Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joseph G. Rosse is professor in the Leeds Graduate School of Business, University of Colorado at Boulder.

Robert A. Levin is managing director of the Center for Human Function and Work, University of Colorado at Boulder Research Park.
Rosse and Levin are the authors of High-Impact-Hiring (Jossey-Bass, 1997) and Talent Flow (Jossey-Bass, 2001) and are codirectors of the Center for the Integrative Study of Work at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

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Department chairs and other academic administrators are often called upon to hire administrative and staff personnel for a variety of positions, as are chairs and members of search committees. To meet the challenge of finding and hiring the right person for the right job, The Jossey-Bass Academic Administrator's Guide to Hiring offers the essential information needed to make an informed hiring decision. The book's "Performance Foundation" will help to connect hiring, retention, performance development, and performance assessment of any position at an academic institution with the most critical aspects of performance for the institution, the unit, and the job.
Based on research-based and field-tested practices, this practical and straightforward guide to hiring will help anyone involved with hiring in an academic institution increase their effectiveness and efficiency. This important resource:

• Includes suggestions for assembling and managing a search committee
• Offers information about how to tie organizational goals to the performance objectives of the new hire
• Shows how to attract well-qualified applicants
• Outlines the key legal issues that affect hiring decisions
• Describes the process of gathering information for assessing applicants
• Guides the interview process that gets to the heart of performance qualifications
• Includes research-based approaches to making the decision-making process more effective
• Provides worksheets for planning the hiring process, identifying qualifications, planning and conducting interviews, conducting reference checks, and more

Aus dem Klappentext

Department chairs and other academic administrators are often called upon to hire administrative and staff personnel for a variety of positions, as are chairs and members of search committees. To meet the challenge of finding and hiring the right person for the right job, The Jossey-Bass Academic Administrator's Guide to Hiring offers the essential information needed to make an informed hiring decision. The book's "Performance Foundation" will help to connect hiring, retention, performance development, and performance assessment of any position at an academic institution with the most critical aspects of performance for the institution, the unit, and the job.
Based on research-based and field-tested practices, this practical and straightforward guide to hiring will help anyone involved with hiring in an academic institution increase their effectiveness and efficiency. This important resource:

• Includes suggestions for assembling and managing a search committee
• Offers information about how to tie organizational goals to the performance objectives of the new hire
• Shows how to attract well-qualified applicants
• Outlines the key legal issues that affect hiring decisions
• Describes the process of gathering information for assessing applicants
• Guides the interview process that gets to the heart of performance qualifications
• Includes research-based approaches to making the decision-making process more effective
• Provides worksheets for planning the hiring process, identifying qualifications, planning and conducting interviews, conducting reference checks, and more

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The Jossey-Bass Academic Administrator's Guide to Hiring

Jossey-Bass

Chapter One

Higher education has been singularly successful at convincing our constituents that education is the engine of both individual and societal success. The support provided to institutions of higher education for research and teaching is based on an implied contract with society as a whole and with legislative bodies, granting agencies, and donors for extremely high-quality outcomes. Far more than in most organizations, the quality of these outcomes depends on the quality of the people who are hired and retained. Faculty, whether in the classroom or in the laboratory, provide the inspiration, creativity, and dedication that are the heart and soul of colleges and universities. Staff provide the support to both faculty and students that often makes the difference between excellence and mediocrity. And administrators can provide the vision, direction, and resources to make the work of faculty, staff, and students possible.

Yet as you probably already know from your own experience-whether hiring or being hired-conducting hiring in higher education involves some special challenges. Colleges and universities often have complex and sometimes bureaucratic procedures for hiring compared with hiring in many business enterprises. Moreover, many jobs in higher education are highly specific; whereas a private business may be able to hire a salesperson with pharmaceutical experience to sell air conditioners, it's impossible to hire an experienced sociologist for a molecular biology position. And it's often more difficult to correct hiring errors in a higher education institution. Make no mistake, private enterprises accumulate deadwood, and people do move from one institution to another in higher education. But in many schools, hiring and firing of staff is based on a civil service system, a tenure system, or procedures set by a governing board, so it's fair to assume that hiring decisions, once made, cannot be unmade lightly.

