Leading at a Distance

CHAPTER 7Hiring Without a Handshake: Discovering Successful Virtual Leaders

It was almost midnight on a Sunday in March 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic was accelerating, and our firm faced a dilemma. For the prior two months, we'd been working with the board of directors of eBay on the search for a new CEO, and we were at a critical juncture. We'd led discussions with dozens of potential candidates, winnowed the list, and worked with the eBay board of directors to conduct a series of preliminary face-to-face interviews. The directors had chosen several finalists, and the next morning the board and the candidates were scheduled to board airplanes to travel to Menlo Park, California for final-round interviews. The question we were all debating: should we call off the meetings because of the pandemic, and if we weren't able to hold face-to-face interviews, what should we do?

The next morning, after the decision was made to call off the in-person interviews, we discussed what to do next. Should the board pause the CEO search entirely until it was safe to travel again, or should we shift the process to remote? One search committee member, who recognized the pandemic wasn't likely to be over quickly, reflected on the situation. “The next CEO is likely going to have to start remotely and lead in a virtual way well into the future. So we might as well shift the process so that we experience how the candidates will show up in a virtual setting the same way that our employees will.”

That ...