Higher education institutions are trailing their peers in the corporate world when it comes to innovating the hiring process. We are in the age of social media and yet few colleges and universities have embraced social recruiting strategies, foregoing the opportunity to expand hiring pools and reach people who may not even have been looking for a new job.
Experts in the industry, though, are beginning to see a change.
Bruce Stephen, director of real-time labor information research for Monster Government Solutions, said his company has put more emphasis on social recruiting for its education and government clients in 2015.
“The education side has been slower to adopt some of these social recruiting strategies and products,” Stephen said, “but we are starting to see more interest in it.”
These strategies include using Twitter to announce job opportunities or gathering information about potential candidates online, before they even start looking for a job. The traditional search process — convening a faculty committee, posting job descriptions on a sponsored board or running the listing in established publications, and soliciting candidate names from academic member organizations — often results in a qualified list of potential faculty members.
But higher education is becoming increasingly competitive. Both for students and for faculty. Social recruiting goes to people where they already are — online — and provides an alternate avenue for finding talent. Especially at the community college level, where finding qualified candidates is sometimes harder, Stephen sees great promise for social recruiting.
“They’re trying to find instructors in STEM and they really need to develop some new talent pipelines and ways of finding folks from the commercial side — folks that are already employed in industry who they can try to attract into the teaching profession,” Stephen said.
Community colleges have always had an eye on the local economy, preparing students for job opportunities that exist in the surrounding communities. Many elected officials are pushing this line even harder now as average student debt continues to climb and job outcomes rise to the top of the list of accountability metrics.
At colleges and universities facing pressure to attract more diverse faculty, social recruiting could also put them in contact with people outside of their traditional recruiting pools.
“Especially with some of these things where we’re going out and finding passive candidates, there’s also an opportunity to find some talent that normally wouldn’t be brought into the recruiting process,” Stephen said.
Many institutions already have internal expertise that can be turned toward social recruitment. Admissions officers have been honing their skills to recruit the best and brightest students in this arena for years. Christa Watson, director of paid search and social at Pearson, has said social media opens up a new group of prospective students. Whereas Pearson used to have to wait until students were actively searching for schools, social media, including LinkedIn, lets them target specific skillsets that are a match with their programs and market to students before they even know they’re looking.
Colleges and universities can use the same tactics when recruiting faculty, especially if they’re looking for adjuncts who already have careers in industry. Higher education may not be ahead of the curve with these strategies but they can certainly benefit from playing catch-up.
Would you like to see more education news like this in your inbox on a daily basis? Subscribe to our Education Dive email newsletter! You may also want to read Education Dive's look at how the U of Montana's 'positive' view of an OCR complaint.