Diversify an applicant pool

Steps to Help Diversify an Applicant Pool

1.   Contact individuals in your discipline who can provide contacts with people who can diversify your applicant pool. These would be people that current department members know and who could provide you with names of people to whom you can send a personal letter together with the position description.

2. Contact all of your department’s alumni in graduate school, recently graduated from graduate programs, or who are currently in faculty positions.

¨ Send the job description to them

¨ Ask for nominations or ask them to pass the description along to people who would help to diversify the applicant pool

3. Contact the Provost’s office to get the list of applicants for Consortium for Faculty Diversity (formerly CSMP) fellowships in the last three years. The full dossiers of these applicants are available in the Provost’s office. You may use the list of applicants in your discipline in one of two ways: 1) if there is an applicant whose areas of expertise matches your needs, you can contact that person and notify them of our tenure track opening, 2) you may write to all the applicants in your discipline, sending them a copy of the job description and asking them if they know of anyone we could contact who would help us to diversify our applicant pool. This strategy will almost always require some on-line searching to identify the current position and e-mail address of the former fellowship applicants since most of them will now be at institutions other than the one where they were working when they made their original fellowship application.

4.   Contact people running discipline specific programs to cultivate a more diverse pool of Ph.D’s. For instance, the American Economic Association runs a summer program for undergraduates from diverse backgrounds to help develop their mathematical skills and to encourage them to attend graduate school. The person who runs this program would have the names of many top candidates in the pipeline.

¨ Send the job description to people who run such programs

¨ Ask for nominations and/or that they pass the description along to possible candidates

5. The NSF runs programs to help diversify the Ph.D. pool in the sciences. Contact the people who run these programs and solicit their help in identifying candidates for the position. (There are apparently no parallel programs by, for instance, the MLA.)

¨ Find out who runs the program(s) in your discipline

¨ Write them a letter and send the job description

¨ Invite them to nominate people or ask for names of recent participants in the program

6. Identify the appropriate professional associations that might be the home for diverse candidates in the applicant pool. If you are not aware of the existence of a professional group for traditionally under-represented groups in your discipline, you might search the web to see if such groups exist. Often, there are separate groups for different ethnicities.

¨ Identify the officers and/or people who have recently been involved in efforts to increase the number of doctoral candidates

¨ Write to these people and ask them for nominations. Ask them to share the position description with potential candidates.

¨ Some such organizations will not share names but will (for a fee) put labels for a demographic subset of their members on a stamped envelope you provide.

¨ Explore job advertising opportunities in the web listings or newsletters of these organizations.

7. Search for graduate student organizations for students from diverse backgrounds;

¨ at specific schools, e.g. minority graduate student organization at the UC Berkeley Chemistry Department.

¨ Some graduate student organizations have national conferences (disciplinary or interdisciplinary)

¨ Write to officers/contact person(s) and send the position description.

8. Identify the departments that have recently awarded the largest number of Ph.D.’s in your field to students from traditionally under-represented backgrounds. One source for this information is normally Diverse Issues in Higher Education.

¨ Send a letter to the chair or DGS

¨ Include the position description with the letter