| 0:00:00.64 | 7.3s | Mike Burke | You're listening to For the Record, a registrar podcast sponsored by ̽»¨Â¥. I'm Mike Burke, Dean of Student Services at Harvard University. |
| 0:00:08.44 | 10.5s | Rebecca Mathern | And I'm Rebecca Mathern, Associate Vice Provost for academic affairs and university registrar at Oregon State University. And this is hire the best and treat them well. |
| 0:00:27.47 | 66.6s | Doug McKenna | Hello. Welcome to For the Record. I'm your host, Doug McKenna, University Registrar at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Registrars serve different roles at their institutions, everything from being stewards of student academic data to being technology leaders or partners with academic units, and at a more micro level, leaders, supervisors and managers within their own offices. And it's this last piece that we're going to be talking about today. It is not uncommon for there to be turnover in a registrar's office. Whenever someone leaves, it's an opportunity to add a fresh new individual to improve the functioning and direction of the office. But how to do that effectively? How do you hire the best people and then how do you support them once they arrive so that they're able to bloom and grow into the best version of themselves. Joining us for this discussion are Mike Burke and Rebecca Mathern, two outstanding colleagues who have some great insights on the hiring and onboarding processes. So, Mike, Rebecca, welcome to the podcast. |
| 0:01:34.76 | 2.1s | Mike Burke | Thanks, Doug. Great to be with you. |
| 0:01:37.20 | 0.6s | Rebecca Mathern | Thank you so |
| 0:01:37.76 | 18.1s | Doug McKenna | much. To kick us off, Mike, tell us some of your background, how long you worked in higher education, how did you come into your current position, and your title is not registrar, it’s Dean of Student Services. So maybe give us a little flavor background of that. And then also Harvard. Tell us about it. |
| 0:01:56.8 | 88.7s | Mike Burke | Sure. Well, I've been working in higher ed for about 30 years, I guess. 25 of them have been at Harvard. It's where I've been, um, those last 25 years. I'm not a registrar now, but I was one for, boy, I don't know, 15 or so years, until recently, and the registrar's office actually reports to me now. So I remain engaged deeply in this work and it's uh still a huge part of my portfolio. I am interested in this hiring business because as you said, there's a lot of turnover sometimes and I think if we really want to have these well functioning offices, we have to put a lot of effort into getting the right people. And it starts right from the beginning, meaning how you post the position, how you cast a wide net for people, how you network to to enrich the applicant pool, which we'll talk about. Prior to being a registrar, I was in admissions at Harvard and there I, in addition to the hiring aspects and a lot of, there's a lot of professional overlap with registrar's office. But I learned to read resumes really quickly and hopefully deeply and uh to figure out what's most important. So even though uh we're talking about hiring, the art of reading someone's essay or letter and resume is really something that's useful in trying to screen your applicant pool. So that's one of my interests here. |
| 0:03:25.58 | 12.6s | Doug McKenna | Tell us a little bit about Harvard. There's like Harvard's a huge name. It's been in the news a lot recently. We won't go into that, but tell us a little bit about Harvard. How many students are there? Like how is it organized? |
| 0:03:38.63 | 42.4s | Mike Burke | Harvard's been around almost 400 years and it's uh like many universities, fairly decentralized, it's broken up into what we call faculties. So there's a faculty of Arts and Sciences, of business, of government, of medicine, law, etc. I primarily work in The faculty of Arts and Sciences, supporting undergraduate students and graduate students in the graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Harvard College. Harvard overall has about 20,000 students. About half of those are in the unit that I work in in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. And so we have a residential undergraduate liberal arts college embedded in a pretty complex research university. |
| 0:04:21.60 | 2.1s | Doug McKenna | Very cool. Rebecca, to |
| 0:04:23.73 | 101.9s | Rebecca Mathern | you. I work at Oregon State University and I have been here for about 13 years, but I've been in the higher ed profession about 27 years, and for the last 17 years, I have served as a registrar both at a large community college and at Oregon State University. I love this work, I sort of fell into it by accident, as many of us do, and I quickly realized that I guess I was just born to be a registrar. I think I think like a registrar. In my, in my current role as Associate Vice Provost, I supervise three areas. I supervise the office of the registrar, the curriculum management office, and then also the accreditation process at our institutions. So I deal with compliance in multiple aspects at our university. But Oregon State is about 38,000 students and um we have, I want to say we have 3 campuses. We have two physical campuses, one in Corvallis, Oregon, which is where I'm located at the heart of Willamette Valley. And uh wine country. But we also have a lovely campus in Bend, Oregon, which is high desert, and all the students who want to ski while they're in college attend our Bend location, which we call Cascades. And then we have about 13,000 students who are online. So we have a really large online population and we have about 80 academic programs that are offered solely online. So that students can start and finish their degree that way. But we are one of just a few universities that have sort of all four grants, right? So we are a public institution that is a land, sea, space, and sun grant institution. We're really proud of that. And we have about 200 academic programs at our institution. |
