Ways to demonstrate you are a family-friendly department

This post continues our series by a onetime academic job seeker, now academic-at-large, on ways an academic institution or department can demonstrate that they are family-friendly.

There’s a well-known gender-based pipeline problem in academia: women earn 50% of PhDs granted to American citizens, but get fewer tenure-track jobs and achieve tenure less often. People who study the problem theorize the reason may be because academia has variable hours, but those hours can be long. A caregiver—be that a mother, a father, or somebody caring for an aging parent or sick family member—pays a price. Luckily, departments can take significant steps to retain caregivers as faculty. Here are a few suggestions.

Make expectations extremely clear.

In an Inside Higher Ed interview about their 2012 book on academic motherhood, Kelly Ward and Lisa Wolf-Wendel reported some surprising findings. Although you might assume that professors at research universities would find parenthood most demanding, their book found that these larger universities have more support structures for (and around) research. Having well-defined structure and clarity was a benefit to working parents.

The study found that professors at schools without these well-developed guidelines suffered more. Often, it was exacerbated when these same schools also had a strong culture of faculty campus presence. You take a big chunk out of your parenting faculty’s mental load (and your non-parenting faculty’s, as well) if you can be more specific about what’s needed and expected.

Be open about caregiving while recruiting.

Of course, you shouldn’t ask about people’s family responsibilities (current or hoped-for) in the interview process, but you can make a point to talk to potential faculty about all the things that your institution does to make those responsibilities easier. Faculty with children on a hiring committee can be open about their experience, as well.

Be extremely careful not to penalize caregivers during reviews.

This can obviously have a directly negative effect on the faculty under review, but comments like “You had maternity leave, you should have gotten more writing done” will also travel by grapevine through your department. The next person contemplating taking advantage of a family-friendly policy or program may think twice.

Schedule important events between the hours of 9 and 5.

Academia is great at flexibility, but small children (and the preschools and daycares that care for them) are not. After about 5 pm, schools close, and parents need to get frazzled children on the dinner-bath-bed train. Try to offer lunchtime talks, or even breakfast seminars. If you must sometimes convene colloquia including dinners after 5, make it very clear to parents that their presence is not required—and try to schedule the events as far in advance as possible.

Make sure your expectations about email and text responsiveness are clear.

Clearly defined boundaries around electronic communication help caregivers relax about their work obligations when they’re home—and socializing these expectations is helpful to non-caregivers, as well.

Don’t allow a culture of resentment to develop among the rest of the faculty.

Negative comments about a caregiver’s absence or non-participation should never be allowed to pass unremarked—even if they’re couched as humor. You’ll know the difference!

These are only a few ways that a department or institution can demonstrate that they are family-friendly to employees. What are some other ways you have experienced that helped you manage both your personal and professional responsibilities? Tweet us using #familyfriendly.

***

Interfolio’s Dossier enables scholars to collect, curate, polish and send out their materials at all stages throughout their academic professional path. Learn more about Dossier here.

The community college hiring process for full-time jobs: an overview

This post continues our series Confessions of a Full-Time Adjunct. Read my previous post about the top benefits of teaching at a community college.

Interviewing for a full-time job at a community college is an experience I was completely unprepared for coming from a PhD program. After speaking with K-12 teachers, I think that community college hiring practices are more similar to that level than to what goes on at 4-year colleges. The community college approach is highly formulaic and rigid—rubrics and a scoring-systems are involved. And in the end, it’s an administrator who makes the final call on which of the finalists gets the job.

My purpose here is simply to clarify what the interview process for a community college job generally entails. Although I’ve never personally been successful in navigating the process, I do think that many of my early rejections were caused by the fact that I didn’t understand the interview system at all. So, I hope what follows helps you understand the situation better than I did.

Overall structure and process

In terms of structure, there is a committee that reviews applications and a first-interview committee (who may also run the second and possibly third interview). Sometimes the “paper” committee (that reviews the applications) is different than the first-interview committee. In that situation, the people who interview you haven’t seen your materials. Because of that, you need to somehow cover all your major qualifications while responding to the interview questions.

The general committee format

In terms of committee make-up, usually the first-interview committees are made up of full-time professors in your field. However, I’ve been to a few first-interviews that included classified staff, administrators, and even students. There, the challenge is to communicate your expertise to an audience of non-experts. It can be very unnerving.

