The context for this study involves the intersection between a community's increasing expectation for hiring highly qualified classroom teachers and its increasing expectation for access and involvement in public schools. The current investigation attempted to identify community members' perceptions of the primary factors that influence their impressions of teacher candidates in an exploratory qualitative research design procedure that utilized face to-face interviews with a confederate candidate. After completing structured interview questions, participants were asked to respond, in an open-ended written format, to the factors that influenced their desire to see the candidate be hired or not hired. Results indicate that personality characteristics were nearly twice more likely to be cited as selection factors than were indicators of competency (e.g., experience, qualifications). (Contains 1 table.)