This month’s free Interfolio webinar and Q&A features our partner Clemson University, and will address some concrete ways departments and human resources offices can collaborate to achieve major institutional goals around recruiting faculty.
WHEN: Thursday, October 20 / 2:00-3:00 PM EDT / Register here
This webinar will feature Josh Brown, from Clemson’s Office of Human Resources, explaining how Clemson uses lean analysis techniques to solve challenges around faculty committees and faculty recruitment—with ideas like keeping a database of great candidates, studying candidate referral sources, and investing some time in social media. He’ll go through several specific methods by which his office equips Clemson’s search committees to better understand and approach their candidate pool. Along the way, he’ll point out how the information and tools available via Interfolio’s technology fit in.
The challenge is one that all organizations face, not just universities: how can we build an excellent professional team? But in an academic context, where hiring is a committee decision by a group of faculty members who are uniquely qualified to evaluate candidates—and where tenure may be on the table—this question carries great weight with each individual hire. Brown is a trailblazer in this area: he’s an academic HR professional who agrees that hiring a faculty member carries its own demands that are really distinct from hiring a staff member.
So we’re looking forward to this webinar because it’s a great example of fruitful collaboration between academics and administrators in service of a key institutional goal: getting hiring right. As we’ve said elsewhere, we believe that the faculty are the rightful drivers of a college or university’s mission; they’re the appropriate people to make decisions, by consensus, about hiring and promoting other faculty.
At the same time, the problem of finding and attracting scholars is one for which professional recruiters have relevant wisdom and can assist their colleagues in academic departments and Faculty Affairs. Rather than what Brown calls the “post and pray” approach to filling faculty positions, there are some smart practices by which search committees can better focus their recruitment efforts, on which he’ll go into detail in the webinar.
If this sounds interesting to you, whether you fall more on the faculty or administrative side of the fence, go ahead and sign up now to attend. (It’s free!) If you have questions, send us a note at events@interfolio.com and we’ll get right back to you.