| 0:06:06.14 | 24.7s | Doug McKenna | Very cool. Let's jump into the heart of the discussion for today, and I want to start with some assumptions. So there is a person leaving your office in an amicable manner. They're a great employee, but they've gotten another opportunity, or, you know, you're sorry to see them go, but good on them. What is the process that you follow, starting? With them giving their notice. |
| 0:06:31.10 | 86.3s | Rebecca Mathern | Well, let's, let's start by assuming that we didn't, we didn't attempt to offer a retention package or keep them at our institution, right? So, so they're, they're leaving whether they're going to another role in our institution or outside of it. They're leaving. And the first thing that I would typically do, and it always sort of depends on the level of position in the office, right? But I typically pull together the leadership team and ask the leadership team to evaluate the need for the position. And if, if the current role for that position is the best use, right? It's, it is very common in our field for needs to change over time, especially with the quick transformation of different technologies. And so the team will do an assessment as to whether or not we need that specific position or we need a different position, and, and if so, how do we transform that? So that's sort of the, the first thing that we do. Let's just assume that we need that same position. We then move into what our traditional hiring practices, and I could probably talk for 15 minutes about what, what those look like, right? Thank you. But that, but that process involves sort of the outreach that we do, um, in our own fields to do recruitment, and then it, it sort of starts and it's led by the person who's the hiring authority for the position. And it goes all the way through until the person is fully onboarded about 6 weeks into, you know, when they're in the position. |
| 0:07:57.80 | 19.9s | Doug McKenna | Can we go deeper on one thing that you said, and that is like evaluating whether you need that position or a different position. And could you say a little bit more about that? What, what does that actually look like for either of you and how do you go about articulating what the new needs look like? |
| 0:08:17.82 | 52.9s | Rebecca Mathern | Yeah, I'll, I'll share my perspective and then I'm sure Mike will have a different perspective, but for us, we, we look at our organization chart and we look at where we have depth and where we don't. We look at the intake of our just our operational work, right, our day to day work, the transactional work we do. And for example, is the intake in the operations higher than it is in our degree clearance area or has something shifted, and does that create a need for a change? But what we also do is we look at the institution's strategic plan. We evaluate if we've been able to complete projects that support that strategic plan. And if we think that there's a gap, that's where we would actually look for a strategic opportunity to shift a position to better meet the needs of our office, implementing projects or creating, you know, creating services that support the strategic plan of the university. |
| 0:09:11.8 | 110.5s | Mike Burke | We, I think we do that more on an ongoing basis, so we don't necessarily do that at that interval, um, unless something just emerged. In other words, if we have already determined or we're in the process of determining that our needs have changed and we need to change the structure or the position is not right. We're not going to wait necessarily for a vacancy. So when we get a vacancy, I have this philosophy that every hole is an emergency, like every hole in a in a boat is a leak, and the more holes you have, the longer you have them, the more in danger you are. And when I mean danger, I mean business continuity, maintaining our level of service, maintaining our critical services. So I tend to act pretty quickly for that reason to, to get the the job going. We of course will look at the position description, make sure it's still accurate and that sort of thing, and if it has to be reclassified, we'll do that. We usually hope it doesn't because that is a lengthy HR process that we don't control. So we hope we can just continue. So, and then the other um reason that we, we are usually urgently posting things when they become vacant is because there's a viewpoint here that a position left vacant for an extended period of time may not be that necessary and we don't want to ever give that impression. We need all the help we can get. We have a lot of work, we're very busy, and we never want to give the impression that, yeah, we could go 6 months without that position and not suffer anything. So, uh, from the business continuity perspective and from the, uh, the prioritizing the need to save a position, we move quickly, Never as quickly as we want. We always have this grand vision like, oh, we'll get this wrapped up in a couple of weeks or a couple of months, and it goes longer than that, obviously. |
