Best Practices for Faculty and Staff Recruitment

The Office of Inclusion and Cultural Enhancement offers assistance and resources for departments to develop outreach plans leading to the recruitment of faculty and staff underrepresented in medicine. Below we describe best practices and tactics to enrich faculty and staff applicant pools with excellent candidates from diverse backgrounds. 

The Office of Inclusion facilitates and periodically places marketing pieces in high-profile publications to attract excellent candidates for posted faculty and staff positions (eg., Insight into Diversity).  

Note: Human Resources automatically advertises positions with various resources to assist in diverse recruiting efforts, including the Chronicle of Higher Education, Insight into Diversity and the Higher Education Recruitment Consortium (HERC).

The Office of Inclusion disseminates:

• marketing ads to specialized journals, and
  
• the Job Opportunities at the Jacobs School page, directly linked to UB Job postings using our comprehensive list serve which targets scientific societies, universities, training grant directors, national funding agencies and foundations training and/or supporting eligible individuals for available positions.

• Search Committee Dialogues. The Office of Inclusion is available to present our “Dialogues with Search Committees”  to your search committees, or groups of faculty. The Dialogues discuss recruitment plans, strategies to expand outreach and enrich the pool with diverse candidates, and topics such as cultural competence and the impact of unconscious bias.
  
• Appoint a diverse Search Committee to bring different perspectives and views.
• Expand advertising to specialized journals, websites, national societies, and program officers at national funding agencies and foundations.
• Advertise positions to department Chairs’ national groups in your area of interest.
• Nominate outstanding candidates to apply for your position, among UB residents and fellows, those identified by networking at national meetings and/or by conducting unbiased searches of databases and the NIH Reporter listing diverse recipients of prestigious grant awards.
• Identify candidates thriving at less well-ranked institutions
• Review candidate evaluation forms completed by search committee members and others meeting with the candidates.

To make an appointment for a “Dialogues with Search Committees” presentation contact:

• Review job description to develop clear criteria and standards and to insure education and skills requirements are appropriate and not overly restrictive
• Appoint a diverse search committee to review resumes and participate in candidate interviews
• Advertise in the Buffalo News to supplement standard community listings through UB Jobs
• Contact local colleges with business or technical education programs providing training in the required skills
• Create a clear evaluation system in advance and avoid global scoring
• Develop a list of standard interview questions to insure that consistent information is obtained from each candidate
• Obtain and evaluate candidate evaluation forms completed by each member of the search committee and other individuals who meet with the candidate
• Conduct anonymous voting, if the size of the pool is large enough  

Contact us for information or assistance with your diversity outreach plan for faculty or staff at smbs-inclusion@buffalo.edu.

The Office of Inclusion website provides recruitment resources and information to facilitate successful recruitment of excellent faculty candidates underrepresented in medicine, and to offer an inclusive environment for faculty hires to thrive at the Jacobs School.

A diverse team of people, is a sucessful one. They work better and they are more efficient. Work through this Interactive Toolkit to guide you to excellence in faculty.

Learn why we recruit faculty for diversity and excellence, obstacles to achieving faculty diversity, how schemas affect the careers of women and underrepresented minorities, and what we can do to address these issues.