A Selection Committee is a group of individuals charged with making a hiring decision on behalf of an organization. It can be comprised of supervisors, peers, or even clients/customers who offer varying perspectives and experience with the candidate pool. The committee must be diverse enough to maximize its chances of evaluating the candidates objectively and avoiding bias.
Selection committee members must be willing and able to commit their time and energy to the process. If committee members are not committed, they will most likely fall prey to the temptation of weighing their personal impressions and observations of the applicant interview too heavily. This can lead to a hiring error that may negatively impact the organization.
To ensure that the selection committee does its job correctly, each member must understand and agree on the ideal candidate profile that will serve as the basis of the evaluation. This is especially important in the preparation and interview stages of the selection process.
Committee members must use a wide variety of observation, consultation and data resources throughout the season and during selection week to make their decisions. These include an extensive season-long evaluation of teams through watching games, conference monitoring calls and NABC regional advisory rankings; full box scores and results of all regular-season games; head-to-head wins and losses; quality wins versus common opponents; overall and nonconference strength of schedule; and various computer metrics.
The Selection Committee must be able to weigh all of these factors equally during the deliberation and seeding stage of the process. The goal is to create a balanced field that reflects the overall strengths of the entire NCAA divisional and geographical tournament fields.
The committee must also take into account the unique circumstances that affect individual teams during the regular season and during the course of the tournament. For example, the committee must evaluate a team’s loss to a top-10 team when assessing its resume. However, the committee does not impose an artificial restriction on the number of times a team must lose to a top-10 team in order to earn a certain seed level.
The Committee should strive to avoid rematches of teams from the same conference, geographic area or region an inordinate number of times in the First Four and first round. This is a difficult task that requires the committee to weigh the benefits and cost of doing so against the potential for an early upset in the NCAA Tournament.
In the case of Louisville and Saint Louis, the Committee did not penalize either team for losing to a top-10 team following the COVID pause. Similarly, the Committee did not consider Villanova’s poor record without Collin Gillespie in the regular season or the fact that they played two games against teams with similar records following the COVID pause when evaluating its resume.
The Selection Committee must be able to identify potential conflicts of interest and address them in a timely fashion. For this reason, it is critical that the Selection Committee chair and committee members complete an online Conflict of Interest training module on an annual basis.