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:
- Admin 101: How to Actively Recruit Faculty Members (Chronicle of Higher Education). Part of a series about active recruitment and it can improve faculty diversity.
- 5 Ways to Make a Real Improvement in Hiring Black Professors (Chronicle of Higher Education). Practices San Diego State University used to increase its Black faculty members.
- Ten best practices for diversity and excellence (University of Michigan, STRIDE). These practices are based on extensive research from the University of Michigan ADVANCE/STRIDE program.
- Don’t just search, recruit! Although this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education was published in 2007, the strategies are still informative and relevant today.
- Top 10 Steps for Advancing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Higher Education (PeopleAdmin). PeopleAdmin is an organization that provides solutions to the higher education sector.
- Search is a verb (University of Michigan, STRIDE). This is a diversity recruitment map to facilitate intentional recruitment practices.
- Special effort strategies to identify underrepresented applicants (University of Houston Advance). This resource provides several strategies to identify applicants from underrepresented groups.
- Use this interactive tool to identify the diverse faculty pipeline in your discipline. This resource (created by Cornell University) shows the top 50 universities graduating the largest number of PhDs. It provides results highlighting the number of PhDs awarded to women and members of historically excluded and underrepresented groups. Cornell created this interactive resource with data from the National Center for Education Statistics.
- The Southern Region Education Board (SREB), is a non-profit educational organization that helps educators strengthen student learning through professional development. For more than 25 years, SREB has organized the Institute on Teaching and Mentoring Conference, the largest gathering of doctoral scholars from historically excluded and underrepresented groups in the country. The Institute provides its doctoral scholars with the training and mentoring necessary to survive the rigors of graduate school, earn their doctoral degree and succeed as faculty members. The conference attracts about 1,000 PhD students and hundreds of recruiters from top universities.
- If you have faculty positions you wish to advertise at the Institute’s 2021 conference, please contact Dr. Millie Rivera, director of Diversity, Inclusion, and Well-being.
- SREB also provides member universities with free advertising of faculty positions to its alumni and current doctoral scholars.
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:
- An Inclusive Academy: Achieving Diversity and Excellence (Stewart and Valian, 2018).
- Search Committees: A Comprehensive Guide to Successful Faculty, Staff, and Administrative Searches (Lee, 2014).