To test this feature, visit your live site.

Fully Screened Auditions/Resumes

Are fully screened auditions really impartial? I was thinking about this today and wondering if anyone who has served on these types of committees could shed any light on this... It has been rumored that some committees have the ability to pull "nameless" resumes during screened finals. Is this true? Aside from the fact that someone who intimately knows a friends playing can tell who they are from their sound/the way they play, this adds to my feeling that as great as it sounds, fully screened auditions are not that impartial. I know that they are kind of the best option we've got, but with those two things in mind, isnt it all kind of a ruse? Fully screened auditions certainly protect from gender and racial bias which is super important.. but I wonder if it also protects the committee from any scrutiny when they hire a known friend.

12 answers0 replies

12 Comments

davidroode

Mar 28

•

This is a topic I've been considering a lot lately. Over the years I've served on many audition committees across multiple orchestras, all of which were blind throughout hiring. Initially I favored keeping the screen up, but my opinion has gradually shifted. Now I feel the screen has an appropriate place (ie. in prelims or if someone on the committee has a clear conflict of interest) but I don't think auditions should be screened to the end. Here's why.

Screens remove valuable information that is useful to the committee. Experience is the main one, but also stage presence, poise/confidence, communication skills, etc. This is relevant to the job but off the table in a blind audition. Also I would point out there are people who sound fantastic but are horrible colleagues. This matters too.

Second, while the screen gives the appearance of objectivity, I've found that committees still have as much disagreement about candidates' playing. For example, if a trumpet player changes from pistons to rotaries (or a trombonist from tenor to alto) this changes the sound color, but it can easily be misunderstood and debated by a committee who didn't have eyes on the situation. If the screen were clarifying things, consensus would be easier. But I've observed the opposite.

So I now believe the 'objectivity' gained by the screen is actually negligible and not proportionate to the value of the information sacrificed. That's why I now recommend the screen be removed in finals unless an obvious front runner has emerged who has won over a majority of the committee. In those situations, you can probably hire blind with confidence.

Racism, sexism, ageism, personal bias, etc. are real and we should strive for fairness. But I do believe that most musicians are wanting fair auditions and trying to hire the strongest candidate for the future of their orchestra. I think our own personal advocacy for fairness in the workplace will advance that cause more effectively than blind auditions will.

One final thought. I hear a lot of people complaining about candidates being auto-advanced or orchestras hiring players on one-year contracts. I know this is frustrating. But please understand that being a sub or one-year is really hard. That person has essentially been auditioning every day for the past year (or more!) not knowing if they will have a job next season. If they can manage that stress, consistently play great, avoid any personal conflicts or backstage politics and still have a committee voting for them, I think that says more than if they can flawless execute excerpts behind a curtain.

Edited

-redacted-

Mar 28

•

Replying to

Extremely well reasoned argument! Thanks for this perspective.

enigmatic_bass

Feb 15

•

i've been on "both sides" of the committee so to speak - that is to say that i've been on a committee that hired the person we "liked" and also on one that did not hire the person we "liked." from my blind perspective, i simply chose the best player out of the options i was given...at least for me, i've found that identifying someone whose playing i've heard before behind a screen is a lot more difficult than it might seem.

re: resumes in a final round, i know we don't do it during the audition; only after.

re: "are screened auditions really impartial," i'd like to think they are. i've taken a lot of auditions (almost 30...) and anytime i got cut out of any round, i could point to exactly why, which leads me to believe that i was cut purely because my presentation did not meet the standard the orchestra was looking for.

Notsure

Feb 20

•

Replying to

Funny story, at one of my auditions (fully blind) in which I was a finalist I was told by the committee afterwards that they were convinced I was someone else just from the playing. Guess you never really CAN tell.

Feb 13

•

FWIW we only get resumes after the audition has concluded and the winners/runner ups have been named

Notsure

Feb 20

•

Replying to

Interesting, so how do you determine who gets invited? Is the personnel manager just fielding CVs discretely along a detailed requirements list?

Feb 13

•

In regards to the original poster, my orchestra does have the ability to present redacted resumes, which is a tool we use when trying to look for candidates to preadvance or to send letters of discouragement if the applicant pool is simply too big to accommodate for our allotted audition times.

As far as the timeless question of "are auditions the best way to hire?" Any hiring process could be justified in one way or another, but if we are concerning ourselves with fairness, I believe a fully screened audition is the best we have. I've yet to see or hear a viable alternative. The problem of supply and demand remains regardless of what process is used. Are some auditions skewed to one candidate? Potentially. That is tremendously difficult to achieve in a fully blind audition, which is why I'm such a fan of screen up all the way. As much as you think you may know someone's playing, they typically sound very different behind a screen from further away.

