"Part of your role as an administrator supervising faculty hiring is not just to do the technical planning — the subject of my first essay in this series on partner hiring — but also to wrangle the human and cultural elements. Part 2 of this series focuses on executing the academic-couple hire and anticipating potential blowback.

Don’t be too quick to dismiss the opposition. When you encounter resistance to a partner hire, your first step in dealing with the opposition is to acknowledge that it is not groundless. 

Run a real hiring process for the partner, not an appointment by fiat. The more a hiring accommodation becomes a back-door deal — bypassing standard governance protocols, HR norms, and screening criteria — the less popular and justified it will be. Forcing a partner on a department does no long-term favor to the scholar or to the unit’s morale.

Make sure the potential match between partner and department makes sense. The fit may be off for any number of reasons. Perhaps the internal opposition to the partner hire is already too strong, and nobody is going to give the candidate a reasonable hearing. Or maybe even a friendly scan of the partner’s CV shows little promise of a match to the job description."