Search committee game
Posted at 4:57 p.m., Sept. 24, 2013
The whole interactive, including the applicant pool and filter system.
The whole interactive, including the applicant pool and filter system.
The details shown about a specific applicant.
In the process of reporting a story on the size and competitiveness of the typical applicant pool for university faculty positions, a Chronicle reporter obtained all of the CVs for a couple of recently filled positions. The story itself would describe some individual applicants' experiences (good and bad), but we wanted to convey more about the variety of backgrounds and credentials people brought to the hiring process.
After working through a few other concepts, we came up with a game-type interactive that allows the user to narrow the (anonymized) applicant pool based on such criteria as the person's current job and number of publications. Once the user has filtered out most of the applicants, he or she can guess who actually got the job and see whether that guess is correct.
The package that included this interactive won a National Award for Education Reporting from the Education Writers Association. Among the judges' comments: "The data visualization was a fun way to make a potentially dull subject interesting."