Thank you for sharing this, Terri. One needs to guard against hiring too many faculty members from a single institution, whether it is their campus or from another, in order to ensure diversity of perspective and experience.
Jeffrey Schillinger
We use two ways, predominantly, to recruit teachers: one, referrals from our current faculty, and two, graduates of our program. We "bookmark" students as they graduate and keep in touch with them, with the intention of interviewing them after 3 years in the field. These methods have brought us better success rates with new hires, I believe because of the familiarity with personalities and campus culture.
We are not opposed to other methods, but have had the most success with these.
Angela,
What characteristics do you look for when identifying potential teaching assistants?
Jeffrey Schillinger
We recruit from the moment they become students. Always keeping our eyes open for who would make a good teaching assistant.
We us a combination of methods to recruit applicants, depending on the reason for the opening. If the opening is due to expansion or resignation of an instructor, we always ask current faculty and staff for recommendations. If this doesn't yield successful results, we turn to posting the opening on careerbuilder.com and if applicable post the position at the local university.
Currently, the most common way of recruiting applicants for instructor positions at our school is through the school's job portal. Any graduate of the program has access to the job portal. I feel like the job portal is like using our network by advertising in newspapers done on the internet. I have learned that one has to be extremely clear what your KSAOs are. I have found that I thought I was being clear but then looked at the responses received. The next time the job portal was used the responses matched what the qualifications were.
I regularly get people calling and or e-mailing me asking if I am looking to hire. I usually ask them to send me a cover letter and resume first. I get back to them saying that I will keep their resume on file and will call when we have openings.
I think that the next time I actively look for another instructor I will utilize more professional associations for massage therapists.
All of our TA's receive the latest text for the courses that they are covering giving them the opportunity to take supplemental notes for future use in instructing. We provide the TA with partial lectures to teach and work them into teaching full lectures over time under the supervision of the full time instructor in the classroom who provides feedback and is there during the lecture to answer questions from the class and the TA. Starting as a TA myself, I found it to be a solid proving ground to determine whether I had what it took to meet the expectation of the full time instructional staff as we as the education manager at the time.
James,
What are sme of the specific things you work on with your TAs to develop them into instructors?
Jeffrey Schillinger
We most commonly recruit from within. When I hire a teaching assistant, I do so with the intention of training them and grooming them to become an instructor. Part of the interview process with TA's is to identify their interest in becoming an instructor. That is not to say that if you are not interested in teaching that you are not considered for a TA position, but I more often than not look for that interest in my TA prospects. We have had more success with hiring instructors from within than hiring instructors that have trained or taught in other programs.
The most common method is through word of mouth and connections established over the years. This method may be improved by tagging prospective applicants with keywords that may be usable to find information and/or people in the future.
At our school we use several methods but our most tried and true method is referrals. To have someone who knows about our program from a trusted employee is probably the best. This way they witness what types of employees we have and they don't walk blindly in trying to see whether they would like working with us.
Nearly all of our teacher hires are grads of our programs and are either self referred and/or endorsed by teachers and/or the Deans who are familiar with their track records and personality from the period that they were students. Our state has a mandatory 2 year "incubation" period when we encourage graduates to get as much experience as they can and to do as much Teaching Assisting as they can to accumulate both clinical and classroom experience.
One way that I could improve our recruitment system would be to be more timely to respond to interest calls and to be more frank when a candidate is simply not qualified.
We tend to rely on the internet and past graduates for recruitment methods. If we were able to branch out to agencies, massage therapy associations and the licensing board we may have a broader spectrum.
Internet is the most common at my school. I would like to see the "deal breakers" included in the advertisement and highlight more of the "O" of the KSAOs. We often get flodded with applicants who do not meet any of the minimum requirements. I am not sure if we are using any type of filtering system or not but reviewing resumes only to find the applicant does not meet the minimum requirements can be very time consuming.
I am looking forward to enhancing the use of the Professional Bodies to our recruiting strategy. We do seek former grads who have been employed in their field for several years as well.
Elaine,
Do you compensate current employees for referrals? We do so if an employee refers someone who is hired and stays for six months. We have had good luck this way.
Jeffrey Schillinger
We have used the internet such as teachers.com and job fairs. It has worked well for us, the only thing as far as the job fairs there is so much competition that when you find an employee and you think yo have them they have gotten calls from others at the job fair.
The internet has been the best way to recruit for new intructors. I am looking forward to crafting new ads with KSAOs.
However, we have also found that having a dedicated recruiter for Nursing Faculty has really paid off.
Josh,
Thank you for this response. You summarize the challenge well.
Jeffrey Schillinger
Hello Jeffrey
Our biggest challenge is actually retaining those graduates we've invited back to teach. Many are hoping to become successful audio engineers and/or music producers, and will jump ship when given a better opportunity. They don't consider teaching to be their professional calling and our adjunct pay scale can't compete with other possible industry offerings. So, keeping them around and getting a solid commitment is a continual problem.
We've also experienced graduates who have come back to teach a class and appear somewhat discouraging to the students, since our field is tremendously challenging, and they overstate negative aspects about finding work in this industry. Not that we want things to be "sugarcoated" but we also don't want our enrollees to drop out in fear they won't be able to compete.
Other than these two scenarios, things have been pretty smooth with graduates as teachers. Students occasionally complain that they wish our teachers had more experience (credits on hit records and Grammy awards etc.) but, again, it comes down to a lack of financial resources.
Best regards,
Josh
Joshua,
Thanks. Hiring graduates can be a good thing, but there may be some pitfalls. Have you experienced any with graduates who are now teachers?
Jeffrey Schillinger