The first interview

In terms of the format and content of the first interview, you are almost always asked to arrive early to review and take notes on the interview questions beforehand for around 15 minutes. If you are in English (and maybe in other writing-heavy fields), also expect to be asked to grade a sample student paper during this time. During the interview, you’ll be asked to explain the rationale for your comments and grade.

Be prepared to teach

Since community colleges are true teaching colleges, also expect to be asked to prepare a 20-minute (or so) teaching demonstration. During the teaching demonstration the committee members act as your students, and in some cases they even role-play as students by misbehaving, or getting off-task, etc.

Question and answer portion

Once you are before the committee, a strange thing happens. They place the list of questions on the desk in front of you and then each committee member takes turns reading each question aloud to you before you answer them. While usually a bit awkward, the formulaic approach ensures they treat everyone the same.

They are generally not going to ask follow-up questions during a first-interview. At most, they will ask for an example of whatever you’ve just said. They are not allowed to ask you about the specifics of your CV, and in some cases (as I said before) the interview committee may not have seen your CV.

If you make it past the first round…

Second and third interviews vary quite widely. I’ve been to some that were with the President, VP, Chair, first-interview committee members—a whole table of people. Some were just the President and VP; other times, it is just a VP. In another variation the second interview was a teaching demonstration in front of a class of real students. They took input from those students, but some of the first-interview committee members were also present to evaluate my demo. At another school, the third interview is just a formality. If you get it, it means you got the job.

In short, once you make it to a first-interview, you can ask Human Resources about that school’s particular process, or you can ask at the end of the first-interview.

Although the make of second and third interviews can vary, in my experience, they are quite similar to first-interviews in terms of the types of questions and the chance to review them beforehand. However, in the end, it’s the President or VP who makes the final decision. My understanding is that the first-interview committee (which is made up mainly of faculty from the department) makes a recommendation about who they prefer, but the administrator can override that decision.

Now, some specific advice and tips…

The rubrics

The “Desirable Qualifications” section of the job announcement is basically a list of concepts, trends, and skills you want to hit—in your cover letter and in your first interview. You have to spell out very obviously to the committee members reviewing applications and the first-interview committee that you fit all the key things they are looking for.

My understanding is that both committees fill out a rubric that is created based on those desirable qualifications. Each candidate receives a score, and that’s how you advance. In case you don’t make it past the first interview and want to see how you did, you can request to see these rubrics via HR to get a better sense of how this system works.

Teaching demonstrations

I advise that you take these very seriously. Don’t be boring. Get them doing something, and even better get them moving around the room. Also, use something that you’ve done plenty of times in class so you know the little quirks of the lesson, and you can show off that skill of guiding students where they need it. Don’t do something totally new that you’re unfamiliar with. Show off your strengths as a teacher; give them a sense of what you are like.

What has your experience been?

I hope some of this is helpful and I’d love to hear what your experiences have been like interviewing for full-time jobs at a community colleges. Connect with Interfolio online on Twitter, and good luck with your applications!

Author bio: Dr. Lauren Nahas has a PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin. She is a full-time adjunct in the San Francisco Bay Area.

How to “conference” creatively for professional and intellectual growth

This blog post continues our series, Scholar at Large, written by an academic who is now on the tenure track at Nevada State College.

Graduate programs are increasingly modernizing their professionalization toward a more inclusive humanities job market. This is definitely promising for upcoming and recent PhDs, even while many of these programs are still being taught by faculty who have little to no experience beyond their academic silos. At the same time, is this shift exacerbating a gap between generations of academics? What can current faculty do to incorporate more inclusive humanities work into their own practices, and enhance their abilities to speak to humanities work more broadly?

Recently, I was reminded of how conferences can provide scholars at any level, and with any title, the opportunity to “learn new tricks.” I presented at both the American Studies Association and the National Humanities Conference (a collaboration between the National Humanities Alliance and the Federation of State Humanities Councils), occurring concurrently in Honolulu. Both spaces were largely composed of professionals with the same credentials—scholars, academics, educators with advanced degrees. Yet I was struck by how distinct the conversations felt between these two communities.

This difference was very generative for me and reminded me of the work I did while exploring non-traditional academic careers:

I was able to make the way I relay my research more inclusive (and thus generate better ideas from the conversations)
I was forced to push the agility of my thinking and communication
I broadened the way I approached building my networks in my field

I walked away from that week wanting to encourage current faculty and graduate students to approach conferencing more creatively than we tend to be trained to do. Creative conferencing is a great way to boost your knowledge of broader humanities work—and in turn to connect with humanities practitioners that will make your scholarship more robust (and have more sustaining impact). At the same time, you’ll be actively practicing the same skills that you want to instill in your students.

