Faculty who participate in the Best Practices for Faculty Search Committees workshop leave the session with written commitments to augment their personal and committee practices in ways that will broaden the pool of candidates, enhance the equity and fairness of the process, reduce the application of bias in the process, and ensure all candidates are treated fairly and with respect. We invite you to peruse these commitments as inspiration for making positive changes in the actions your department, committee, and you personally are conducting the search for a new faculty colleague.
Recruiting Strategies
1. Social media
- Ask faculty, search committee members, and others to post on their social media feeds
- Post on LinkedIN
2. Leveraging networks
- Ask people (self, faculty, colleagues, search committee, students) to leverage their professional networks
3. Targeted emails
- Mailing lists and listservs
- Colleagues at HBCUs and MSIs
- Former students
4. WiscProf
- Participate in WiscProf
- Stay connected to former participants, invite them to department seminar series
5. Conferences/professional organizations
- Promote positions at conferences, especially affinity-related events
- Ask faculty and students attending conferences to promote positions
6. Other
- Contact affinity groups in the field
- Contact administrators of award programs, and/or awardees
- Identify and contact potential recruits
- Leverage CoE resources
Interviewing Strategies
1. Share best practices
- Share best practices with all faculty who will interact with candidates
2. Madison resources
- Implement a “living in Madison” session with non-department person
3. Interview questions
- Help interviewers with a standard list of questions for each topic/rubric area that they can customize or choose from
- Create a single set of questions that all candidates are asked
4. Appropriate/Inappropriate questions
- Discuss inappropriate behavior at departmental meeting/prior to interviewing
- Send handout about appropriate/inappropriate questions to all department members
5. Customize
- Get preferences on dinner in advance
- Determine if there are particular faculty they would like to meet with who might not be on the interview schedule
- Personalize the agenda
- Offer a handout or set of handouts to all candidates with resources on living in Madison
6. Other
- Build in breaks and make the day comfortable for all candidates
- Make sure there is time for walking between meetings
- Consider inclusion of meetings with people outside the department
- Have candidates meet with research administrators
- Educate during the interview
Evaluating Strategies
1. Rubrics
- Create your rubric before or at the same time as writing the PVL/Job Description
- Develop PVL from existing rubrics
- Share standard “faculty rubric” within or across departments
- Candidates are diverse; be flexible with rubrics
2. Quick screen
- Create a quick screen/triage approach for first round
- Define clear go/no go” criteria and make that the first column for the candidate evaluation spreadsheet
3. Standard “no feedback”
- Standard “no feedback” email for first round
Onboarding Strategies
1. Mentor committees
- Have a member who is not in the department on the mentoring committee
- Make sure there is “early contact” from the mentor committee
2. Administrator introductions
- Meetings with research and all other department administrators
- Explain roles of all administrative staff
- Lab onboarding
3. Social/Informal
- Create weekly lunches or coffee with new faculty
- Brownbag lunches bi-weekly
4. Logistics trainings
- Set up time for training on purchasing, RAMP, and other administrator-supported tasks
- Create process for developing a “priorities checklist”–things each individual new hire needs more or less support with
5. Other
- Before onboarding any new faculty, ask administrative staff “What do you wish new faculty knew about?”
- Continued focus after offer is accepted
- Provide resources on UW and Madison. Ask about specific interests new hire has across campus and city and provide information.
- Plan for onboarding of new graduate students that a senior hire might bring with them to UW-Madison