Searching during a Pandemic: Tips and Lessons Learned from Virtual Faculty Job Searches

Overview: How do you run a job search during a pandemic? Join three search chairs and a job candidate as we discuss virtual strategies and considerations. Includes perspectives from: teaching-focused, research-focused, historically black college or university, and primarily white institution. Critical conversations about antiracist hiring practices will be centered.Proposal text: When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down institutions in March 2020, many academic programs faced budget cuts and hiring freezes (Friga, 2020). The impact of budget cuts most severely impacted HBCU’s and rural colleges (Kelchen et al., 2021). Yet, as the pandemic restrictions eased and some schools found ways to begin hiring again, the job market was back in action. However, things were different this time. Many schools conducted their searches entirely virtually (Banks et al., 2020). As many social work educators can attest, a switch from in-person to virtual methods presented unique challenges (Paceley et al., 2021).

This panel will offer insights from four different perspectives on what worked and what didn’t work in our virtual job searches. Three search chairs will present perspectives from rural and urban teaching-focused and research-focused institutions ranging in Carnegie Classifications from “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity” to “Master's College and University (larger programs)”. These perspectives will encompass both PWI (primarily white institutions) and HBCU (historically black colleges and universities). A job candidate (now off the market) will search their perspective as well. We will share details on tips and tricks that helped us run the search smoothly. We will share what worked to make the virtual environment as welcoming and attractive as possible. We will also share details of what our priorities for hiring were and how we embodied those priorities in our respective searches, including a focus on antiracism, equity, and justice.

Critical conversations around hiring equity and antiracist search processes are an important part of higher education leadership. As social workers, we must act to eliminate racist hiring trends in higher education and bring equity to the front of the table in hiring conversations (Gates et al., 2021). Participants in this panel will have the opportunity to confront their own biases related to antiracist search practices and can learn new strategies for faculty searches in the landscape of an ongoing pandemic (Fariña et al., 2021).