Hmmm....what specific skills are the people getting hired in management and field roles missing? If you can break that down further maybe it’s possible to screen for those specific skills. And digging a bit further into this, how do you know the management problem is with the CMs and not the candidates? At the lower levels, you have this weird situation where you get the top job (candidate) by just showing up, but then there’s actually a selection process for the second in command, run by the person who got their job by just showing up.
I go back and forth on my opinion about hiring from elite schools. IME the schools are quite good at skimming the cream, so you will generally be stuck with less talented people if you don’t hire from there. OTOH the culture of elite schools is not the culture of most places in America and staffers’ failure to understand that seems to be a real problem. So idk what the solution is. Hire from elite schools, but only grads who grew up in the state you want them to work in, or a similar state? Hire from the top 10% state schools?
But maybe the inability to get elite school grads to run competent campaigns does point to the absence of skilled campaign managers. After all, these are people who have been quite good at responding to incentives from an early age, so why are they not sufficiently incentivized to understand local values?
I’d probably have to think harder about breaking down the specific skillsets; re: the comments above, hiring seems to be one of the skills that would fall into this subset. It would likely be slightly different for different management roles.
I agree with the weirdness in smaller races, but I think that this may be more of a culture issue than a talent issue—candidates should just learn to rein in their egos, step back, and realize that running a campaign is not a skillset that they have (and that they should let their staff handle it). I’ve worked with candidates who are very good about this, and it makes life much easier on a campaign.
Re: elite schools, I think the part of elite grads being disconnected from the reality of what happens in actual communities is probably true. But a bigger question may be, why hire at schools at all? I’m not sure that the set of skills one needs to be good at campaign roles is even weakly correlated to academic performance / admission to a top US university; people just seem to default to this as a proxy for hiring, and I don’t think it’s a good proxy.
Hmmm....what specific skills are the people getting hired in management and field roles missing? If you can break that down further maybe it’s possible to screen for those specific skills. And digging a bit further into this, how do you know the management problem is with the CMs and not the candidates? At the lower levels, you have this weird situation where you get the top job (candidate) by just showing up, but then there’s actually a selection process for the second in command, run by the person who got their job by just showing up.
I go back and forth on my opinion about hiring from elite schools. IME the schools are quite good at skimming the cream, so you will generally be stuck with less talented people if you don’t hire from there. OTOH the culture of elite schools is not the culture of most places in America and staffers’ failure to understand that seems to be a real problem. So idk what the solution is. Hire from elite schools, but only grads who grew up in the state you want them to work in, or a similar state? Hire from the top 10% state schools?
But maybe the inability to get elite school grads to run competent campaigns does point to the absence of skilled campaign managers. After all, these are people who have been quite good at responding to incentives from an early age, so why are they not sufficiently incentivized to understand local values?
I’d probably have to think harder about breaking down the specific skillsets; re: the comments above, hiring seems to be one of the skills that would fall into this subset. It would likely be slightly different for different management roles.
I agree with the weirdness in smaller races, but I think that this may be more of a culture issue than a talent issue—candidates should just learn to rein in their egos, step back, and realize that running a campaign is not a skillset that they have (and that they should let their staff handle it). I’ve worked with candidates who are very good about this, and it makes life much easier on a campaign.
Re: elite schools, I think the part of elite grads being disconnected from the reality of what happens in actual communities is probably true. But a bigger question may be, why hire at schools at all? I’m not sure that the set of skills one needs to be good at campaign roles is even weakly correlated to academic performance / admission to a top US university; people just seem to default to this as a proxy for hiring, and I don’t think it’s a good proxy.