3 Hiring Practices to Help Diversify Higher Education Faculty

As activists continue to call attention to the racial disparities in faculty demographics, institutional DEIJ plans increasingly include goals to recruit and retain BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) faculty. To realize these goals in a competitive hiring environment, hiring committees need to infuse DEIJ practices into each stage of the recruitment process. Most higher education institutions do not have standardized DEIJ hiring practices embedded into their processes—but that can change.

Below, we’ve laid out actionable DEIJ-focused and candidate-centric hiring practices to incorporate into your next faculty hiring plan.

Increase the size and diversity of your applicant pool by reducing opportunities for bias

The hiring committee can take the following three steps to help reduce bias and promote equity across the initial stages of the review process:

• Blind candidates’ names and PhD-granting institutions during the first round of resume screening to avoid preference for candidates who attended similar institutions to committee members.
• Conduct initial interviews as phone interviews rather than video calls where bias can be introduced based on candidates’ appearances, or conference interviews that depend on candidates being able to afford conference attendance.
• Introduce a second round of phone or video interviews before the on-campus interview to ensure institutions are interviewing a larger pool of candidates.