| 0:11:01.77 | 47.7s | Doug McKenna | Yeah, Mason has been under not a hiring freeze, but a hiring chill, which is a differentiation without a distinction for the most part, because we've had this critical vacancy request process. So every time there's been a vacancy, you have to fill out a justification for that position and send it up through the Provost and President's office in order to get approval to post it and that. At various periods has been a very long process over the last 2 years. Uh, it's getting a lot faster now. So that's an improvement position right now. Yeah, yeah. And so I think that your move toward expediency in trying to at least kick off the process is a wise one. So. |
| 0:11:50.9 | 45.6s | Rebecca Mathern | And one thing I might just add quickly to that, I, I really appreciated Mike's comment about how he's constantly looking at that. You know, and I think we do that too. And oftentimes what happens is that sort of evaluation of like, do we really need this position for this work or something else. You know, sometimes we've, we've kind of done that in our planning, but we have no idea what position will open. And so when the positions open, it's sort of the idea of strike while the iron is hot, right? We've kind of already done that pre-planning, but we're just waiting. And then when a position does open, we're like, OK, now is the time, make that change. And sometimes we, we actually wait, right? But, but we try to utilize those opportunities because like all of you, we have too much work to do to have vacant positions in our office. It's just too Hard on everyone else performing the work. |
| 0:12:35.86 | 34.2s | Doug McKenna | Yeah, for sure. Can we talk about the interview process? So, you have gone through, you have identified the position, revised, revisited the position description, it has gone through the HR and talent acquisition groups and it's been posted. Great. You got applicants. How do you go about selecting people to be on a search committee? Is there training required by your institution for people to participate on search committees? And then what does that vetting process look like even before we get to inviting people for an interview? |
| 0:13:10.83 | 151.1s | Mike Burke | I have leaned away from the practice of hiring committees for positions that report up to me, but I have a bunch of people helping me, advising me, and I want them to have partners and colleagues interview, but I want to steer away from the notion that there is a committee that is tasked with this and that they have discretion and even an advisory kind of thing. I want to make sure that everyone understands I value their input and they're going to give me their candid feedback and I will take it kind of each person at a time. I, I look for private consultation rather than group consultation. So if even if I have 5 people interviewing somebody at a certain stage, I want to hear from each of them individually because I've, I've been a part of committees where people become a little hesitant to um speak their mind because maybe they have a different opinion and then you find out later that they had a. reservation and they never shared it. So I look for that individual thing. It, it's not rigid in that in the way you described it, but for us it is structured. We, in my practice anyway, I lay out kind of um all the steps that are going to um happen for the position and then Some of this answer is going to be for more senior positions that would report to me and it would be modified a little bit for more junior positions. But we can say, let's say it's been posted for a couple weeks, we will give it an interval like that, 23 weeks of not even thinking about it. Um, it's, it's out there, we're hoping that people are applying. But then every step of the way from the point where we say, OK, we're gonna look at resumes, and then we're gonna do pre-screening, and then we're gonna do first interviews, then 2nd round interviews, final interviews, all of that is plotted out on a calendar and those people that I mentioned that I will invite, we have asked them to hold days. So hold these 3 or 4 days, we're going to put somebody on your schedule, don't, you're not gonna know when until we're done. And so this is planned out weeks in advance. And if somebody tells me, I'm sorry, I'm not available those days, then I thank them and uh relieve them of the burden of having to interview people, because I, I don't want someone to be interviewed 2 out of 3 or 4, something like that, so that I'm not getting a full and fair picture. We can actually predict where we're going to be at every stage, so because we know when those on campus. are going to be. So I could, I can actually predict when we're going to make an offer from based on where we start and plot it out on the calendar. |