Creative conferencing helps us understand what being an “agile thinker” means in practice

At traditional academic conferences, there is often an assumed “starting position” of knowledge, of politics, of priorities. While that shared starting position is an important part of how knowledge is developed in a field, it can also perpetuate a field’s insularity. Bringing my work to two different kinds of conferences gave me access to more inclusive and challenging conversations, which in turn sharpened my ideas and the contributions I make to my field.

Though I presented the same core material at each conference, I had to think differently about how I framed my work. I was placing my work in conversation with different kinds of humanities practitioners (not just professors, but folks who work with communities and K-12 teachers, folks supporting initiatives like The Lemon Project), which encouraged me to draw new connections between others’ work and my own. I had to practice recognizing and making my work relevant for the different starting points, pressures, and stakes related to doing humanities work for each audience.

Creative conferencing helps us identify new modes of academic collaboration

Despite the fundamental overlap in the commitments and the backgrounds of the attendees of each conference, the conversations at each conference tended to remain siloed in either the theoretical or the pragmatic. I found this gap astounding; it seems that there should be no reason for it other than the ways that professors determine “academic work” to look and sound like something very particular. Purposefully going to conferences that enable us to meet with and collaborative with other humanities practitioners is a great way to close that gap. My own work will only improve the more I am able to think of its theoretical components and pragmatic applications as inextricably co-formative (as praxis).

Creative conferencing reveals networks we didn’t know we had (or even needed)

Conferencing across these venues also helped me think differently about how and who I was networking, and toward what ends. In one conference I’m connecting with folks who may expand my knowledge of my scholarly fields or pedagogical praxis, or who might potentially publish my book. In another I’m meeting and connecting with folks who, for instance, have expertise in public engagement work, who are starting institutes at their universities, or who are running initiatives related to equity in search committees. Working and dialoguing across these networks made me consider how I think about the different sectors of my own work—how they overlap and how I may be more creative in integrating them.

Now that I’ve started my job as a professor, I find that my academic and intellectual investments are shaped by pragmatic and institutional issues in a way that I simply was not cognizant of while attending a well-endowed and large university for graduate school. The more that I am able to understand my academic work in these terms, the more potential I have to both be good at my job and enrich the work of the humanities as a whole. The “alt ac” moves folks are talking about right now are not just for those coming up in the academy; they’re for all of us already in the tower, too.

Author bio: Dr. Molly Appel is an Assistant Professor of English at Nevada State College, where she teaches courses on composition and literature. Her work focuses largely on how literature works as a space of teaching and learning for human rights and social justice in the Americas. You find her on Twitter @mollyappel.

Interfolio’s Dossier enables scholars to collect, curate, polish and send out their materials at all stages throughout their academic professional path. Learn more about Dossier here.

Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of Interfolio.

Getting the most out of academic conferences

This post continues our series, The Smart Scholar, on preparing for and attending an academic conference.

Lately my social media timeline has been filled with various hashtags indicating colleagues in the field are attending their discipline’s academic conference. While conference season is a great opportunity to connect with friends from around the country who you have not seen in several months (or years), for some more introverted folks—including myself—academic conferences can be quite overwhelming.

Nevertheless, academic conferences have great potential to provide professional development and networking opportunities. I believe you should have some strategy in mind to make the most of your conference attendance, and to help alleviate that overwhelming feeling. In this post, I provide three strategies on how to make the most of your conference attendance.

Reach out to folks before the academic conference

Is there a scholar whose work has influenced yours whom you would like to chat with at the conference? If so, I would highly suggest that you reach out to this individual before the conference to inquire about their conference schedule and see if you can set up a 30-minute meeting at the conference.

I think it is important to set meetings beforehand for two main reasons:

Top scholars may have a litany of responsibilities at a conference (presenter, discussant, organization officer, meeting with colleagues) that might leave them with small amounts of time at the conference to meet. Thus, if possible, getting on their schedule beforehand will ensure you have the opportunity to chat with them.
Attempting to engage in a conversation after the scholar’s presentation might be difficult, as you may be competing with other attendees who also want to talk with the individual about their presentation.