Lastly, my suggestion to those who are auditioning or those who are thinking about it; don't give anything like this much thought. Focus as much as you can on perfecting your craft, and then go out and give it your best. It's the only thing under your control. Most orchestras have the best intentions to find the best candidate that fits their needs.

-redacted-

Feb 27

•

Replying to

Well said!

2224

Feb 11

•

There is no such thing as a perfect way to run an audition.

If a section/committee already knows and likes a person, and their playing, maybe they're actually the best person for the job. Or maybe they're not, and the audition was rigged, who's to say? Life isn't fair. The music industry isn't fair. All the audition procedures in the world are, at best, a theatrical presentation of "fairness."

CuriousTpt

Feb 11

•

Replying to

I agree that there should be more room for people hiring a candidate they know and love, perhaps this is where trials come in. This post was more about questioning who fully-screened auditions protect more: candidates or the committee... often times I see posts where people are very prideful about their fully screened auditions, as if they ARE super fair, so I'm just curious to hear from people who may have been on the other side of the screen to gauge how true that is. I definitely agree that fairness doesn't exist, but isn't getting closer to impartiality a worthwhile cause when there are so many qualified candidates and so few jobs?

ProfessionalTrianglePlayer

Feb 12

•

Replying to

I think it's bizarrely cynical and defeatist to simply throw in the towel and say that nothing is fair. It also serves to simply shut down the question as opposed to addressing it.

I agree that impartiality should be the goal of audition committees. I think that with respect to different situations, the level of impartiality changes to reflect those differences. I think everyone on this forum can name an audition that was rigged, bitterness notwithstanding. It happens- it's the result often of such situations whereby someone has played with the orchestra for years etc and they have established a life there and are a contributing member to the ensemble.. it's difficult to be a committee and not have biases carried. I think it's possible to identify players based on their playing, and when that fails, it's 100% certain that audition committee members and audition candidates who fit the criteria above are in communication to assist with the mutually assured success. Is this fair? No.. but it's common. Committees want more than anything to make a hire, and it's such a risk to hire someone unknown for a tenure track job where you could be working with this unknown quantity for 30-40 years. I think what has to happen is that auditions need not always happen if the committee is interested in a particular candidate and is willing to bend protocol, engage in unethical practices to assure success. That would theoretically require honesty and accordance amongst all committee members and other concerned parties... and would just never happen. I think trials are the middle ground that we're looking for. Or play-offs even, which many European orchestras do but also Baltimore has used this process to make the final call. Anything other than believing you have a 1/x shot where x is the number of candidates when in fact you have a 0/x shot because you aren't the person they're looking and that's already been decided.

2224

Feb 13

•

Replying to

I don't personally think of it as defeatist - I just increasingly think that, like curioustpt implies, certain aspects of running a "fair" audition are often enacted merely to protect the committee members from claims of unfairness, rather than to actually ensure fairness. At the end of the day, this is a huge waste of time and money for a lot of people to go to certain auditions, and it's better to be honest about it. A lot of these orchestras are obligated to hold their auditions a certain way due to their CBA, which means we've got union musicians enforcing policy in their orchestra that is imposing MASSIVE costs audition on other union musicians with little to no potential upside. Where's the solidarity in that?

In other fields, people hire who they want. Qualification for the job is a piece of that, but so are networks, diversity preferences, personality fit, and all sorts of other variables. At the end of the day, committees are doing exactly the same thing - voting to hire who they /want/ to hire, not who's somehow objectively "the best candidate for the job." There's no such thing. It's baked into our language with "winning" auditions, as if it's some kind of athletic competition where one person scores the most points or finishes the race the fastest. But the reality is the committee members are all weighing some vague noncommittal social pressure to "impartiality" against the desire to hire a person they know and like, or not hire a person they've heard negative gossip about, or their moral social justice impulse to hire a candidate of some marginalized identity group.

Hiring, regardless of field, is complicated and messy. And it's way higher stakes when

We're in a field with way more candidates than good jobs, and
those candidates are spending weeks of dedicated work and hundreds of dollars to travel, in person, to be considered for those positions.

Why keep up the lie that there's some impartial, objective "best candidate" at any audition? It's ridiculous on its face when you actually think about it, isn't it? And yet believing in that lie props up this whole status quo audition system, which we all agree kinda ***** anyway.

At least back in the bad old days, a great player with roots in a community and relationships in an orchestra could much more often stay put, instead of needing to uproot their whole life in order to get the employment they're qualified for.