Getting hired at Wharton

Like prospective undergraduates and MBAs , prospective Wharton professors have to stand out in a pool of candidates to score a spot on the faculty roster.

Of the 10 new professors at Wharton this semester, four were hired directly out of doctoral programs for their first teaching positions. In an admissions-like process, these newly-minted Ph.D.s face off for the limited number of open faculty positions at universities.

And experienced professors are usually in the mix, too. Wharton departments actively recruit professors from other universities in an effort to build the strongest faculty.

New Dean Geoffrey Garrett, who is also the Reliance Professor of Management and Private Enterprise, was wooed from his old post as dean at the Australian School of Business at the University of New South Wales. Other new professors this semester agreed to come to Wharton from the Stanford Business School, the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago Law School.

Wharton management professor Minyuan Zhao, who was recruited this year from Ross, explained that the business education community is a very small one in which everybody knows the research that others are doing. In her case, she explained that the department she joined at Wharton was very interested in the work that she was doing, and made her an offer to come join the Wharton faculty.

“There are a number of people that we do bring in who have already established themselves at other institutions,” said Lori Rosenkopf, vice dean and director of the Wharton undergraduate division. “That’s a wonderful plus for us when you have somebody who is already a renowned expert to be joining your faculty.”

Rosenkopf said that hiring at Wharton is done on the departmental level, allowing faculty to look at who is doing the most intriguing research in their field. She said that hiring always begins, though, with empty faculty positions being openly advertised in forums like the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Gerard Cachon, chair of the Operations and Information Management Department, said that after identifying the best candidates, departments also try to determine who would be most willing to actually join Wharton’s faculty.

Departments work hard on pitching themselves to prospective professors, he noted. “You make an offer and try to sell the person on the value of coming to Wharton,” Cachon said. ”Fortunately, there are lots of great things about Wharton from the perspective of an academic, so we surely have something to offer.”

“Many times the sales pitch works,” Cachon said.

Though she believes that the methods across departments are reasonably similar, Rosenkopf cautioned that she could only definitively speak from her experience as a member of Wharton’s management department. The management team always starts out by simply seeking candidates who are publishing in academic journals, leading the professional societies and who have a great reputation in their field.

Making the final decision about adding someone to Wharton’s faculty is not simple, though. In the case of Garrett, a consultative committee chaired by Dean of the Perelman School of Medicine J. Larry Jameson vetted around a dozen semi-finalists before recommending four finalists to Penn President Amy Gutmann. The committee additionally consulted with headhunting firm Spencer Stuart, whose representatives declined to comment for this article.

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