In all honesty, the title of this blog post should be, The Years I Hired Off-Cycle, but that doesn’t match Jenny Han’s Will Belly Choose Conrad? energy, so here we are.
When I first began working professionally in the field, hiring, on-boarding and training for both professional live-in hall directors and student leaders followed a very specific, predictable, and easy cadence. While I occasionally had to replace a student staff member midway through the year, it was rare that a professional staff vacancy would arise outside of August-June and so hiring and on-boarding cycles were easy to predict. Student staff recruitment was in the Spring, and we knew who our staff were well before the start of the upcoming academic year. Similarly, we recruited and hired any prospective live-in hall directors in the Spring for a mid to late summer start, well ahead of professional staff training in the fall.
In recent years it seems that Housing and Residence Life departments can be a revolving door for student and professional staff alike – our work is taxing, and people aren’t staying in positions for the duration of the school year if they decide to take on a role, or if they’ve been in a role for a while. In my experience, especially at the professional level, where there used to be an unspoken understanding that you leave at the conclusion of a school year, that notion doesn’t hold true anymore. I’ve watched staff leave pretty much at any given time with either ample notice, or next to none. Which then, puts you in a challenging spot – you’re hiring off-cycle, and then you’re on-boarding off-cycle. A staff member – whether a student leader, grad, or professional – comes into the department at a time outside of your traditional training window, and yet they still need to know everything there is to know in order to be successful in their role. So, how do you recruit, train, and on-board off-cycle when you have the usual demands of the school year needing your attention?
Recruitment/Selection:
- At the student staff level, if you find yourself needing to fill a vacancy, hopefully you have a healthy alternate pool to pull from, which eliminates your need to put students through an application and interview process. But, if you do find yourself needing to run an application process:
- Consider running an abbreviated process. As long as all candidates in a specific process are held to the same requirements, you can determine if that process consists of a written or video application, and how many rounds of interviews you do. Maybe allowing applicants to apply through a simple form, then meet 1:1 with the hiring professional staff member is all that is actually needed to find the right student leader for a vacancy.
- Evaluate existing student leaders: Sometimes shoulder-tapping existing student leaders or really involved residents to apply off-cycle works in your favor or inviting an existing student leader who holds another role in your department works best. If you have a vacancy that occurs in February, and you’ve already begun the application process for the next year of student leaders, is there anyone who shows promise that you could invite to begin the role early – perhaps an upper division student with more campus experience?
- Weigh the capacity of professional staff: Decide on a process that will work for your professional staff and needs of your team. You don’t always need to include every professional staff member in a selection process. If you take a “we hire for the department” approach and then task a small group of your existing team to run a mid-year process, it helps everyone’s bandwidth, time, and energy, leaving other staff members to focus on other things. Or, consider a process in which you might involve other professional staff with more capacity to hire students, depending on the time of year. I’ve been a part of student staff recruitment teams that utilize one professional live-in hall director, and the rest of this selection team is comprised of professionals across the university that also work with student leaders. This keeps hall directors free to attend to day-to-day needs and not worry about selection in say, December.
Many of the ideas above can also apply to a professional staff vacancy and off-cycle recruitment process, but here are some other things to consider for live-in hall directors:
- Factor in running an internal process: While you have to work with Human Resources on this and every institution is different, if you’re on a committee working through a hiring process, consider working with HR to run an internal hiring process. Internal candidates typically need less time to adjust to the culture and cadence of a university, and you can often get them to finish their current role and start in a new role more quickly than an external candidate.
- Give thought to a rolling application with a published priority deadline: If you run a rolling process with a priority deadline, it can help fast-track your entire process – that way, you don’t have to wait until an application closes to evaluate applicants, score applications, or invite candidates for interviews. You essentially find the most qualified applicant in the pool that applied the earliest, and the position is considered open until filled. You can apply this same concept to a student leader pool, too. If your institution allows it, consider running an “anticipated opening” search – review applicants and conduct first round interviews, and keep those folks in a pool until you have a confirmed opening. Once you do, invite your finalists from that anticipated openings pool in order to fast-track your search.
