When we talk about spousal and partner hiring in higher education, everyone naturally assumes we mean professors. But increasingly, these dual hires involve staff members.
Anyone who has worked in administration can tell you that the success of everything we do — whether it’s obtaining federal grants, improving teaching, or raising money —is intimately tied to recruiting and retaining terrific staff members. That’s always been a challenge, but it’s become much more so in recent years, as academe’s labor pool has been shrunk by employment trends with ominous names like “the big quit” and “the great disillusionment.”
Hiring and retaining staff members for complicated and stressful support jobs has become harder than it’s ever been in my 30 years in higher education. For example, in academic advising, my college, along with others in the country, is looking for professionals who have:
- a sophisticated understanding of certain software and data analytics.
- innate empathy and ability to counsel and mentor students.
- facility in teamwork and in engaging with other staff and faculty members as well as parents.
- a willingness to work for good public-sector salaries that don’t always match private-sector pay.
Those traits, skills, and preferences don’t necessarily come together in the same person. The point is that good staff members are at a premium these days, and you should do everything you can to try to hire and retain the best. That includes trying to accommodate a partner-hire request from a top faculty or staff candidate whose partner is a staff member.
The hitch: Most colleges and universities have some formal operating procedures that come into play when a dual hire involves two faculty members (even if it’s a “no can do” policy). However, accommodating a staff partner of a faculty hire, or a staff partner of a staff hire, tends to be relatively unregulated and case by case.
In recent months, I have been focusing the Administration 101 column on the complex issue of overseeing partner/spousal hires. So far, the series has covered how administrators should handle faculty partners (how to prepare for a dual hire, how to supervise the process, how to negotiate the contracts, and how to retain them). Now I’ll turn to the much-ignored variant of partner hiring for a staff position.
Understand the limits and options of partner accommodation for staff members. As a dean, I know the playbook if we want to try to hire a faculty member. Given that staff hiring tends to be less organized and scripted, in some ways, it’s simpler to find a position for a partner who is a staff member than for one who is a faculty member. If a department comes to me for help with a staff position for a partner, I have greater flexibility, but also more is left to chance and circumstance.
In this series, David D. Perlmutter writes about pursuing a career in academic administration and about surviving and thriving as a leader.
For example, let’s say a new faculty hire tells us, “By the way, my husband is a nurse.” My first thought would not be to go through some complicated campus bureaucracy to create a position or try to get funding for it. Rather, I would make calls to contacts within our (huge) university hospital system and some of the other (huge) hospital systems in the area. In the case of professions like nursing, I would be highly confident that I could make a connection that would lead to a position, assuming the partner had a decent résumé. My own contribution would be a few phone calls. In such cases, it’s not really a partner accommodation — it’s just me passing on useful information and letting the partner take it from there.
But there are also cases in which the partner has such an unusual or highly technical set of skills that it’s difficult to find relevant work in your town. A colleague at a small liberal-arts college in a rural region of a Midwestern state told me that he was unable to make a faculty hire because the candidate’s spouse worked in a technical field that literally had no jobs in the region and no prospect of remote work.
Sometimes internal politics and/or budget constraints limit who your institution can help. If you are recruiting a prominent scientist or an Ivy League vice president whose spouse is an admissions counselor, then a position will be found and financed for their staff partner — guaranteed. But at a small college located in the middle of cornfields, the answer to a request for a dual hire may be: “Sorry, but we can’t afford to help anyone.” Political pull and budget realities affect partner hiring on every campus.
Learn the types and classifications of staff positions that exist on your campus. You don’t have to be an expert on staff hiring. But to be serious about accommodating nonfaculty partner hires, you do need to be aware of the general range of staff positions.
For example, I only found out two years ago that some science departments on our campus employ full-time “scientific glass blowers” whose duties include “fabrication and repair of instructional and research glassware.” At any large university, hundreds of staff positions are open at any given time. Some will be familiar: accountant, IT technician, academic adviser, or the like. But plenty of others — such as “glass blower” and “swine center technician” — might be obscure if you are, say, dean of a communications college. I like to learn about unusual positions anyway; I never know when they might be relevant to one of my own hires.
Second, familiarize yourself with your institution’s system of staff job titles and ranks, and their commensurate pay grades and duties. Again, the larger the institution, the more complicated and more numerous the options. The position description and salary for an “accounts manager I” and a “director of accounting” will vary. Likewise, the title of “technician II” might mean very different duties in a languages department versus an environmental-toxicology office.
No doubt other people on your campus, such as HR or the managers doing the actual hiring, will know far more than you about the staff-hiring process or the types of positions available. But understanding the basics can put you in a better position to help a staff partner get a foot in the door.
Belong to a network of administrators who assist one another in locating staff positions for a partner hire. Helping someone find a staff position can start with a simple contact: “Hi, Laura, I noticed your department is trying to hire a new ‘senior business assistant.’ Well, one of my IT technicians just got married and his new husband is moving to town and looking for a job.” And so on.
Such connections take little time and effort if you’ve already done the prep work in the following ways:
- Build a network of contacts around the campus so you have a general idea of who to call — or at least who to ask about who to call — for different types of staff positions.
- Get a sense of the types of staff positions that have higher turnover than others, and thus, more frequent openings. Note: Your institution’s list of high-premium positions it can’t fill is changing all the time in these peculiar years of the early 2020s. So if your information about staff hiring is two or three years old, it’s time for a refresh.
- As the old saying goes, “If you want help, be helpful.” Make sure to alert your network when you have staff positions open in your college or department. Be flexible when assisting other units with staff accommodations.
The idea here is to create an informal system, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time candidates you’re trying to hire request help finding work for their partners.
Engage the nonacademic, nonprofit, government, and corporate sectors. Here in West Texas, we have a relatively low population base spread out over a very wide area. But we have a lot of jobs in health care, financial services, agricultural support, real estate, and construction, as well as thriving nonprofit, government, and school sectors. On the other hand, our region has very few other universities within driving distance. If we want to help nonacademic professionals find a job, we need to be community connected.
Get involved with your area Chamber of Commerce and other local organizations to get a sense of the job market around your campus and to identify good sources of intel. After almost a decade of community engagement, I feel confident that if somebody’s partner is trying to find a job as a construction supervisor, a tax accountant, or a police officer, I know who to call.
The side benefit is that you are building a positive town-gown relationship — something every college and university cares about nowadays.
One caveat about timing: The hiring process for most staff positions in higher education, and certainly for nearly all private-sector jobs is much tighter than for faculty recruiting. A professor might sign a contract in November for a tenure-line position that does not actually start until next August. In contrast, in the corporate world, “Can you start on Monday?” is a real thing. This mismatched timing creates a bind for many couples when one of them is a faculty member with a months–away start date while the other is seeking staff or nonacademic work. My usual advice: Move to town first and then seek a position.
In the summer of 2022, the work world feels not just turned upside down but as if we are in some sort of multiverse. With the surge in popularity of remote work, I am seeing more instances of couples moving to the campus area for a university job for one of them, while the other opts to work remotely for their current employer. That phenomenon particularly benefits institutions in regions with limited local job options.
In any case, all of this underscores how partner hires have become more — and less — complex, and, thus, worthy of your attention as an administrator.