Employee selection and group decision-making skills are critical for ensuring hiring is valid, meets organizational goals, and considers ethical and legal limitations. This exercise has participants role-play members of a search committee reviewing job finalists using shared and unique information. A novel twist to traditional hidden-profile…

In response to the need for greater racial and ethnic diversity, the Office of Academic Affairs (OAA) at Indiana University Indianapolis introduced a mandatory equity and inclusion-centered training program for faculty search committees in August 2023. This training addresses key challenges in achieving faculty diversity, including biases, narrow…

Faculty hiring is an important dimension of diversity efforts across many postsecondary institutions. Many U.S. colleges and universities have released faculty job announcements establishing a demonstrated commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion as a necessary criterion for applicants. This move is significant because it entrenches…

This paper is the fourth revision of the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges (ASCCC) paper on equivalency adopted by the delegates to the plenary session in Fall 1989. Previous revisions were adopted in 1999, 2006, and 2016. The original paper was intended to help local academic senates develop policies and procedures in response to…

This piece outlines the process generally used for hiring faculty at community colleges and offers advice for individuals seeking positions at two-year institutions.

The increasing diversity of the student bodies of community colleges calls for faculty who are motivated and equipped to educate them. This diversity is a product of the common theme community colleges share in their missions that espouses providing access to education for all members of their local communities. The faculty search committee plays…

As the higher education leadership landscape has become more complicated, particularly through retirements, there is greater difficulty in finding the best candidates for non-presidential positions, which has resulted in more facilitated searches. Candidate recruitment is the most visible work, but equally important is managing, enhancing, and…

One of the critical issues in education today is how to help all students to maximize their fullest potential. Achieving this goal seems to be difficult for many people who come from culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) backgrounds. At all levels, they endure direct and indirect disenfranchisements, disadvantages, and disillusionments,…

The hiring of faculty is at the heart of developing and maintaining programs, as well as the success and achievement of students, in all educational systems, and the California Community College System is no exception. While hiring practices may vary in terms of specifics in the 72 community college districts in California, basic principles and…

Despite stated commitments to diversity, predominantly White academic institutions still have not increased racial diversity among their faculty. In this article Robin DiAngelo and Özlem Sensoy focus on one entry point for doing so--the faculty hiring process. They analyze a typical faculty hiring scenario and identify the most common practices…

This paper is the third revision of the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges' (ASCCC) paper on equivalency adopted by the delegates to the plenary session in 1989. The original paper was intended to help local academic senates develop policies and procedures in response to Education Code §87359, which requires that each district's…

The academic job market is an exercise in captivity, and the author thinks that she is still its prisoner. A Ph.D. in history, the author is learning the rules of the game, and finding that search committees could do with a few lessons, too. In this article, the author shares how she found a way out.

Spring is interview season for aspiring presidents, provosts, and deans. It's when search consultants spend a lot of time sitting in meeting rooms at airport hotels watching candidates engage with hiring committees in the ritual dance of the preliminary interview. Even after 15 years of that, the author is constantly surprised by the approaches…

As both a serial search-committee member and an occasional job seeker, the author has observed that one of the most awkward parts of a standard academic interview often comes at the end, when the committee chair asks the candidate if he or she has any questions. During an interview, the questions candidates ask may be as important as those they…

The time between a president's resignation and the next president's assumption of office--often a 12-to-18 month period--can be crucial for an institution. Between the winding down of an existing presidency and the successful launch of the next, there are all too many opportunities for lost momentum, frayed relationships, key departures, and…