How do you make the most of your meeting time? I once met with a graduate student who came to our meeting with an agenda of the items she wanted to discuss. I found it very helpful as it guided our conversation and made sure she got the most out of the conversation. While you may not have a formal agenda, make sure you have some ideas about what you want to gain from the conversation so that the time with the scholar is fruitful.

Be strategic about what sessions you attend

Let’s face it: at most conferences, there are too many presentations and not enough time! And it seems the ones I want to attend always occupy the same slot in the schedule. Consequently, over the years I have had to be more strategic about the sessions I attend. Moreover, I have created a team of my colleagues who have similar interests. When presented with conflicting sessions, we each go to a different one, and then we have a conversation later on in the conference (or after) about what was presented in each session. I think this approach is useful for graduate students as you can all discuss with each other what you learned from attending various sessions.

Attend networking events at the academic conference

I am often reminded by my experience in academia that the networking and social events are just as important as the formal conference presentation sessions. At networking events you get to interact with individuals in a more relaxed environment than at a presentation.

As a graduate student, I published my first peer-review journal article, and at a conference that same year, I attended a social gathering. I was able to meet three of the authors at the gathering whom I cited in my paper (and I did not know them previously!). To this day I still have a relationship with those individuals, but I believe it was fostered as a result of attending the social event.

For many, navigating networking and social events comes easily. However, for my more introverted readers, I truly understand how these events can feel overwhelming. To combat your apprehension, try to build a deeper connection with 3-5 folks rather than having surface level conversation with 20. To make the most of these conversations do more listening and see where there is a connection between you and the other individual. That connection can be related to aspects of your job (e.g., research interests), but that connection can also be forged based on your like for similar past times (e.g., traveling).

What suggestions do you have on making the most out of conferences? Do you have a conference story to tell? Feel free to tweet me with your insights!

Author Bio: Dr. Ramon B. Goings is an assistant professor of educational leadership at Loyola University Maryland. His research examines gifted/high-achieving Black male academic success PreK-PhD, diversifying the teacher and school leader workforce, and the student experience and contributions of historically Black colleges and universities to the higher education landscape. Dr. Goings is also the founder of The Done Dissertation Coaching Program which provides individual and group dissertation coaching for doctoral students. For more information about Dr. Goings’ research please visit his website www.ramongoings.com and follow him on Twitter (@ramongoings) and for more information about The Done Dissertation Coaching Program visit www.thedonedissertation.com.

Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of Interfolio.

Presenting non-traditional work for academic promotion or tenure

This post continues our series by a onetime academic job seeker, now academic-at-large, on presenting non-traditional work for academic promotion or tenure.

It’s early on in your career on the tenure track, and you hope to create scholarship that has real public impact—the traditional monograph or articles, to you, doesn’t feel like enough. But will the work you do help you reach your goal of promotion inside academia? Here are some tips to help you achieve that goal, while producing the museum exhibit, podcast, or social-media page of your dreams.

Find out what policies, if any, your department or institution already has on the books.

And do it early—before you invest too much energy in a project that might not be legible to those in charge.

Plot out ways to connect your non-traditional work to the more traditional categories of research, service, and teaching.

Maybe your students participate in the podcast you’re producing; maybe you mount an exhibit at a local gallery and invite the neighborhood to an opening, with musical performances; maybe you use archival material you’ve uncovered in more traditional research as the backbone for a website, or a series of articles in newspapers or magazines. Then, in your statements for the tenure file, be prepared to describe how these connections have worked.

Build external evaluation into the process.

When you’re working on a plan for non-traditional work, make sure that you plan ahead to include a survey—formal or informal—of users or visitors, so that you can find out what your impact has been.

Keep good records.

This advice applies to most aspects of the tenure file, but goes double for non-traditional work: try to take notes as you go along. Remind yourself, in a text file that lives in a prominent place on your computer, of the names of people you’ve encountered along the way who might be able to provide supportive commentary on your project’s strengths and impact. Excerpt any helpful comments that you get from users or readers during planned evaluations. Consider other ways to quantitatively or qualitatively measure the impact your work has had, like:

Download numbers for a podcast?
Emails from others who’ve used a tool you’ve created?
Numbers of retweets for the viral thread you wrote for Twitter?

If so, save every bit of that evidence, too!

Reach out to professional organizations and colleagues outside of your school who might be able to help.

