Early in 2022, when I became executive vice president and chief of staff at my liberal-arts college, one of the duties I was most excited about was serving on search committees for senior staff positions. But since then, it’s been a lesson in “be careful what you wish for.”
In this academic year alone, I’ve supported, been involved in, or chaired searches for an executive director, associate vice president, and three cabinet-level vice presidents. Within the president’s office, I’ve also chaired searches for an institutional ombuds (twice), administrative assistant (twice), executive assistant (twice), and an assistant to the board/special projects manager. For those who aren’t counting, that’s nine positions (12 searches) in eight months. I am exhausted.
To be clear, I still enjoy this kind of work — it’s satisfying to share my joy about the college and its students with candidates and to identify, recruit, and hire people who can make the institution even better. But what I hadn’t anticipated was the challenge of fulfilling this mission amid the high turnover rates of the Great Resignation.
Everything I thought I knew about running an administrative search has gone out the window this academic year as we, like the vast majority of institutions, have struggled to fill vacancies within a much-altered higher-education landscape.
As a recent survey by The Chronicle found, “hiring managers reported taking months to fill key positions,” and “their ability to land top talent is being dictated by candidates’ desire for hybrid and flexible work arrangements.” That’s been my experience, as well. Some vacancies are because, when campuses reopened after Covid lockdowns, some employees didn’t want to return to in-person work. Some openings are because people resigned to accept higher-paying jobs with more-flexible schedules. Other vacancies are intentional as institutions reorganize to meet new fiscal challenges.
And of course many of the people who continue to work in academe feel overwhelmed and stressed from doing two to three jobs with minimal supplemental pay (if any) since the spring of 2020. There’s been a sense of urgency to fill vacancies as quickly as possible in order to improve workplace conditions for everyone — however, going fast doesn’t always equate to getting very far.
To make matters worse, it isn’t just staff members leaving positions. Executive leaders, including presidents, are turning over at a higher-than-normal rate, resulting in questions about institutional vision, direction, and, yes, staffing needs. That lack of direction — plus people assuming responsibilities for work assigned to vacant jobs — makes it challenging to know which positions we need going forward versus which ones we have just because we’ve always had them. Where are the actual pressure points? How does the current staffing structure align with new strategic priorities? What exactly do we want each of these positions to do?
Once we have those answers, the next concern is fiscal. Can we afford to hire at the same level? Do we even attempt to pay market rate? What and where is our market? It is undoubtedly less expensive to promote from within, give a raise, and move forward. But that only creates a vacancy in a different place. For example, at my college, we eliminated the position of senior director of human resources and created a vice president of people and workplace culture. This decision was obvious given less-than-stellar results from a workplace climate survey. But now we are dealing with a backlog of HR work.
We’ve had to adjust our job-performance expectations to match staffing and fiscal realities. Indeed, without a sizable endowment, most colleges must increase tuition to generate enough revenue to keep up with inflation, meet staff and faculty compensation demands, adhere to government mandates about minimum wage/salaries, and so on.
So the big question is: How do we recruit, select, and successfully hire talent in a culture of low morale with limited financial resources? Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned this year.
Pick search-committee chairs who can truly take the lead. Sure, you could hire a search firm, if money allows, to help you run the hiring process. Especially for executive hires, search consultants are incredibly beneficial. They do all the work of developing a “leadership profile,” doing targeted advertising, recruiting, and even screening applicants. But as we all know, they are pricey. And in the current economic climate, search firms aren’t an option for most staff and administrative openings.
Instead I’ve relied on finding the right people to lead particular searches. Then I advise search-committee chairs to develop a mini-leadership profile detailing our goals for the position: three to five performance expectations, opportunities and challenges related to those expectations, and desired qualifications and personal characteristics.
Convene a hiring committee that accurately represents the constituencies with whom the successful applicant will work. Be strategic in selecting the committee members from the right mix of divisions and units, and encourage them to play an active role. Their diverse perspectives will help ensure a holistic assessment of a candidate and they can answer job-specific questions from applicants.
A diverse committee is also a bonus when it’s time to advertise the position. There are so many job postings. Part of the challenge of hiring now is finding ways to make sure that a diverse range of prospective applicants see your job posting. Ask search-committee members to share it widely within their personal and professional networks.
