By Liz McKinney, Director of Business and Operations
GSPP has made several efforts to improve our inclusive faculty hiring practices. In addition to having search committees participate in the ODEI training, in fall 2020 we also invited all committee chairs of ongoing faculty searches to meet with Kristin Deal and Marcy Cozzens to share challenges and ideas. We are working to translate individual efforts, such as targeted outreach, into standard protocols. For example, in advance of this meeting, we allocated time for a temporary staff member to research and compile potential sites for advertising our positions to recruit more diverse applicant pools. The dean has also actively engaged in outreach to her networks, and we have paused searches to allow for additional outreach and recruitment as needed.
Internally, we are improving our interview process to promote inclusion within our school as well. For instance, staff are included on most search committees and invited to the small-group interviews and job talk. During the “on-campus” interview day, we have replaced the search committee dinner with the candidate by a coffee hour with students (now virtual). Both students and staff are invited to the job talk and asked to evaluate the candidates, and we are in discussions about adding a staff vote to inform the final selection.
Our ongoing efforts include continuously improving our job descriptions to attract diverse applicants, making more resources such as checklists available to faculty leading searches in order to free up time to devote to recruitment and outreach, and revising our interview day evaluation forms to include how a candidate addresses diversity, equity and inclusion in their presentations.