Selling the Intangibles

By David Evans

When you are an administrator at an university where job candidates are not fighting to be hired, you tend to think about how to package what you and your colleagues do in a way that shows the virtues of your institution readily to prospective colleagues.

Every institution has some special qualities and amenities that should be helpful in attracting strong candidates. Some advantages speak for themselves: a spectacular campus, high levels of student achievement, huge endowments, or a great reputation. It’s no wonder that institutions with some or all of those qualities have a relatively easy time getting people to apply.

Institutions like mine — which I think can be tremendously attractive but whose attractions are, shall we say, not those of the academic mainstream — face more significant challenges in attracting the best possible faculty members. So as we contemplate faculty recruitment, one of our key goals is to find ways to show the possibilities of a career here.

You can do that through a glossy brochure, which is an interesting but expensive strategy. Such brochures are something like the viewbooks most institutions send to prospective students, but with the kind of information a faculty member would want — teaching load, research support, benefit summaries, and so on.

Some of the most attractive things we have to offer, however, don’t convey very well in print. So much of what really matters about an institution is in intangible qualities that are difficult to explain in any other way than through direct experience. I am frankly stymied by how to convey those qualities in a largescale way, but my colleagues and I keep trying to do so because we know we can make our university even better by the right kinds of hires. One thing I know is that too much insistence on how great a place this is will likely have the opposite effect, a kind of “doth protest too much” outcome that is not helpful to our overall goals.

So I wonder: For those of you somewhat off the beaten path of academe, how do you make the case to prospective candidates that your positions are worth pursuing?