Each spring, we in Student Affairs become search obsessed.  Which amazing new professional will join our team and impact students?  Who will come into our world and make our institution better?  And how will we support those on our staff who are searching for their new home (especially those #sagrads!)?  We sometimes forget the importance of making sure that we build an intentional and meaningful process from the employer end.

Recruitment is a critical part of the future of our individual institutions and the best service to our students.  Changing our lens on recruitment from something we have to do, to a critical function of our work can create unstoppable teams that best serve our students.  Student Affairs has long lagged behind in the world of understanding the importance of sleek, meaningful recruitment campaigns and strategies that create desire to work at our institutions.  For a majority of our searches, we are candidate driven individuals who spend less time being intentional in building and understanding a candidate profile, and more time focused on the candidate pool that becomes automatically generated, and letting out recruiter and recruitment team become the defining voice in our selections, instead of focusing on institutional best fit. Starting dialogue inside of the Higher Education recruiting community will hopefully create an exciting place for us to start this critical dialogue.

In creating this month’s focus on #SArecruits, we have tried to focus on those who are running the quest to find their perfect staff members.  In collecting topics for this month we will talk a lot about proper, fair and transparent communication with candidates, how to maximize your already established institutional brand, and learning the mechanics of managing a search process from the back end.  Our goal this month is to create a sense of understanding from those who run searches regularly within our community.  By tapping the knowledge of those who hire, we hope to create a dialogue related to the community of us who find those next institutional superstars and make the fits match.

As we move through the month, you will see that a large portion of our contributors will be from the Housing and Residence Life community, we think it’s a tremendous opportunity to pull information from a group that tends to do the most on the ground recruiting within student affairs.  By tapping their knowledge, we hope to be able to provide a resource and voice for those that may be running their first search, we will feature a blog later this month dedicated to that exact topic.

As we create these posts, I think it’s important to emphasize that every recruiter will have their own style and voice.  The goal of #SArecruits is to create a venue and opportunity for those who have one foot in student development and one foot in human resources to start the conversation regarding fair, appropriate and ethical recruitment strategies.   Parts of this blog series will focus on how to be transparent with your candidate, as well as talking about the ways in which we can successfully search for our perfect candidate, but also provide support to those on the other end of our processes.

As we launch into this series, I am excited for the dialogue and energy that abounds in recruiting processes every year.  As someone who is responsible for hiring annually, this time of year provides amazing focus and intentionality moving into the end of one year, and the launch of another.  #SARecruits is a place where recruiters can share their tips, candidates can learn about the way search processes work, and hopefully we start great conversation on how to build our teams!

> BONUS <

Podcast With Quint Geis on #SAGrad, Life, and Job Searching