Gone are the days when a county school district - Hamilton County, for instance - could advertise in various publications for a new schools superintendent and believe it would reap the country's best candidates.
It's a far more strategic process, Kenneth Carrick Jr., president and managing director of Coleman Lew and Associates, told members of the Hamilton County Board of Education at their work session Thursday afternoon.
So, he said, "we want to take some of this grunt work off you, and get you good candidates."
Ideally, any county would want the best qualified candidate to be hired at the lowest possible salary and be effective for the longest number of years. But good luck with that metric.
That's why the board agreed to pay Coleman Lew some $60,000 to help conduct the search.
Carrick said it is possible school board members will have candidates to select from for the superintendent's job - five to 10 is normal, with an average of about eight - by the end of March. It could be longer.
One name that will be on that list, according to the Coleman Lew president, is interim Superintendent Dr. Kirk Kelly, who has said he will apply for the job. The search firm president doesn't believe the firm should be in the position of making "the decision up or down on an internal candidate," he told Times Free Press education reporter Kendi Rainwater.
However, Carrick said the firm will give the board its opinion on how the internal candidate stacks up against any external candidates it recommends.
On a positive note, he said, two candidates already have reached out to the firm, and he said the firm would look closely at the candidates who were not picked for recent regional superintendent searches.
Knox County, for instance, closed applications for its search on Friday. The Johnson City School District has a Feb. 15 deadline for applications. Robertson County, outside of Metro Nashville, will close out its search March 3. Both Metro Nashville and Bradley County have hired school superintendents in the last year.
School board member Karitsa Mosley Jones asked Carrick haltingly though earnestly the million dollar question. Would the county's recent history - pending lawsuits and low test scores are among other things she might have been thinking about - dampen the search?
Some people would see it as a challenge, he said. Some would be risk averse. Still others initially may not want their names public. And more may not decide until they meet the board members for whom they'll work.
After all, Carrick said, "candidates are evaluating you just as much as you're evaluating them."
We want to believe board members are - as member Joe Wingate said - "passionate about what we are doing." If that continues to be the case, the Coleman Lew president's job will be a lot easier.