The University of Kentucky (UK) Martin-Gatton College of Agriculture, Food and Environment (CAFE) is committed to attracting, developing and retaining the best faculty. Our faculty search committees play an essential role in the process of hiring hospitable, competent, diverse individuals and as a result have a direct impact on the future success of the college. While vetting candidates is the committee’s primary charge, members of the committee are also selling the opportunity to work in your academic unit and college, so creating an environment of respect and inclusion is imperative. The faculty search committee also has an obligation to be proactive in recruiting a diverse candidate pool. We appreciate your commitment to being focused, well-organized, and collaborative. Your time and efforts are greatly valued. The following sections provide best practices to promote efficient and effective searches.

Search Committee Members

Active involvement of every member of the search committee can help you reach a broad base of potential candidates. Make sure that each member of the committee feels involved, valued, and motivated to play a significant role in the search. Search committees themselves should be appropriately diverse. Faculty from other college academic units or other UK colleges should be considered. Students and/or staff may be included as well. At a minimum, staff and students should be provided with opportunities to interact with faculty candidates during the interview process. Extension Title Series faculty committees should include county agents or other Extension personnel.

The First Committee Meeting and Timeline

The first meeting of the search committee should include a discussion with Tim West, Chief of Staff and Associate General Counsel for the college. He will discuss the legal aspects of conducting a faculty search, including a review of Legal Considerations and Best Practices and the Faculty Search Evaluation Tool.

Search committees are expected to actively recruit and encourage applications, not just passively receive them. The committee is expected, with the assistance of HR, to advertise in periodicals or on websites. The committee should also advertise via professional organizations, meetings and discipline-related listservs. The committee should use electronic databases for potentially qualified candidates or review conference proceedings, SciVal/SCOPUS, Academic Analytics, and the like to identify potentially qualified candidates or people that they believe would know potentially qualified candidates. Committees are expected to contact candidates already practicing at other institutions or elsewhere in the field and request that they self-identify or nominate potential candidates. Search committee members are expected to keep records of such contacts and provide them to the committee chair. The committee may have one person handle all of these direct recruiting efforts in order to simplify record keeping and consistent messaging. The search committee should establish a timeline to ensure that guidelines are properly followed.

Position Announcements

All position announcements must be reviewed by college administration and approved in writing by the Dean before being advertised, as well as the Provost's Office. The academic unit leader should identify search committee members when a position announcement is submitted to the Dean for approval. The Office of Faculty Resources, Planning and Assessment will work with the academic unit leader to request and receive the Provost's Office of Faculty Advancement for Initial Search Authorization.

Advertising and Posting Open Positions

Open positions should be posted on the UK Integrated Employment System (IES) and typically be advertised widely for a minimum of 45 days. Additionally, it is important to document the advertising process in order to stay in compliance with governmental regulations regarding equal opportunity and visa regulations. Please include Le Anne Herzog, Misty Howard, Brian Lee, as a backup search coordinators.

All positions should be widely broadcast through discipline-based listservs, journals, professional meetings, and shared with colleagues, etc. Advertisements typically last for a minimum of 45 days and coincide with the IES posting dates of the vacancy.

The academic units may consider writing the position announcement to be "open rank," at Faculty Hiring Proposal Stage rather than limited to a specific rank if they think there is a chance they may want to hire a candidate at a senior rank.

The academic unit should keep a paper or electronic file to record the procedures used in the search, including when and where the position was advertised. Because all CAFE faculty positions are now posted through IES, equal opportunity data are captured during that process and application submission source.

Once a position is posted in IES, an HR representative will contact the department to discuss options for advertising the position. HR Employment has arranged for job postings to be automatically added to several major job boards at no cost to the academic unit. More details about these job boards are available here. 

International Candidates

The following additional information applies when advertising or hiring an international candidate:

International Student and Scholar Services

Advertising Guidelines for International Candidates

H-1B Status (fees are the responsibility of the hiring department)

Permanent Residency/Green Cards (fees are the responsibility of the employee)

Reference Checks

Reference checks should be used to confirm and verify information and to gain insight on the strengths and weaknesses of the candidates. Committees should determine a set of reference questions ahead of time to ensure consistency for all candidates. The guidelines regarding illegal questions apply to conversations with references, just as they do with candidate interviews.

