Several searches for major deanships as well as dozens of tenure-track and a few tenured positions will account this year for thousands of hours of faculty and staff time. Some will involve the work of professional search firms-headhunters receiving premium fees to develop the candidate lists from which local search committees work. A handful of luckless faculties will pick up where they left off last year-with a failed search. Can the frequency of failed searches be reduced? No one has estimated the cost of fruitless searches. The tangible elements include faculty and staff time, hotels, Fed Ex mailings, airfares, and meals for the candidates and their hosts for at least three and, for administrative- and senior-level positions, often six or more finalists. Dean and directorship searches today have additional costs. After attending airport interviews that shield them from the public exposure of an initial campus visit, short-listed candidates are invited to return, sometimes with a spouse or partner, for more extensive campus-based interviews that include discussions with additional faculty, staff, undergraduate and graduate students, disciplinary administrators and provosts, realtors, advisory boards, and alum. For their part, candidates can expect to expend several days of time and effort preparing and visiting, and several anxious post-visit days or weeks waiting for a phone call or letter, or under the increasingly less civil circumstances of today's search environment, an e-mail. Best guess of the true costs? For even the simplest of tenure-track searches, a failed search is expensive. In real dollars, a bankrupt senior-level search can be equated with sufficient assets to pay for increased faculty travel, several student scholarships, load-lightening adjuncts who might have reduced student-tofaculty ratios or increased student access to the major, resources to intensify diversity recruitment, or speakers' fees and honoraria for guests who can deeply enrich the student and faculty community. At best, insolvent searches produce a negative return on the dollar. The lesson, however, is not that searches are unnecessary, but that they represent a significant commitment of limited resources. Like any investment, a search is not a casual affair. The costs in time are no less precious. Many hundreds of hours are required for tenure-track searches, more for dean and directorship recruitments-hours that might otherwise have been productively invested in teaching and advising students, conducting research, reading the journals and books that inform our professional work, transforming courses, or coming to know colleagues (and the implications of their work for our scholarship) who are housed in other disciplines. Reputation is no less dear. Failed searches take their toll on a program's ability to attract future gun-shy candidates. Few things are more disheartening to faculty morale than finding themselves viewed as suitors without willing or desirable partners. Likewise, unsuccessful candidates have opened their professional aspirations to references, colleagues, and supervisors, as well as to search committees. Candidate reputations are no less valuable, and no less vulnerable, than those of institutions whose searches go belly up. It is no longer rare after a failed search to read that a provost or committee search chair has commented publicly, We just thought that we could do better. Better? No one's reputation-school's or individual's-survives the careless incivility embedded in pronouncements like this. The irony is that institutional face saving reflects more about failed search committees than about the quality of the candidates they meet. It's natural to think of a search as successful when the process ends with an offer accepted. The experience of scores of programs and hundreds of faculty, however, suggests there's more to it. There are at least two kinds of failed searches. The first is obvious. …