cowboycane
All-ACC
- Joined
- Feb 6, 2012
- Messages
- 7,734
Seems like the consultancy firm is really just a way of legally skirting the rules that govern tampering: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...le-of-search-firms-in-college-coaching-hires/
A lot of the schools in that article ended up hiring an obvious choice anyway, but the thing is, you don't want to publicly swing and miss, so you contract out the "back channeling" piece of it to avoid a lawsuit and potentially save a ton of face, and then break off the firm for doing part of the dirty work.
End point: the firms are functionally fairly useless...it's not like they're going to dig up some miracle candidate for this job that none of us has ever heard of. But they probably function as insurance against making an expensive process even more expensive.
A lot of the schools in that article ended up hiring an obvious choice anyway, but the thing is, you don't want to publicly swing and miss, so you contract out the "back channeling" piece of it to avoid a lawsuit and potentially save a ton of face, and then break off the firm for doing part of the dirty work.
End point: the firms are functionally fairly useless...it's not like they're going to dig up some miracle candidate for this job that none of us has ever heard of. But they probably function as insurance against making an expensive process even more expensive.