If you are the only person at your institution who does the kind of work you want to do, this step may be even more important. Hearing stories from other people who’ve successfully—or unsuccessfully!—included non-traditional work in their own dossiers can help you plan your course. And professional organizations like the National Council on Public History and the Modern Language Association have been considering the question of how to evaluate non-traditional scholarship for tenure and promotion for years, and may have guidelines available that you can share with your institution.

***

Interfolio’s Dossier enables scholars to collect, curate, polish and send out their materials at all stages throughout their academic professional path. Learn more about Dossier here.

What can you do to recruit and retain diverse faculty?

Higher education is a hub for creativity, innovation and, of course, knowledge. With so many qualified educators hailing from different regions and academic institutions, it’s no wonder universities are known for cutting-edge research and top-notch education. Key to the institutions’ success is diversity in staff, faculty, and the student body.

There are compelling benefits of improving diversity in all fields, but particularly in higher education. In our complex, multidimensional world, it is essential that administrators provide their students with faculty and staff voices that originate from different backgrounds. Additionally, the more distinct voices and opinions a university has, the more opportunity the institution has to incubate creativity, innovation, and outside-the-box thinking. Most important of all, universities should take it upon themselves to recruit and retain diverse faculty and staff members to create a more equitable, socially responsible environment for learners and educators alike.

Recruiting diverse faculty members requires thoughtful action and engagement from a variety of stakeholders.. When you’d like to attract a more diverse applicant pool to your higher education institution, consider implementing specific strategies to put your diversity initiatives into action. To improve your recruiting and retention strategies so they accommodate diverse staff and faculty, think about transforming institutional leaders into advocates for change who thoroughly and consistently follow up and incorporate data-based strategies into their efforts.

Get the leaders onboard

For a university’s diversity initiative to reach its full potential, it is essential that executive leaders actively support the plan. These individuals should make themselves accountable for advancing the institution’s diversity, beginning with recruiting and retaining diverse faculty and eventually creating an institution-wide culture of inclusion. However, when it comes to setting an example for the rest of the staff and faculty to follow, speaking about diversity isn’t enough. To affect change on a large-scale level, leaders must turn their vocal support into concrete action. Rather than just speaking of the imbalances at a societal and institutional level, executive leaders should develop diversity plans of action and make sure colleagues, students, and members of the community are aware of these inequities and the action that needs to be taken to resolve them.

Follow through with ongoing efforts across the university

Developing a strategy for diversity isn’t enough; for it to be truly impactful, administrators and institutional leaders must follow through in creating a culture of diversity and inclusion. By making diversity an ongoing priority, universities are creating a culture that welcomes differences and embraces change. This, in turn, produces an environment in which diverse faculty and staff will be more likely to stay for years to come.

Develop data-driven recruitment strategies

Without a transparent view of diversity statistics for current staff, university leaders may not even know that their institutions are in need of more diverse employees and applicants. When administrators and department heads have access to comprehensive data on their faculty and staff, they are able to study employee demographics. They can share this information with academic affairs leaders and other professionals in charge of advancing diversity across the university. Equipped with up-to-date data and statistics, these professionals can develop impactful plans and strategize how best to use university resources to enact change.

Interfolio Faculty Search is a transparent recruiting platform that allows university leaders to view insights into all stages of the application process. One piece of information they can access is applicant diversity statistics, which are essential in the practice of equitable hiring. Find out more about advancing recruitment and retainment by developing an environment of diversity and inclusion.

The best way to approach faculty evaluations

Full-time faculty members are consistently evaluated based on the progress they’ve made in their own professional development, as well as their performance as an instructor at a higher education institution. Faculty reviews and evaluations involve looking closely at different information surrounding individual educators, including:

Quality of teaching
Usefulness as an academic adviser
Professional service and academic productivity, including publication of academic papers and books
Grants
University and community service

Faculty evaluation is a critical component in maintaining accreditation and preparing for tenure evaluations. Accredited universities must ensure they are employing high-quality educators and that they are supporting equitable and efficient hiring and tenure review processes. As there are multiple parties involved in the faculty evaluation process, it is crucial to have evaluation systems that are accessible to all stakeholders. Many colleges and universities would argue that an online faculty evaluation system is the best, most accurate way to approach faculty reviews.

