9 Steps in Hiring the Best College Faculty
Delivering quality education is the primary goal of every university around the globe. Universities are the leading producers of students with complete skills and competencies for various fields of profession. To achieve those feats, you must hire the best college faculty members that you can find in the higher education industry. Aside from delivering quality education and producing competent graduates, the university ranking of your institution will also improve with the presence of excellent college educators. In that case, more and more students will enroll and study on your campus. So to help you reinforce the teaching workforce of your university, we’ll show you nine steps in hiring the best college faculty members.
9 Steps in Hiring the Best College Faculty
Be Specific About the Requirements
Of course, you must establish a checklist of requirements for each teaching position in your university. Teaching positions in the higher education sector are top tier educational jobs. That said, you need to be specific about the requirements of the teaching positions in your institution. You must list every required credential and competency to find the most qualified job candidates. Qualifications should include the minimum amount of teaching experience, master’s/doctor’s degree, and teaching license/certification.
Write Clear and Detailed Job Descriptions
Job descriptions are essential documents that serve as written guides of a position’s overall scope. College teaching jobs cover extensive scopes of work. That said, it’s necessary to write clear and detailed job descriptions for each teaching job at your university. Such job descriptions will clarify what tasks candidates will do in the teaching position, aside from conducting lectures and classes. You must emphasize other specific functions in the job descriptions, such as planning and management responsibilities. And don’t forget to include the specific requirements of each teaching position as well. Job descriptions will help you in assessing if a candidate is qualified for the job or not.
Advertise Your Teaching Positions Widely
If you want to maximize your chances of finding excellent candidates, you need to arrange a budget to advertise the positions widely. Many highly-competent educators are available for hiring out there, including those that are from other towns, cities, and states. You can post your vacant teaching positions on a popular job posting site, or you can recruit via social media. Automation tools and software are also available for announcing job vacancies. Due to innovative trends in recruiting employees today, you have plenty of options on how to advertise the vacant positions of your university to the masses.
View Credentials Thoroughly
Once you receive applications from job candidates, make sure to analyze their credentials. Based on the job descriptions you’ve written, you need to determine if a candidate’s credentials meet every requirement of a teaching position. If not, then you should reject his/her application professionally. Teaching positions are very crucial because they concern the learning process of the students. For that reason, every job candidate must possess all the needed credentials to receive a job interview invitation.
Do Background Checks
Campus and student security should be a primary concern for university administrators. With that in mind, you have to do a background check report on each job candidate as a precautionary measure in your hiring process. In doing a background check, check a candidate’s public and employment records. Although it’s unlikely in most cases, you need to find out if a job candidate had committed violations of law. Candidates with violations in their records shouldn’t be eligible to teach in your university to ensure the welfare of the students. Also, background checks will help you determine a candidate’s capability of abiding by your university general policy and student retention guidelines.
Ask the Right Questions During Job Interview
During a job interview, it’s a candidate’s role to articulate convincing and accurate responses to whatever questions are being asked to him/her. Doing so will improve his/her chances of earning the vacant position. The candidate’s answers will help you in assessing his/her level of competency for a teaching job. For that to happen, you have to ask the right questions to receive the best possible answers from the candidates. Make sure to ask questions that are relevant to the teaching job and educational practices in general. You can also ask questions about a candidate’s background, but you should focus more on the teaching aspects.
Look for Soft Skills
Assessing the expertise and credentials of a candidate about a field of study is a given process in hiring educators that you already know surely. What you must not also forget is to look for candidates’ soft skills, which are as important as their core competencies. The following are excellent examples of soft skills:
- Written and verbal communication skills
- Leadership skills
- Interpersonal skills
- Time management skills
- Adaptability
- Flexibility
- Computer literacy.
The soft skills mentioned above are attributes that every educator should have. An individual’s in-depth knowledge of a field of study is not enough for him/her to be called an educator. An educator must be adept at communicating, leading, and managing various matters to deliver quality education.
Ask For a Teaching Demonstration
Asking for a teaching demonstration is a sure and direct way to assess a candidate’s competence. It should be the final step of your interview/screening process. In a teaching demonstration, you can judge the quality of a candidate’s soft skills and how well he/she conducts lectures to students in an actual classroom setting. You need to determine if a candidate’s teaching methods can help in maintaining and improving the overall faculty performance of your university.
Select Candidates and Give Offers
After the screening process, select the top candidates based on your thorough assessments. Make sure that the candidates you’ll choose met all the requirements. Afterward, you can then give them job offers. In offering them the position they applied for, make sure to indicate when they can/should start lesson planning or teaching. And, of course, you must inform them of the salary rate and other employment benefits. According to Glassdoor.com, the annual salary range of university/college professors is between $55,000 to $194,000, with a $92,860 average. You can set the salary rate of your college teaching jobs between those numbers.
College faculty members are the most important people in your educational institution. If their numbers are depleted, they’ll be overwhelmed in handling too many students and classes, which may not bode well in the goal of delivering quality education. So apply what you’ve learned in this blog and strengthen the educational manpower of your college faculty.
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