On-Boarding and Training:
- Draft a detailed on-boarding schedule: It can be tempting with mid-year hires – both student and professionals – to just say, “we’ll just do one on one training on what you need to know in 1:1s” with no real plan, which erodes trust and rapport and can contribute long-term success in the role. It helps a new staff member to have an outline of topics and information that will be covered in one on ones, meetings, and in other ways. Create an outline of topics that are vital to the role (Title IX training, care and case management follow-up, duty logistics and response), and an outline of topics that are secondary in nature (programming, collaborating with campus partners and other staff) and then determine a schedule for when you’d like to go over those items. For most mid-year hires – both students and live-in professionals – I can get through a mid-year training schedule in a series of one on one meetings that last a month.
- Set up meetings with various departmental (and campus) partners: Instead of having a mid-year hire be responsible for reaching out to departmental and campus VIPs, generate a list of people you’d like a student staff or professional staff member to connect with. Set up these meetings for them around other training meetings/sessions and give them a detailed agenda for what you’d like them to either cover in terms of training or conversation. These meetings don’t have to be extensive (30-minute sessions are great), but they help someone create a foundation for relationship and learn content vital to their role. For a student leader, setting up ones-on-ones with other hall directors might be worthwhile as they didn’t get a chance to meet them during the established training period, and they will be interacting with them while serving on-call. For a professional staff member, it may mean setting up meetings with campus partners your department works closely with, like the Dean of Students office, or leadership teams of various campus offices.
- The buddy system: It may seem silly, but it can be helpful to assign a trusted returning RA to an incoming RA to serve as an informal check-in person as the new staff member gets used to their role. Depending on the amount of content you must cover, you could even have some returning RAs go over scope-appropriate content with a new student leader. For professional staff, buddy them up with a returning professional in the department – the returning professional can go over content with them, but the purpose of having an assigned close colleague is also meant to be more social in nature – it can be hard to come into an established department where hall directors already have friendships established, especially when someone may be new to the area. If departmental funds allow, pay for a meal between a buddy and a new staff member, and encourage that buddy staff member to be intentional with invites, sharing of content and resources, and informal check-ins as that staff member gets comfortable in the department.
- Scaffolding and shadowing: For both student leader and live-in hires, accept that it will take time for them to get up to speed – and structure expectations as such. If a staff member comes on-board in November, or January, maybe you don’t have them host their own programs until they’ve shadowed at least two, and consider having them collaborate with strong team members before they have to do stuff on their own, and/or have them shadow on-call duty and documentations for 2-3 weeks before they serve as the primary RA on-call. For professional staff, take a similar shadowing approach – assign them a returning professional staff member to serve on-call with for the first few weeks, so that they have a safety net and get to practice responding to real incidents. As a supervisor, determine what aspects of the role you want them to focus on, and determine a timeline for things that can wait – for example, you may want to have them focus more on building staff rapport, running staff meetings, and student wellness follow-up, whereas, conduct training can wait and other hall directors can adjudicate cases until that staff member is formally trained and ready to take on more within their role.
- Use existing resources and utilize a flipped classroom mindset: Make any training materials and resources available to mid-year hires (videos, training modules, manuals, presentations), and ahead of one on ones where you are going over content, have a staff member review the materials. This way, you can focus your time together going over material, reiterating what is most important, and answering questions that they will inevitably have. And, if there is a training topic that your entire team would benefit from revisiting or practicing, instead of covering that one on one, use a staff or departmental meeting to go over content.
- Evaluate your own bandwidth: As a supervisor, it can be so tempting to want to be a new staff member’s source of support and their go-to resource. But, you likely are surrounded by talented colleagues who can help with training mid-year hires. I used to have a colleague who was particularly gifted at breaking down operational processes, and that is not my gift. I had a graduate hall director who had a knack for coming up with the most creative and educational programs out there. Once I got past my own feelings of needing to be a mid-year hire’s sole go-to person, I passed off training on desk procedures and talking about programming requirements to my colleagues. And, when they had mid-year hires, they would return the favor and have me go over duty, crisis response, and soft skills of the role. On-boarding mid-year hires is a team effort, and you don’t have to do it all.
Hiring off-cycle can be challenging when you have competing demands and you also want to ensure a candidate and new hire’s experience are positive. Mid-year vacancies can make you want to pull your hair out. But, if you continue to rethink how you recruit, train, and hire, you may find the Conrad Fisher of staff members and have the year you love hiring off-cycle.