Stakeholders in faculty evaluation

A number of professionals are involved in faculty review. The following individuals play a significant role in the faculty evaluation process:

Faculty members: As the ones being evaluated, faculty members are involved in each step of the evaluation process, either directly or indirectly.
Department chairs: At the beginning of the faculty evaluation process, department chairs will review semester summaries of each educator’s teaching evaluations.

Dean of the college: After the department chair has given their evaluation of each faculty member’s performance, they will send this information to the dean of the university for review.
Administrators: An individual on the staff, typically a member of the Office of Academic Affairs, receives the results of the faculty evaluation from the dean. They will review this information and ensure that it is stored in a secure environment.

Most universities require department chairs to have at least one evaluation interview with each non-tenured faculty member in their department. This interview is comprised of discussions on teaching effectiveness, course syllabi, professional and academic development, and overall citizenship to the department and university as a whole. After this meeting, department chairs will send the results to the school’s dean, who will review the materials, then to an administrator who is in charge of making sure this information goes to the right place.

Transform evaluation with Interfolio’s Faculty Activity Reporting

While some universities have succeeded without technological resources designed to centralize and streamline the faculty evaluation process, the increase in data and proliferation in campus technology systems has made it necessary for colleges and universities to integrate digital processes in the faculty evaluation and activity reporting processes.

Interfolio’s Review, Promotion and Tenure software is a comprehensive online platform that strives to improve faculty reporting and evaluation. It allows higher education institutions of all sizes to make their activity and evaluation information available to users operating on any type of device and in any location. In addition, Interfolio’s Review, Promotion and Tenure allows universities to develop reports on faculty data in customizable formats that can be used in different contexts, such as in gaining and maintaining accreditation.

Accreditation Process for Higher Education

In the U.S. higher education landscape, universities seek out accreditation, a quality review process that assures students, families, and the press that a program or institution offers a high-quality education.

Aside from improving a college’s public perception, accreditation is important for students seeking financial assistance. According to the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, students who want federal and/or state loans and grants must attend a recognized accredited organization. Additionally, those seeking out tuition assistance from their employers must attend accredited universities.

There’s no doubt programs and institutions desire accreditation. However, the process is complex, and institutions may be unclear on how to qualify and obtain this status. . If your institution is interested in applying for accreditation, read on to find out what you should anticipate from the process.

Accreditation requirements

Accrediting agencies have different standards and requirements that institutions must meet for an initial accreditation. When you’re trying to become an accredited university, you should do some research on your desired accrediting agency. For instance, the Higher Learning Commission specifies the following steps in applying for candidacy and initial accreditation:

Letter of intent to pursue candidacy
Comprehensive evaluation for candidacy
Award of candidacy
Biennial evaluation
Comprehensive evaluation for initial accreditation
Award of initial accreditation

Membership policies and procedures

Each accrediting agency has its own unique standards for gaining and maintaining accreditation. For instance, institutions and programs must pay fees for earning initial accreditation and then must pay annual membership costs to maintain accreditation.

Accreditors require different membership dues, often depending on the amount of students within a program or institution. For instance, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges has annual dues of $5,500 for institutions with more than 2,000 students enrolled. Meanwhile, the base membership fee for the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) is $4,550. However, the HLC has a variety of additional costs associated with off-campus activities, monitoring, and on-site visits, among others.

According to EducationNext, seven regional accrediting agencies are responsible for accrediting over 80% of public and private nonprofit institutions in the U.S. These include:

Higher Learning Commission
Southern Association of Colleges and Schools
Middle States Commission on Higher Education
New England Association of Schools and Colleges
Western Association of Schools and Colleges
Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities
Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges

Gain and maintain accreditation with Interfolio

The accreditation process certainly isn’t simple. It requires multiple parties, numerous standards, tons of documents, and up-to-date data. Though it’s possible to complete this process manually, with stacks of paperwork, it has become much more streamlined and organized with the assistance of accreditation software. Accreditation with Interfolio provides innovative technology that fits seamlessly into your institution’s workflow, rather than forcing you to alter your operations to meet its systems.

Comprehensive accreditation software gathers the documentation needed to earn and maintain your institution’s accreditation status. In addition, it helps institutions create and store faculty data surrounding hiring and recruiting; this is important in proving to accreditors that your university works with productive, qualified, and diverse instructional staff members. It’s possible to gain and keep accreditation the old-fashioned way (universities did it for years) but the benefits of using accreditation software—cost savings, saved time, and increased data accuracy just to name a few—are numerous.

