Faculty Recruitment Tips and Tools

Explore the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning

Expand the reach of your recruitment efforts by utilizing listservs of academic or non-profit groups that cater to minority faculty members and PhD students. Faculty Affairs and Development has a comprehensive list of advertising resources to reach a diverse pool of applicants across disciplines/fields of study.

Department chairs, search committees, and faculty members need tools to plan, conduct, and evaluate faculty searches in a way that will lead to more equitable processes and more diverse candidate pools.

The resources offered below are research-based and represent the best practices in diversity and equity-oriented academic recruitment—e.g. the University of Michigan’s STRIDE Committee (Committee on Strategies and Tactics for Recruiting to Improve Diversity and Excellence) and research stemming from the National Science Foundation’s ADVANCE Program, which provides grants to enhance the systemic factors that support diversity, equity and inclusion in the academic profession and workplaces.

Best practices to achieve diversity and excellence must include using active recruitment techniques that your department may have not used before. Review these resources to enhance the diversity of your recruitment efforts:

The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Women in Science and Engineering Program (Wiseli) recently published a website that lists a comprehensive list of diversity-enhancing recruiting resources for search committees. The list includes STEM fields, Social Sciences, Humanities, Clinical Sciences, and Professional Schools. While the list is still a work in progress, it is extensive and worth checking regularly.

The following books can also enhance the effectiveness of search committees and departmental search practices:

Higher Education Recruitment Consortium (HERC) is a non-profit coalition of colleges, universities, hospitals, research labs, government agencies, and related non- and for-profit organizations, committed to diversifying the pipeline of faculty, staff, and executives in academia. HERC supports its member institutions in recruiting and retaining outstanding and diverse employees. For more information on how to advertise faculty/staff positions with HERC, contact Ms. Dwala Toombs, a member of Mason’s HR Talent Acquisition team.