Equity Advisors provide helpful advice to faculty and department chair search committees to ensure that diversity and equity remain at the forefront during every step of the search/hiring process and that federal, state, and university employment laws/policies are followed.
Qualifications of Equity Advisors
The Equity Advisor is a non-voting search committee member who follows all confidentiality protocols and attends all search committee meetings. Equity Advisors:
- are associate rank or higher faculty (either tenure or ITF) at Michigan Tech
- are current on Diversity Literacy and Faculty Hiring Legal Aspects/Refresher Courses
- have attended an in-person training workshop
Role of Equity Advisors
The Equity Advisor can support the search committee in the following ways:
- Liaison: Act as a liaison to and receive support from the Provost’s Office, Human Resources, and Equal Opportunity Compliance.
- Job Description: Communicate the importance of a job description and review the description language to ensure that it is accurate, inclusive, and conforms to best practices.
- Diverse Applicant Pool Solicitation: Assist in supporting the search committee to build a broad and diverse network to ensure a diverse applicant pool. Ensure the search committee documents their efforts to reach out to professional networks and identify diverse candidates to invite to apply.
- Applicant Pool Diversity Check: Prior to interviews, assist in checking the representativeness of the applicant pool against the NSF Survey of Doctorates within the fields relevant to the applicant pool prior to any interviews.
- Communications and Logistics: Review applicant communications and logistics to ensure inclusivity, including invitations to interview, interview questions, campus visit and interview itinerary, etc.
- Interrupt Bias: Assist the search committee in ensuring that no irrelevant or illegal criteria are used to determine who receives initial phone/online interviews or is invited for on-campus visits. Equity Advisors do not review CVs or provide disciplinary-specific advice.
- Procedures: Assist the committee to follow all of Michigan Tech’s Human Resources hiring steps, University Senate procedures, and Equal Opportunity Compliance requirements.