Three tips for candidates working with search firms

This post continues our series, The Smart Scholar, on three tips for candidates working with search firms.

As many of you are preparing for the upcoming semester, you (or colleagues you know) may begin to get calls from search firms about their interest in applying for faculty or administrative positions. I’ve had experience with search firms as a candidate and as a member of a search committee, so I want to focus my advice on engaging in search-firm-lead hiring processes. While I do not highlight each step of the process in this post, I share a few insights to consider as you all are on an upward career trajectory and may work with search firms.

Getting on a search firm’s radar

If a search firm is involved in hiring, they handle the initial screening of applicants. I have found that there are two possible routes to get on the shortlist for a potential position:

Apply formally via the application submission portal
Exist on a search firm’s vetted list of potential candidates

The first route is self-explanatory and just requires you to keep abreast of where jobs in your field are posted, as I described in a previous Smart Scholar post. The second route, however, is also important because some positions may not be widely advertised. Having a relationship with a search firm is advantageous to getting on a shortlist for positions.

In my experience, I have found that individuals can get on the radar of a search firm through various ways:

Reach out to a firm via email, provide your resume/CV, and set up a time to talk with a representative from the firm.
Talk with your peers! You can be referred to the search firm by either a colleague already on their radar or the university search committee.

While being referred by someone else presents you as a warm(er) lead, I am not opposed to reaching out to search firms directly and building relationships with their associates. This may not be immediately fruitful, but down the line, opportunities may come to you that would not have previously.

Develop your list of references early

If you are contacted by a search firm and decide to apply for a position, it’s critical to begin lining up your references. This may seem early in the process, but you want to get your list set up because when you are considered a finalist for a position, the search firm—in conjunction with the university search committee—will begin to engage your recommendation list. An important question, therefore, is: who should I list as a reference?

While the committee itself will give (or likely suggest) this information, I’ve found that it’s good to have the following types of individuals prepared to serve as a reference:

A current supervisor
A former supervisor
A colleague or research collaborator—typically I’ve seen this for faculty or research center positions
A direct report— an individual who has reported to you in some capacity—if applicable

Clean up your social media

Now that you have developed a rapport with a search committee and prepared your references, you may well find yourself at the final stage in the hiring process. At this point, it’s likely that the search committee will do a formal background check—along with an informal background check, which includes searching through your social media.

We are in a social media age where sharing much of what happens in our lives is common. It is important, prior to applying for a search, to assess what your social media profiles say about you. My suggestion here would be to:

Do a Google search on your name and see what shows up
Then clean up anything that would not represent you in a positive way

Unfortunately, I have heard from colleagues and have experienced as a committee member how a great candidate could lose a potential offer due to what a search firm and committee would deem a “problematic” social media post and/or image. Interpreting social media is subjective and often adversely impacts candidates of color. I believe doing a clean of your social media is beneficial to securing a future position.

Have you had experiences with search firms? Please reach out to me on Twitter to continue the conversation!

Requesting a letter through Interfolio—simplified

Last week we launched a new Dossier product feature in our ongoing quest to save our user’s time, and so that we maintain our exclusive offering as a full-service Dossier. We received feedback that the process of requesting a letter of recommendation through Interfolio could be confusing and unintuitive. In response we’ve enhanced the user experience working with our product design team.

Here are the changes we’ve made:

Instead of having a blank “Recommender” search field, you will now have two options: “Choose Existing Contact” or “Add New Contact.”

In the default option shown, when you select “Choose Existing Contact,” a drop-down menu will display all of your existing contacts.
The “Add New Contact” option will allow you to add a new contact.

We’ve made this change due to user feedback—it clarifies that a letter request has to go to a particular contact.Once you’ve selected the contact that you want to send the request to, you are ready to do so.

We encourage you to add more detail and personalization to the request, but the only requirement of sending a request for a letter of recommendation is providing the contact information of your recommender. Here is a link to a help article that fills in more of the details.

How do these changes impact me?

First and foremost, it saves you time. It is far more convenient to simply select saved information than to type it in from scratch for every request. In addition, it helps to avoid errors in email addresses and names. Requesting and sending letters of recommendation is a stressful but necessary part of applying to many scholarly positions and other opportunities. Let Interfolio help you manage this portion of your to-do list, confidently and confidentially.

Interfolio’s Dossier enables scholars to collect, curate, polish, and send out their materials at all stages throughout their academic professional path. Learn more about Dossier here.