Before you dive into summer, check out our top tips for HigherEd teams in 2023.
The academic year is over and we’re already halfway through 2023—it’s hard to believe! As your team helps get campus prepared for summer, ramps up for hiring new roles for the fall, or catches up on everything that has fallen through the cracks, make sure you that you check out some of the top tips and best practices for HigherEd teams so far this year. Read on below!
Develop your employment brand
Attracting talent today isn’t as easy as it once was. If your institution isn’t leveraging recruitment marketing tactics, it’s time to get started—and the best place to start is an employment brand. An employment brand is the identity and messaging that an organization communicates to potential candidates, and usually encompasses an organization’s culture, mission, values, and work environment. This is distinct from an institutional brand that your enrollment team might use to attract students. When developing and marketing this brand, think about what’s important for a job-seeker as they evaluate your institution: just like you examine their resume and cover letter, they’ll be looking at your website, social media, applicant page, and more. Check out this post for best practices for creating an employment brand.
Level up your search committees
Search committees are a central part of the HigherEd hiring process, and can sometimes be a roadblock to a fast hiring process. It can be tough to create efficient and effective search committee processes, but it’s not impossible—your institution just needs the right tools and the right tactics for adopting those tools. For instance, the faculty affairs team at the University of Alabama Birmingham faced resistance from faculty in implementing a digitized search committee process, but the team knew that they had to bring in technology. To drive adoption, they launched user groups, brought faculty into the conversation, and demonstrated the benefits—they would still have the same voice and agency in the process, but they’d be able to do everything more quickly and easily. Read more about how UAB leveled up their search committees.
Avoiding burnout
The key to increasing retention in today’s HigherEd climate is preventing burnout. Turnover for HigherEd employees spiked during and after the pandemic, and that turnover has been driven by burnout. Preventing your faculty and staff from burning out requires a comprehensive plan to tackle the challenges of employees today. Best practices include:
- Offering flexibility when you can
- Offering clear expectations for work and “extra” work (like service for faculty members)
- Ensuring balanced workloads
- Encouraging career growth and professional development
Find more tips for avoiding burnout in this blog post!
Targeted job descriptions
PeopleAdmin experts agreed on one tip that can make all the difference for hiring: cross-department alignment on a job description. “Start the hiring process with a meeting between recruiters and hiring managers, or department leads, or someone else close to the role being hired for,” said Ramonica Emerson is a Senior Business Partner at PowerSchool, PeopleAdmin’s parent company. “It’s important to get those groups in the same room so that those dealing with candidates and candidate communication have a strong sense of the characteristics of an ideal candidate.” Instead of recycling old job descriptions, use this best practice to create a refined, targeted job description that gives a holistic sense of the role—this will attract the right candidates. Read more in this blog post!