WHEN David Parkin scored his first VFL coaching job, he was walking through the car park after a long pre-season session back in 1977. Hawthorn's outgoing coach, John Kennedy, wandered up beside his young assistant, and said the job was his. "He said: tomorrow you'll be coaching the Hawthorn Football Club," Parkin remembered last week. "I believe it was as simple as that."

Times have changed, and Parkin has helped them change. At the end of 2004, the Hawks put together a sub-committee to decide who should next coach their club. Two years later, when Alastair Clarkson's contract was up, a second group decided whether he should be re-appointed.

"Clubs now need to be constantly aware of what they need, and what sort of person they need," said Parkin, a four-time premiership coach who was part of that second panel. "They need to constantly be asking: have we got the right person, for this particular group, at this point in time, to deliver?"

These are complicated questions, which take time to answer. Never more than now, when coaching as a job is about much more than pulling a few sneaky moves on match day.

Ten years ago, when Melbourne placed Neale Daniher in charge, the Demons were the first club to draw up psychological profiles of the leading candidates. With Daniher gone, the club has started what will be an even more extensive search.

A coach must be good at the match-day responsibilities, but he must also manage large groups of varied people, front the media virtually on a daily basis, and make small talk with sponsors. The job has become more detailed, and so finding the right coach means looking for more things.

It has also made scoring a job much tougher. When Robert Walls retired as a Fitzroy player at the end of 1980, he was asked whether he'd be interested in coaching the club. "Sure," he said.

He was told the Lions would choose between him, Allan Jeans and Haydn Bunton junior. "Jeans went to Hawthorn, and I was continually told that the choice would be made in a week or two," said Walls. He got the gig. His only interview for a coaching job came 10 years later, ahead of his appointment at Richmond.

"I didn't have an interview, I didn't present anything to Fitzroy at all, and that's certainly changed. Nowadays, prospective coaches come in with all their thoughts and ideas documented.

"They have video presentations of how they think the game should be played, and they're expected to have a thorough knowledge of a club's list. You'd expect them to talk about who they'd trade, who they'd cut, and you'd expect them to know what sort of young talent was coming through in the draft.

"The job is so much more involved than it was 20 years ago. A coach today needs to have so many more strings to his bow, so you're looking for a pretty special person. Not to mention one you're going to pay a fair bit of money. You don't want to get halfway through his contract and start saying: ‘I think we've made a mistake here'."

Walls helped St Kilda consider all those things before Ross Lyon's appointment at the end of last year. The Saints began their search for a new coach by putting together a sub-committee, as well as a list of possible candidates sounded out initially by Stride Management.

The Saints were the only ones looking out for a new coach, which gave them time to be thorough.

While Melbourne is the only club currently in the market, it is likely the landscape will be more complicated come the end of the season.

St Kilda's sub-committee - Walls, president Rod Butterss, chief executive Archie Fraser, general manager of football Ken Sheldon and Dr Ross Smith - began by compiling a list of the 30-odd qualities they considered most crucial for the successful candidate. The attributes were grouped in different categories, and weighted in terms of importance.

The list - what Fraser calls a "balanced scorecard" - included things like sponsor and fan interaction, communication skills, and ability to work with generation Y. It looked at each candidate's football history - where and for how long they had played and coached, how many mentors they had worked with, and their achievements.

Under "personal style" were listed attributes like calmness in a crisis, balance, determination, mental toughness, intellect, temperament, and interests outside the game.

For Fraser, it was crucial that the Saints understood the exact type of person they wanted, before they even began to look. "We didn't want to get caught up in a slick presentation, where someone came in and baffled us with their ideas," he said. "If we'd chosen someone purely on presentation, we might well have had a different outcome."

At Hawthorn, Jason Dunstall had similar thoughts when, as stand-in CEO, he chose Clarkson. "You don't get a coaching job on reputation, like you used to. Or should I say, you shouldn't," he said.

"We had a very clear philosophy about where our club and our list was headed. We needed someone who matched that. Alastair came in and he had exactly the same ideas and thoughts that we did. We didn't have a checklist, as such, but we certainly had a philosophy."

Having settled on what it wanted, St Kilda then had to work out how to assess those qualities. Each member of the sub-committee rated the final four - Lyon, John Longmire, Chris Bond and Guy McKenna - against the scorecard. The club had each contender rate himself from one to 10 on each attribute, too.

The club offered each candidate as much time as they wanted and needed to present their plans and philosophies; these sessions stretched past two and a half hours in most cases. Unlike the first and last interviews the Saints conducted, the questions asked here were not uniform ones.

From there, the Saints employed an external company to conduct four-hour psychological appraisals of all four men. The value of this was two-fold: first, it helped the club understand how each candidate would function in the job. Running on from that, it gave the club a sense of the support and training that each man would require early on.

"It wasn't about trying to find out what was wrong with them. It was about finding out what they were good at, how they thought, what their learning style was and how they processed information," Fraser said.

"It went through abstract reasoning, numerical reasoning, critical thinking and a whole bunch of decision-making processes. It gave us a more complete picture of how they thought. If they didn't like to listen to other people's ideas, for instance, then that would be a challenge in terms of working with generation Y.

"We got a sense of how they rated themselves on the scorecard, and then we compared it. We were able to see how they performed against a quite extensive list of qualities in the psychological appraisal, which were tailored very strongly for the role."

But that wasn't the end of the process. Before they chose Lyon, the Saints invited each of the four men into their boardroom. There, the sub-committee and four of the club's directors hit each of them with a series of questions designed to surprise and unsettle.

Deliberately, the interviewers offered no response - not a smile, a wink or a nod - to each answer. They tried to intimidate. What would you say in your press conference after losing your fifth game in a row? What would you say if a former coach called and asked to come into the rooms before the game, to wish the players well?

"We figured that the day we announced the job, they were pretty much going to be put on the spot," Fraser said. "Our whole process was really about understanding how they would handle any given situation. We wanted to figure that out during the process, not after we'd decided on someone."

As Melbourne starts its search, president Paul Gardner has said that salary is no issue. He has not ruled out pinching another club's coach, or throwing a newcomer into the role. Steve Harris, the Demons' CEO, has said the new coach will need an understanding of sports science, to be an innovative and strategic thinker, to be able to develop players and to have top-shelf leadership skills. Among other things.

As it was for St Kilda, the process will be largely about the club knowing all it can about the man it appoints. "You put a coach in charge of your future, and they become what your club is known for. Our process was an exhaustive one, but it had to be," Fraser said.

"By the time we made a decision, we knew as much about each of the candidates as we could possibly have known. There isn't a thing about Ross that's surprised me this year.

"But it's been funny, I often think about some of the things that have happened in the past six months, and how the other candidates would have handled it. I've had some fun with it. I think some of them would really have been challenged."