At Rowan University, Debbie Scheibler is in the throes of a search for her fall staff of residence directors. But Scheibler, the college’s director of residential learning, can’t bring candidates to the campus for interviews; the New Jersey college was one of hundreds nationwide to all but close in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
I just don’t know how you select a president when they haven’t visited campus.
Instead, Scheibler’s team is attempting to bring the campus to job candidates. Just before Rowan announced its campus would go remote, the team put together a podcast of the current graduate-student staff members sharing their experiences of working in the residence halls. An interactive online tour replaces the all-important campus visit.
There was “a split second,” she said, when she wondered whether it would be better to press pause, to wait and see how the situation would play out. But she ultimately decided to move forward. “We wanted to try to maintain that normalcy as much as we possibly could,” she said.
Conducting a handful of interviews over the phone is not unusual in most job searches. But now, in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting shutdowns, colleges have to figure out how to conduct the entire hiring process without seeing candidates face to face.
In some cases, institutions conclude that the stakes are too high to proceed. Certain leadership positions set the tone for the campus, rely heavily on interpersonal relationships, and command top-tier salaries.
Presidential searches on the University of Nevada’s campuses in Las Vegas and Reno, for example, have been delayed.
“I just don’t know how you select a president when they haven’t visited campus,” said Thom Reilly, chancellor of the Nevada System of Higher Education. A search for Reilly’s successor is on hold as well — part of a larger hiring freeze for the Nevada system.
They are not alone. Brown University suspended any new hiring, while Bowling Green State University instituted a “soft freeze” that requires presidential approval for searches to continue.
Even where hiring is still happening, the whole process has slowed down, said Andy Brantley, president and chief executive of the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, or CUPA-HR. Decisions that used to be decentralized now require more scrutiny as all the unknowns are weighed.
Letting potential applicants know where the university stands on hiring is key, he said. “The last thing you need to do in a crisis like this is waste people’s time.”
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
Each college’s approach varies. “There is never a one-size-fits-all for higher education,” said Brantley. Universities with teaching hospitals might feel more pressure to hire, he said, and colleges with vacancies in now-vital technology-support positions very likely have a reason to push ahead with those searches.
“It’s important that we acknowledge that the institutions didn’t close,” said Brantley. “The work is transformed, and for many employees, that means extraordinarily more time and effort to continue to help the institution function.”
Going ahead with a hire might also make sense if the search was close to completion before the pandemic hit.
“We want to respect the investment candidates in the final stages of hiring have made, particularly if candidates have provided notice to their current employers and we have ongoing work needs,” said Patrick Smitowski, senior director of human resources in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Smitowski said applications were still being accepted for some of the college’s roughly 45 open positions, though the university announced this week that its hiring guidelines would change to consider whether a role is critical during the pandemic.
The uncertainty of fall enrollments and budgets makes committing to a new hire difficult, said Brantley, of CUPA-HR. “How do you project exactly what those needs are going to be into the fall?” The last thing you want to do, he said, is hire someone whom you will have to let go.
And there is a longer view to take. Brantley sees many ways campuses could be forever changed by the pandemic. Virtual or hybrid courses and remote-work arrangements might increase where they would not have been considered before. The additional scrutiny and levels of approval for hiring are an essential change for some universities.
“We should not assume that the face-to-face campus community that existed two months ago on our campuses is going to be exactly the same face-to-face campus community that we will have in the fall,” said Brantley.
At Rowan, Scheibler is aware that the situation could change at any moment. She and her team have been advised to be “mindful” of what a hiring freeze could mean, but in the meantime they are going ahead with their schedule.
She praised her team’s ability to act quickly in response to the coronavirus: “As scary as it is, it still brings out the best in us.”