| 0:15:42.87 | 188.2s | Rebecca Mathern | Rebecca. Yeah, we have a little different approach probably because we're a public institution, right? And so this is where maybe some of the flexibility that Mike has, maybe we we don't have or we have some. Our our searches do require committee. Work, but where the flexibility lies is that it could be a hiring committee or it could be a screening committee, right? And, and that is sort of the power of, you know, yes, we're still restricted to use committees, but using a screening committee really allows the hiring authority a lot of autonomy in the decision making process. And and a lot of what Mike said is, is really relevant at Oregon State. But one thing that I, that I want to touch on and um and I don't know if it's relevant at all public institutions, but I've experienced it at multiple institutions. There is a requirement prior to interviewing and actually prior to even reviewing applicants that we demonstrate what meeting minimum requirements looks like for each required portion of a job description. And that, it, it can be very limiting if you do it wrong, but it is extremely powerful if you do it right, because what you do is you say, what are my minimum requirements and what are my preferred requirements. And how will someone demonstrate that they've met those, right? And at what stage in an interview process will they demonstrate? Is it in the cover letter? Is it in the application? Is it in an interview? Is it through references, right? You can decide when you want to measure if that requirement's been met. Where you get locked in is if you have an amazing candidate who doesn't meet one of the minimum requirements, they cannot move forward. You can give them all the way to the very end of the process to demonstrate they meet that minimum requirement right through reference checks, but if they don't meet it, we are not allowed to move the candidate forward, they must meet all minimum requirements. And so that power really, the power and how you perform an outstanding search at our institution. is what you determine our minimum requirements and what are preferred requirements. Because you sometimes get to where you've got a really good pool, but the people who should be moved forward based on your definition of MQs versus PQs are maybe the, the people you didn't want. And so you have to determine at that point. If you fail your search and you start over and you rewrite the requirements for the position, or if you move forward with, with who you have, or maybe you've actually misdetermined how you're measuring those requirements. But that step in the process is can be extremely limiting if you do it incorrectly, but it can be extraordinarily powerful in helping really separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of Applicants, if you do that correctly. But in it, and it requires an intense amount of work up front, but it actually makes the work in reviewing applicants quite fast, right? You can be expedient when you have that information about what are the minimum qualifications and what are the preferred qualifications right in front of you, it sort of becomes a check, check. |
| 0:18:51.20 | 17.5s | Doug McKenna | You got it, got it, got it. Yeah. Exactly. Uh-huh. I also love the fact that you, you've gone straight to MQs and PQs. So you definitely think like a registrar there because they're like, how can we shorten this into an acronym that no one else will know. |
| 0:19:10.95 | 58.4s | Doug McKenna | Sorry. Yeah, no, it's great. It's great. You both said some really interesting things. The one of the questions that I have is sort of the stratification about what the interview process overall looks like depending on the level. So for me, an associate registrar goes through a different set of hoops than a coordinator would go through. Sort of from a high level, how do you differentiate what types of interview activities? Whether it's like you come in and talk to 3 people one time or you spend half a day with 5 different groups. What does that look like for each of you at those different sort of levels and both of you have actual like full units who report up to you. So this could be, if you're hiring the registrar, that's a different thing entirely also, but let's keep it, let's not go as crazy as that. What does it look like for like a normal associate or or below kind of a position? |
| 0:20:09.70 | 148.8s | Rebecca Mathern | That our institution, because we are required to have some sort of committee, we look for great stakeholders who we connect with regularly to participate in that committee. We try to keep the committees small enough to be nimble and move quickly and be available when Mike was describing availability and the restrictions, I mean that is a real thing. So we try to look for committees of, you know, 66 is a good number for us. Once you start getting to 8 and larger, it gets difficult to sort of be moving, to be moving quickly. So that, that process is, that committee is doing that initial screening that I already described. They then will interview candidates and they typically will do a short Zoom 30 minute interview to just sort of screen, right? And, and at that stage, Let's say we have a pool of 40 applicants. At that stage, they may choose to talk to 10 or even 12 people because they're quick and they can decide who, who they want to hear more from. Oftentimes between that 1st and 2nd stage of narrowing it down to either semi-finalists or finalists, there will be a conversation with the hiring authority if the hiring authority