Cultivating a Community of Respect

Hiring Manager’s Guidelines and Promising Practices on Recruiting

The 2016-2017 “Making Excellence Inclusive” certificate program was organized around the theme “cultivating a community of respect.” With this theme in mind, our workgroup was tasked with addressing diversity and inclusion issues related to the hiring manager and making recommendations for promising practices around the hiring process.

Our team began by conducting an in-person survey with campus members engaged in the hiring process at different phases to determine common problems that undermine UCR’s commitment to equitable hiring. We also researched UC-wide hiring practices for both faculty and staff and innovative hiring models at non-UC universities. Finally, we “attended” all six available online training modules for the AACL role and attempted to attend the new EEAA course, however, these sessions were all cancelled.

Our research helped us to focus on two major issues in the hiring process: 1) the excessive influence of the hiring manager and 2) the relative lack of influence of the AACL. In this white paper, we propose three specific policy changes to reduce the influence of the hiring manager and a new AACL training program to empower and educate a voluntary pool of MEI graduates to serve as AACLs for searches across the campus. Because the ramifications of administrative decisions can be unanticipated, we propose that the use of the AACL pool be piloted by the Chancellor and Provost organizations prior to full campus implementation. In this way, we can measure the results and work out any difficulties at a smaller scale. Ultimately, we hope that attention to administrative policy and enhanced AACL training will increase the number of diverse staff members at UCR, thus helping to create an inclusive campus climate for our diverse student body.

Project Team:

Tanya Adams, Strategic Executive Administrative Team, Office of the Chancellor and Provost

Loren Bacallo, Business and Administrative Services

Anna Finn, Office of the Provost

Carie Wilkens Smith, School of Medicine