• Overview
• Resources
• • Recruiting Faculty
• - Prepraring Your Search
• - Expanding the Pool
• - Recruiting Talent
• - Identify Candidates
• - Interviewing
• - Making an offer
• - Retention & Success
• • Recruiting Staff
• • Accomodating Students/Employees
• Community Involvement
• Building Diversity Into University Processes
• Measuring Results

Prepare for a Diverse Search

When a vacancy occurs, it is natural for a department to think of the new person in terms of the expertise of the departing one, or of the programmatic needs immediately identified as central to the department's mission. A vacancy is a great time to rethink the department's programmatic needs and tie directly to enhancing diversity.

How Search Committees Can Prepare:

• Make finding minority and women candidates for faculty positions a priority at the beginning of all search processes. This is currently being done at the end of most search processes, to identify if there were any minorities and/or women in the pool.
• Share with the Provost a statement of probable pool demographics based on national data on Ph.D.s awarded (and any other information of this same sort) for the discipline and subdiscipline. The definition of the subdiscipline and the source of the data should be provided.
• Develop a statement of the strategy to be employed to ensure the full field of candidates reflects the best possible opportunity for sampling all available, qualified candidates for the underrepresented groups. For example, you may plan to personally contact respected established members of the disciplines who are members of such underrepresented groups, are known to have trained such individuals, or are faculty members at institutions with good records in this regard.
• Request from Equal Opportunity Services national lists of resources that may assist search committees in identifying potential and/or qualified women and minority candidates. These lists include "Minority Ph.D. and M.F.A. Candidates" and "Women in Science and Engineering: Ph.D. Candidates and Recipients, and Postdoctoral Appointees."
• Invest in talent banks. The most effective talent banks are not simply lists of names. Personal contacts and firsthand information are very important in selecting the right individual for a particular assignment. Talent banks can also be national in scope, and names and background information can be collected through professional meetings and individual networks. The talent bank can be used not only to identify potential administrators, but also to identify consultants and speakers.
• Take time for planning to reconsider the department's programmatic needs and how these needs can be linked to recruiting minority and female faculty. For details on how your dean, department head, and the provost's office can help, go to Roles and Responsibilities.
• Write position descriptions to attract the widest possible range of candidates. Broad definitions of scholarly areas of interest will be more likely to attract scholars who have the flexibility to do research and teach in a number of related areas.
• Define "quality," and air possible biases. Discuss standards of excellence in teaching, research, and service. What are realistic expectations? How might minority and female candidates look "different" but also "notable"? Is there a bias, spoken or unspoken, against individuals from lesser-known institutions or from HBCUs?

Recruitment Checklist

1. Examine cross-divisional recruitment and selection procedures. Sometimes, the procedures in place are either an obstacle or simply not helpful in recruiting minority individuals.
2. Are the current procedures yielding minority candidates?
3. Are the minority candidates successful in getting to the interview stage?
4. Are attempts being made to identify talented individuals in the institution and to groom them for future opportunities?