of inclusion in the community of interest and activating a broader base of expertise in assessing finalists. It is not so unusual. A search for the Chancellor of the University of Georgia system publicly identified the three finalists. A search for Provost of the University of Arizona invited the finalists to hold public fora at the university. A search for the President of the University of Utah publicly identified the finalists. We don’t have to scour obscure corners of the internet to find these: In two of these searches, one finalist was a then-current administrator at Penn State. In the third, David Smith was a finalist.

Partially lifting confidentiality midstream after expectations have been set is of course very different from defining an open search from the beginning. Any applicant would need to give express permission before a promised veil of confidentiality could be lifted. But if a candidate is unwilling to be publicly recognized as one of three finalists, then are they the sort who we want leading a university where “it will be important for the president to foster an atmosphere of openness and transparency“? (see page 8 of the linked pdf)

(As a final note, be wary if someone with access to vast stores of confidential information chooses to reveal some tiny subset of it in a manner that reinforces their self interest. Anything can be proven by selective disclosure from a large enough store of examples.)