Who Finds Tech-Awesome Employees?

Right now, HR must be crazy busy. I know this because when school starts in the fall there is always a long, long line of new employees who get introduced by our college president and are given lime-green "Tech-Awesome" t-shirts at the annual Welcome Back Breakfast. The new folks have to come from somewhere.

Year after year, our hiring process has been in good hands: my friends in HR are nothing if not methodical. They believe, like self-help author Robert Collier, that success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out. With little fanfare or recognition, HR associates help departments hire staff while at the same time they keep and manage job descriptions, stay current on employment law and practice, update and publicize new term salary and benefit packages, rule on personnel questions and have dozens of other "duties as assigned" that a non-HR person like me sleeps better not knowing about.

But hiring those newbies: that's the future of our institution, that's where HR makes its mark. The school relies on qualified, motivated, creative, honest, trustworthy and hard-working employees to put flesh and blood onto the strategic scaffolding built by leadership-conducted listening sessions. An excellent HR department is able to consistently find quality people to fill empty slots across the college caused by retirements, reassignments, resignations and new programs

Last year, for example, my department had to replace two long-time faculty members who retired. With the help of HR, the two positions were posted, electronic applications and resumes were collected and interviews scheduled. Then HR helped write the interview questions and chaired the interview panel to make sure we didn't ask something dumb (and illegal). After we selected our top candidates, HR checked references, made offers, answered questions and arranged for start dates and training. We ended up with two excellent new teammates. This process takes a lot of time.  Now, multiply this process times 50, 60 or 100 times for departments across the school. That's my working definition of a crazy busy summer.

If I were charged with building a college from scratch, I would start by hiring a top notch HR department like the one we have. Without it, all the data collection, strategic plans, creative curriculum, guidelines and hopes would collapse under its own non-implemented dead weight. You need a roster of top people to create, manage and  maintain excellence. And, I'm not just talking about hiring brilliant and inspirational faculty -- though we have a lot of them. Leadership, support and technical staff also need to be the best in order to continue to move ahead as a Leader College. Those Tech-Awesome t-shirts need to find happy new hands every August.