This is one post in a series on contemporary strategies for increasing faculty diversity and inclusive excellence in higher education. For a fuller picture, take a look at our free best practices checklist.

How can academic leaders help faculty across the institution develop professional networks that will improve diversity and inclusion in future searches?

One of the biggest mistakes higher education institutions make, in their efforts to recruit faculty from underrepresented groups, is focusing primarily on activities of search committees filling open positions. To achieve the best results, colleges and universities need to approach inclusive excellence the way other large organizations do: sustaining institution-wide, ongoing efforts to network with talent from underrepresented groups to put the institution in a strong position to attract a strong and diverse pool of candidates when searches open up.

Most faculty members want to support diversity efforts—and will do so more effectively if the institution helps them keep the issue visible and urgent, and provides guidance on which efforts would have the highest impact for their department. One way to advance these goals is holding annual departmental debrief sessions in which all faculty hear an update on the institution’s and their department’s recruiting efforts.

Across the department’s recent searches, where is the greatest drop-off in diversity occurring—initial applicant pool composition, likelihood of accepting an offer, or some other point in the process?  Where should faculty focus their ongoing networking efforts to build connections that could lead to talented applicants from underrepresented groups in future searches? Which graduate programs have produced strong candidates from underrepresented groups that applied to recent searches? Where did those candidates first learn of the position?

Focusing on questions like these helps faculty orient their efforts around those activities most likely to positively influence diversity, representation, and inclusive excellence at their institution.

How does your institution compare?

To see how your school’s current practices lines up with contemporary leading strategies for advancing faculty diversity and inclusive excellence, take a look at our free best practices checklist.

This is one post in a series on contemporary strategies for increasing faculty diversity and inclusive excellence in higher education. For a fuller picture, take a look at our free best practices checklist.

Are you gathering enough data about your faculty applicant pool to accurately monitor the success of your faculty diversity initiatives?

If applicant pools aren’t diverse and well-represented, faculty searches won’t produce hires that represent the diversity of that academic field. Yet most institutions still use decades-old processes that reveal applicant pool diversity long after the deadline for submitting applications.  And because only a small portion of candidates complete EEO surveys, the data that institutions do collect gives little insight into actual applicant pool diversity.

Institutions successfully tracking applicant diversity get 100% of candidates to submit EEO data by making the surveys a required step in submitting the online application. Candidates may select “prefer not to disclose” for any question, but fewer than 10% of candidates typically choose this response. The result is that institutions get an accurate picture of pool diversity as applications arrive.

Progressive colleges and universities also give search chairs the tools to monitor pool diversity during the submission window—not after it. Chairs can see the aggregate diversity of the pool in real time, which allows them to increase efforts to recruit candidates from underrepresented groups in time to impact the diversity of the final pool.

How does your institution compare?

To see how your school’s current practices lines up with contemporary leading strategies for advancing faculty diversity and inclusive excellence, take a look at our free best practices checklist.

This is one post in a series on contemporary strategies for increasing faculty diversity and inclusive excellence in higher education. For a fuller picture, take a look at our free best practices checklist.

Do you have the best advertising strategy you could for influencing faculty applicant pool diversity?

Almost every department invests in advertising to bring faculty job postings to the attention of candidates from underrepresented groups. However, in most cases, departments use the same advertising strategy year after year without any indication whether spending actually generates applications or impacts pool diversity.

Now, growing numbers of progressive institutions are tracking the returns they are getting from different advertising channels and using this data to make more strategic decisions about where they invest their advertising dollars.

• Institutions are first examining what share of views of job postings are being generated by each of the sources where the posting is advertised. That is, what specific website, job board, or advertisement did the user click to view the web page where the job description is located?
• Next, institutions are looking at the immediate digital path to application—or how the candidates who actually applied for the position entered the application portal—as well as applicants’ answers to the question, “how did you first learn of this position?”
• When EEOC surveys are embedded in the online application process, institutions can disaggregate this data by gender and racial and ethnic background while keeping candidates’ personal information protected. Then, at the beginning of the next search cycle, institutions can give each search committee a report showing which channels have been most effective in generating applications from candidates from underrepresented groups.

These practices are particularly valuable as colleges and universities begin testing the effectiveness of advertising faculty positions on social media platforms, such as Facebook and Linkedin. Those platforms allow institutions to direct their advertisements to the audiences they want to reach. More importantly, they allow schools to get their ads in front of desirable potential candidates who are not actively on the job market.

How does your institution compare?

To see how your school’s current practices lines up with contemporary leading strategies for advancing faculty diversity and inclusive excellence, take a look at our free best practices checklist.