5.6 Best Practices to Enhance Equal Employment Opportunity, Affirmative Action and Diversity

Evaluating applicants is the part of the recruitment process where potential, often unintentional, bias and discrimination may be more likely to occur. It is important that search committees and hiring units take a methodological approach when evaluating applicants. It is also important for each member of the search committee to be knowledgeable about personal biases that might influence perceptions about applicants. Some best practices include:

• Get consensus on the multiple criteria that will be used to choose candidates for interviews. Notice that different criteria may produce different top candidates. Be sure to consider all criteria that are pertinent to the department’s goals (e.g. experience working with diverse students might be one). In addition, discuss the relative weighting of the different criteria, and the likelihood that no or few candidates will rate high on all of them.
•  Assess ways the applicants will bring rich experiences and diverse backgrounds to the University community.
• Screen applicants to be inclusive rather than for the sole purpose of narrowing the applicant pool.
• Refrain from assessing applicant qualifications based on a single standard. Consider creating separate short lists ranking applicants on different criteria. Examples might include but are not limited to teaching, research potential, collaborative potential, mentoring capacity. Develop the final shortlist by taking the top candidates across different criteria.
• Evaluate applicants on potential, not just experience already performing the duties of the job.
• Examine each applicant’s accomplishments, his or her potential for growth, the diversity or perspective that s/he will bring, and any unique contribution s/he could make to the hiring unit, division, and University. Nontraditional career patterns should not exclude or inhibit otherwise qualified candidates from being considered.