Re: Comments on Composition and Comportment of the IETF Nominating Committee draft

[Joel Halpern <[e-mail]>]

I think without violating the confidentiality requirements, I can make a 
couple of observations.  Other past nomcom members / chairs / liaisons 
can provide comments as they feel appropriate.

First, one of the difficulties is that the nomcom must treat the 
feedback as confidential.   Great care is taken to not violate that.  
Nonetheless, committees do learn about issues with specific candidates 
from the feedback, and it is important to identify those issues.  
Whether they decide to ask the candidate about aspects of that ought, as 
far as I can tell, be left to the discretion of the committee.

In my experience committee members are generally good at separating 
substantive feedback issues from feedback driven by attributes that 
shouldn't matter.  There are many dimensions besides the ones you are 
focusing on that the committee needs to watch for and avoid.   I don't 
think trying to prevent bias in the feedback is desirable or achievable.

It is also worth noting that we are interviewing people for many 
different jobs.  At the very least, even the structured part of the 
interview is likely to be different for the different positions.  This 
then gets even more complicated when the committee may be evaluating 
person A based on strength X and weakness Y, and person B on strength Q 
and weakness R.  The interview may well want to explore those specific 
qualities for that specific candidate.  Even when we know the job, we 
know that people will do the job differently.  And the selection process 
is even more complicated by the fact that the job itself changes over 
time.   In fact, one of the tasks the nomcom undertakes is deciding what 
properties they think are important for which positions.

I suspect that further analysis would reveal even more nuances in the 
interview and evaluation process.  Yes, it is important to be clear that 
we avoid bias in our selection.  I don't think tying the hands of the 
committee in terms of what they ask candidates is helpful.

In some sense, the structured part of the interview presumably starts 
with the common questionnaire.  I am not asking or suggesting that the 
questionnaire be tuned to the individual candidate.   But that is only 
the starting point.

Yours,

Joel

On 7/6/2026 10:25 PM, Mallory Knodel wrote:
> Hi Joel,
>
> I think specific candidate questions, if not related follow ups to the 
> structured interview questions, can invite discrimination.
>
> OTOH, the US OPM goes to the other logical end: Employers should use 
> structured interviews in which all candidates are asked the same core, 
> job-related questions and are evaluated using the same criteria. Any 
> follow-up questions should be limited to clarifying a candidate’s 
> responses and should be used consistently to maintain fairness and 
> comparability across candidates.
>
> Probably there’s a middle ground.
>
> It would be worth interrogating the role of community feedback. 
> Obviously this is a unique element and guidance for most hiring 
> processes won’t have much to say about it. If we worry about 
> discrimination in nomcom decision making we should probably worry 
> about it in candidate feedback too. So what would be the fair 
> mitigation? Giving a candidate the chance to rebut a potentially 
> discriminatory feedback comment? Or not mentioning the comment during 
> the interview at all, and giving the nomcom discretion to 
> consider feedback in its own right to supplement its decision?
>
> Sorry I pointed the question back. But I’m genuinely not sure beyond 
> my own experiences and intuition, which I’ll keep to myself as an 
> author of this draft, which can hopefully encompass community 
> consensus on the topic.
>
> -Mallory
>
> On Tue, Jul 7, 2026 at 11:11 Joel Halpern <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>     With regard to the structured interview item in your draft, I was
>     unclear whether your documents intends to say that each interview
>     should include the structured questions or were you aiming to say
>     that the interviews MUST ONLY consist of the structured questions.
>
>     As far as I know, the former is common practice, and a good idea. 
>     The latter would unduly constrain the committee from asking about
>     things they think are important to the specific candidate, for
>     example based on the feedback they have received.
>
>     Yours,
>
>     Joel
>
>     On 7/6/2026 10:03 PM, Mallory Knodel wrote:
>>     Hi,
>>
>>     On Tue, Jul 7, 2026 at 01:11 S Moonesamy <[e-mail]
>>     <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
>>
>>         Hi Mallory,
>>         At 05:13 AM 06-07-2026, Mallory Knodel wrote:
>>
>>
>>         >I'm not sure I remember. Could you elaborate this comment
>>         please?
>>
>>         It's in RFC 7704 (Page 4).
>>
>>
>>     Incredible. Thanks a lot for sharing this. I’ll cite it in the
>>     next version.
>>
>>
>>         >Disclosure of interest to the chair, who then decides if
>>         there's a
>>         >conflict. Simple recusal.
>>
>>         It could be a bit more complicated than that.
>>
>>
>>     Certainly but I don’t know if the document can or should try to
>>     encompass the complexity or simply describe a process for
>>     addressing it.
>>
>>     I am open to text suggestions that better elaborate this and any
>>     of the comportment sections.
>>
>>
>>         >It's here. I've edited the main copy.
>>         ><https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__hbr.org_2016_04_how-2Dto-2Dtake-2Dthe-2Dbias-2Dout-2Dof-2Dinterviews&d=DwIBAg&c=slrrB7dE8n7gBJbeO0g-IQ&r=krANNudPSfUTEf2kXiduBUqRjXhDsKNCASr1kibHLfs&m=YIrtQwrRtb_e31ldkUQjV6tcWTEcpf5fCSgJN5EFLRkjqZ3pHWlqlpLKxKQuPKb-&s=MBhR2Q0q-JMD3j71Sm58-ZD61u61e_r2AQAlRgDPkEI&e=
>>         <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__hbr.org_2016_04_how-2Dto-2Dtake-2Dthe-2Dbias-2Dout-2Dof-2Dinterviews&d=DwIBAg&c=slrrB7dE8n7gBJbeO0g-IQ&r=krANNudPSfUTEf2kXiduBUqRjXhDsKNCASr1kibHLfs&m=YIrtQwrRtb_e31ldkUQjV6tcWTEcpf5fCSgJN5EFLRkjqZ3pHWlqlpLKxKQuPKb-&s=MBhR2Q0q-JMD3j71Sm58-ZD61u61e_r2AQAlRgDPkEI&e=>
>>         >https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__hbr.org_2016_04_how-2Dto-2Dtake-2Dthe-2Dbias-2Dout-2Dof-2Dinterviews&d=DwIBAg&c=slrrB7dE8n7gBJbeO0g-IQ&r=krANNudPSfUTEf2kXiduBUqRjXhDsKNCASr1kibHLfs&m=YIrtQwrRtb_e31ldkUQjV6tcWTEcpf5fCSgJN5EFLRkjqZ3pHWlqlpLKxKQuPKb-&s=MBhR2Q0q-JMD3j71Sm58-ZD61u61e_r2AQAlRgDPkEI&e=
>>         <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__hbr.org_2016_04_how-2Dto-2Dtake-2Dthe-2Dbias-2Dout-2Dof-2Dinterviews&d=DwIBAg&c=slrrB7dE8n7gBJbeO0g-IQ&r=krANNudPSfUTEf2kXiduBUqRjXhDsKNCASr1kibHLfs&m=YIrtQwrRtb_e31ldkUQjV6tcWTEcpf5fCSgJN5EFLRkjqZ3pHWlqlpLKxKQuPKb-&s=MBhR2Q0q-JMD3j71Sm58-ZD61u61e_r2AQAlRgDPkEI&e=>
>>
>>
>>         Thanks.  The answers to the questions would not be relevant
>>         in my opinion.
>>
>>
>>     Fair. My thinking was to provide some authoritative example of
>>     how industry thinks about this. I’m open to citing a better and
>>     more relevant publication.
>>
>>     Thanks,
>>     -Mallory
>