Expect to get a big response and to do a lot of culling. That may seem counterintuitive at a time when it’s so difficult to fill staff positions. But getting lots of applicants doesn’t mean they match well with the position. And a sizable response represents one more hurdle for recruiters and committees to overcome. Even with limited advertising, I’ve been shocked by the large number of applicants for all levels of positions. More so than ever before, the variability of experience and credentials is exceptionally high.
For instance, we had lawyers and M.B.A.s in the initial applicant pool for an assistant to the board/special projects manager — a position for which we had advertised “bachelor’s degree preferred.” I was surprised that candidates with high market-value credentials were seeking a position in this salary range. Perhaps it’s a sign that the Great Resignation has not only yielded vacancies but also an opportunity for people to apply their skills in nontraditional roles. They may perceive nonfaculty positions within higher education as more flexible than those in other industries with rigid education and experience requirements.
A large pile of résumés creates a challenge for the search committee in two ways:
- It is easy to get caught up in biased thinking that suggests the more education a candidate has, the better they will be at the job. That is certainly not true and may actually reflect a lack of relevant knowledge and skills for the specific position.
- When an applicant seems like a poor fit for the job, you can’t help but ask, “Do they fully understand this position? Will they be happy in a role that doesn’t use their specialized skills?” While we would never remove someone from the applicant pool for being “overqualified,” it does make it more challenging to identify the person who would be most successful in the position.
With so many applicants and time of the essence, I encourage search-committee members to independently use a screening checklist to identify candidates with the required qualifications and relevant job experience.
In first-round interviews, focus your questions on the nuts and bolts of the job. The goal is to ascertain how applicants would approach this role rather than how they’ve approached prior positions. Résumés and cover letters are about previous accomplishments, but good applicants can translate their past to future work if they truly understand the nature and work of the position you’re looking to fill. Applicants whose work experience and/or credentials are misaligned with the job often struggle to give concrete examples that would help the committee envision them in the role.
One of the few benefits of the current job market — in which you often have far too many applicants yet not always enough of the ones who actually fit the position — is that the best candidates usually rise to the top. That was only sometimes the case in the past, when staff-job postings tended to attract applicants whose qualifications were far more uniform.
The challenge, at this point, is not just whom to advance in the search process, but the speed with which you can do so. Great candidates go fast in this market and higher education is not particularly known for its speedy decision making. For a few top candidates, you have to move quickly enough to schedule a campus visit, arrange the itinerary with 35 or more invitees, and make a hiring decision — all before they accept another job offer.
Sadly, we were not able to move fast enough in our search for an associate vice president. We invited three great finalists to the campus. But four days before their visit, one finalist accepted another offer. And a second finalist withdrew a week before their visit, leaving us with only one viable applicant to bring to campus.
To reduce lost time, try to schedule all campus visits within seven days of one another. That way, you can decide whom to hire as early as eight days after the first finalist’s visit ends, and thus leave very little time for other employers to poach your candidate.
Equally important: Give the chosen applicant a short window of time to make their decision. Two weeks is too long. You don’t want to lose out on your second choice because you’ve given the top candidate too much time to decide. Given the competitiveness of this market, asking for a decision in as little as 24 hours is common, with a maximum time frame of four business days.
A failed search, indeed, feels like a failure. Waiting for the applicant’s decision is nerve-racking. Mostly because there is immense pressure to hire someone and improve the workplace for everyone. When a search falls short, the hope that this new hire would take work off others’ desks is gone, and people may feel even worse than before because they’d allowed themselves to dream that things would get better.
But the fact is, no matter how hard you sell the position, you can’t always overcome the fiscal limitations that restrict the salary, benefits, and moving expenses attached to the job. Nor can you alter the realities of organizational structure, title, and job scope. The first ombuds search failed because the candidate wanted a higher salary. The first executive-assistant search failed because our top choice needed a more flexible work schedule than we could offer. The first administrative assistant we hired left after six months, deciding that higher education was not, in fact, the field in which they wanted to work.
Nonetheless, I pushed forward. With two searches ongoing and six positions filled, the end of the year will see just one vacancy — not too shabby considering what it took to get here. The successful hires all share a few characteristics:
- They chose this role at this time because they want to grow professionally.
- They fully understand the position, the institution, and the career path.
- And they have a passion for the work, even if it’s drastically different from what they’ve done before.
Ultimately what I’ve learned in this highly competitive market is that, while it’s more difficult than ever to find the right candidate, the qualities of the right candidate remain the same.