At the same time, hiring in higher education has certain advantages over hiring in private industry. When hiring faculty and administrators, decision makers have access to a verifiable record of research and administrative achievements that is simply not available for virtually any private sector hire. Well-enshrined hiring procedures, such as use of search committees and job talks, help reduce impulsive hiring decisions. Moreover, the culture of rigor and quality that exists in most higher education settings creates a climate conducive to hiring top-quality candidates. But as with most things in life, the devil is in the details of putting these theoretical advantages to work for you. If it's your job to read through vitae for thirty candidates, or if the search committee you are participating in or chairing either has its mind made up or too many issues about which to bicker and fight, you might appreciate the quality obtainable from the process in theory but regret its application in practice.

This book is intended to help you make high-quality hires in three fundamental ways. First, the foundation of our approach to hiring, whether in higher education or in the private sector, is grounded in performance. We want to provide you with ways to identify the most important aspects of performance and then develop effective ways to match these essential aspects of performance with candidates' abilities and skills.

Second, our approach to gathering reliable information about performance and using this information to make valid decisions about hiring is based on research, which we present here in practical application. Research in psychology and decision making, as well as years of applied research in many areas, can provide guidance on what information to gather, how to gather it (and not gather it), and how to use it in making hiring decisions that can make substantial differences in the proportion of good hiring decisions you and your colleagues make.

Third, our approach is intended to help you navigate some of the unique aspects of hiring in higher education. An academic vita, for example, contains far more information than most business rsums. How can you make use of that information effectively, and what pitfalls must you avoid? Search committees are also relatively unique to academia, and pose both opportunities and challenges for enhancing the success of hiring. Yet job interviews in academia and in industry are more similar than they are different. The interviews you conduct can benefit from accumulated research and practice on effective and ineffective interviewing, so you can change the interview process from one of the least valid predictors of performance to one of the most valid.

A FRAMEWORK FOR PERFORMANCE-BASED HIRING

Academics are accustomed to thinking about theories, models, and frameworks, so we hope that readers will be encouraged to know that the principles and practices described in this book are grounded in nearly a century's worth of theory and empirical research, as well as practical experience. What we describe are neither random observations, personal opinions, nor cookbook approaches to hiring. Rather, our approach is based on three fundamental principles that form a framework for effective hiring:

Performance orientation

Systematic information gathering

Rational, realistic decision making

Performance Orientation

The most fundamental principle underlying effective hiring is performance orientation. This principle recognizes that organizations, including educational institutions, exist to perform work toward a purpose. Every organizational decision should be based on contribution to performance, and hiring is no exception.

Consider, for example, a decision to make a major purchase of computer systems for a new instructional lab. Computers and their associated software can be purchased for many purposes from word-processing to e-mail and Web access to high-speed numerical computations. The way computers are configured can make them more or less effective for the various possible uses, so an effective purchase decision needs to be based on an analysis of intended uses. Whether the cases for the computers are ivory, matte black, or neon blue is not a performance-relevant factor, even though you may have a personal penchant for raspberry red. Having a flat-panel display or the latest and fastest processor may or may not be performance-relevant, even though both may have prestige value when showing off the new lab to alumni or potential students.

Simply knowing that you need fifty new computers for a new lab is not enough. You need to know for what purposes those computers will be used, both now and during their effective lifetime. Only then can you determine memory and processor requirements, what type of software should be bundled with them, and whether you need laptop computers or desktop units.

We're not suggesting that candidates for assistant professor or administrative assistant can be configured like computers. What is critical about the analogy is the importance of understanding and deciding about performance needs before ever beginning to evaluate which candidates might fit those needs.

In the next chapter you will learn how to develop some practical performance objectives for your own work unit (whether that unit is your own lab, a department, or a larger academic unit) and...