Candidate Interviews

To the greatest extent possible, the search process should be consistent for all candidates interviewed. Search committees may use an evaluation tool worksheet to assist in uniformity in evaluation. All participants in interviews, and especially the search committee and the Academic Unit Leader, should understand no questions should be posed that could even be perceived as discriminatory or exclusive by any candidate. Under federal and state law, it is illegal to ask candidates questions related to the following topics: 

• Age
• Year of graduation from high school or college
• Country of origin
• Languages spoken (unless directly related to the requirements of the position)
• Years of residency in Kentucky or the United States
• Disabilities and/or health
• Marriage, sexual orientation, family and/or children
• Political affiliations, elections, elected and appointed public officials
• Race
• Religion
• Ethnicity
• Unions and unionization
• Physical characteristics
• Military service

Selecting Candidates to Interview On Campus

The Academic Unit Leader directly requests authorization and receive approval via email from the Dean to interview applicant(s) while keeping in mind the amount of resources that it takes to conduct on-campus interviews. This request should include the cover letter, career CV, and other submitted materials of the finalists in a single .pdf per finalist. Please use a file naming convention of CAFE_UNIT_TitleSeries_WorkingTitle_Last_First_Name.  The HR Integrated Employment System (IES) will notify candidates when they are no longer under consideration when the unit requests the position to be closed.

Interviewing with the Associate Deans

Once the Dean has approved the candidates to interview, the Academic Unit Leader or search committee chair should use the following procedures for scheduling interviews with the Associate Deans.

1. Send the application materials of the candidates the committee wishes to interview to the Office of Faculty Resources, Planning and Assessment.  The Office of Faculty Resources, Planning and Assessment will work with the committee chair to coordinate the interview times with the Associate Deans. The actual scheduling is typically most easily accomplished with a call to either Misty Howard or Brian Lee.
2. Except in rare cases, the Dean will not interview faculty candidates. Typically, multiple Associate Deans will meet with each faculty candidate as a group depending on position being considered.
3. Interviews with the Associate Deans are typically scheduled for 45 minutes. The Office of Faculty Resources, Planning and Assessment provides the application to the Associate Deans. It is often easiest to call the Office of Faculty Resources, Planning and Assessment to discuss interview timing, logistics and at least place holds on the appropriate calendars. The office will normally include either or both the department chair and search committee chair as an optional meeting attendee on the calendar invitation though the meeting is for the associate deans. The meetings typically occur in N3 of Agriculture Science Building North, though other locations are possible.
4. Normally after the Office of Faculty Resources, Planning and Assessment has confirmed interview times with the Associate Deans, the department/committee chair should offer those times to the candidates, work within his/her department to make travel arrangements, and then let the Office of Faculty Resources, Planning and Assessment know which candidate will be scheduled for which interview time slot so candidate application materials can be attached to the calendar invitation.
5. After the interviews, the Office of Faculty Resources, Planning and Assessment will collect evaluations of the candidates from the Associate Deans for the Dean.

Receiving Approval to Offer the Position

The academic unit leader's recommendation to offer a position, and the offer itself, must be approved by the Dean first. Please refer to the college’s resources on writing offer letters. The Office of Faculty Resources, Planning and Assessment will work with the unit to get the Provost's Office of Faculty Advancement approval. In those rare cases where differences between the academic unit's and the college’s choice cannot be resolved, the administration may meet with the search committee or even the faculty as a whole.

Records Retention

All written records of faculty searches are subject to open records requests. To ensure compliance with the state’s records retention schedule the search committee chair/academic unit should create an email folder to serve as a repository for all email correspondence and electronic documents related to the search and keep this folder for five years. The search committee must collect all paper applications, notes, charts or any other written materials used by committee members related to the search and provide them to the academic unit leader. The academic unit leader must keep them for five years. It is considered a good practice to have the materials saved in a secure and digital location such as OneDrive.

Questions

Questions regarding faculty searches and search committees may be directed to the Office of Faculty Resources, Planning and Assessment.