Recruiting, Hiring and Retaining Persons of Color and LGBT Individuals in Higher Education

As the upcoming academic year’s recruitment cycle begins, institutions prepare to recruit and hire the best diverse candidates for their open positions. Likewise, many professionals are starting their search for the next best career opportunity that affords them career advancement, promotion, or broad experience in the field. For many higher education institutions, one of the most important pieces of the recruitment process is retaining diverse employers. Accordingly, from the perspective of both the hiring authority and job seekers, are you fully equipped to implement your recruitment plans?

Research has proven that increasing diversity in the workplace is not just a subject matter around social justice.  Diversity in the workplace allows for different opinions and experiences to be considered, which makes a decision-making group better informed, innovative, insightful, resourceful, , and successful. McPahil and Boggs (2016) and Romero (2017) articles both note that increased diversity such as age, disability, ethnicity, gender, national origin, religious belief, sexual orientation and socioeconomic among groups offer multiple perspectives and broad methods to handling complex challenges found in higher education settings today. Although many institutions set out to recruit and hire diverse faculty and staff; many find themselves not able to retain them, which in turn continues the disproportion of diverse individuals in positions at our institutions. Which brings about the question: has your institution examined their strategies to ensure the recruitment, hiring, and retention of people from our underrepresented groups?  Alternatively, for the job seeker, have you outlined your “must haves” in a future employer?

This live briefing will focus on how to improve institutional recruitment strategies, establish or advance an inclusive hiring process, create a retention plan for diverse employees in institutions of higher education and share inclusive programs and support that underrepresented groups who are job seekers should look for during their employment search.   

Learning Outcomes

Through this live briefing, participants will: 

• be able to identify factors the impact the recruitment process; 
• gain insight on some of the best practice trends for creating an inclusive and welcoming hiring process; 
• be able to develop an action plan to create or improve institutional retention efforts for people of color and the LGBT community; and   
• be able to identify needed inclusive programs and support from employers.