is not a member of the search committee. To just make sure they're on track and there wasn't anything that was missed and You know, sometimes a hiring authority might see a candidate in the pool that others didn't, didn't bubble to the top and they'll have a conversation about that. But then that next phase is, it's either a longer on campus interview or another Zoom interview that's more lengthy. And if it's, if we move to sort of semi-finalists, we would do that inner. sort of stage where we have a Zoom interview that's maybe 1 hour to 90 minutes. If it's a small pool and we only have 3 more people we'd like to talk to, we move right to that sort of finalist phase. And that stage, the finalist stage, we bring people to campus, you know, somewhere between a half of a day and a full day. We try to keep it at 6 hours or less. We typically If we're talking like an assistant or associate registrar, we will typically include a meal as part of that process, just as a way to see someone outside of sort of, you know, a conference room, a windowless conference room with bean grill, right? We, we try to make it, you know, where there's one opportunity to relax. And then we also try to include, um, maybe not a full campus tour, but just some sort of, um, exposure to our site, right? So that people can see what it looks like to work here |
| 0:22:38.85 | 2.2s | Doug McKenna | and sort of imagine themselves there as well. |
| 0:22:41.28 | 80.1s | Rebecca Mathern | Correct, right. And, and I mean, right, we're recruiting them and they're interviewing us, right? Um, we, we do need to screen people out, but we sure want to recruit the ones that seem outstanding. So that process, if we structure it well and we use all of the, the standards that Mike talked about earlier to sort of have it planned ahead of time and have it a succinct constrained time frame, you know, that can happen over the course of 2 to 3 weeks, but we really like to spend a good 6 hours with a finalist and expose them to different groups on our campus that they would be working with regularly. I'll say one more thing before I, before I turn it over to Mike. There are times, and it really is position applicable, where we might perform what we call a desk audit or some sort of activity where we're asking a person to perform in some sort of exercise so that we can assess skills. So if that's somebody, if that's an associate registrar who's gonna deal with difficult students, we might actually have role play where we ask one of our student workers to go in with a hammer and be difficult, right? If it's a programming position where we're hiring an analyst who we need to be a leader, but also know how to code, we might ask them to perform a short coding exercise so we can just assess basic skills. So we, we sometimes will include activities. |
| 0:24:02.79 | 0.9s | Doug McKenna | Mike, what about you? |
| 0:24:03.88 | 215.9s | Mike Burke | There's some good overlap there, so I think it's reassuring that we're following similar practices even though we have different sort of constraints around our HR process. Our pre-screening, by the way, happens through HR so the the resumes I see are all, they all meet the minimum requirements, uh, which is quite nice. So, let's say, as I was saying before, maybe 2 weeks, you're just collecting resumes, but then the first thing that we do is in this practice, I would say probably from like for any position I would be hiring, even if it was entry level or above. Obviously it's a quick resume review, look for who I have and uh try to find the the most qualified candidates, people that are interesting, people maybe I know from Acro or elsewhere. And I'm going to invite somewhere in the neighborhood of 5, unlikely but possible 10 people to do what we call a smart hire video. So we had we use this system that's, you know, it's a software service. Where we can issue 4 or 5 questions and we say to them, thank you for applying, we'd like you to use the Smart hire system where you'll be given a prompt and then you'll record yourself in a video answering it. And um so we'll do a handful of questions with that. They get something. Like, I don't know, 2 or 3 days to do it, they can retake it up to 3 times, I think if they don't like their 1st 2 answers. And then I see the finished product, you know, what they've submitted, and I know some colleagues do, this is certainly not me, some colleagues do, oh, we'll give them a week or 2 weeks. I, if I give them 3 days, that's way too long. So I'm always looking for 1 or 2 days and HR is always trying to talk me into something longer, but I, I, I stick with my practice. But so I, I view those and then I will decide among them who am I going to interview and that's going to be me and I will set up a Zoom interview with each one of them 30 minutes. I usually can determine whether they should move on or not in a lot less than 30 minutes, but certainly I think 30 30 minutes is fair at this stage. I'm not a big fan of long interviews. Uh, I think they're draining to people and not necessarily that productive. In that interview or in later ones, we'll do some of the same practices that Rebecca mentioned. It could be a simulation exercise, we could have uh some role playing, just like uh Rebecca said, there could be an irate customer. And we want to uh work our way through that. And if someone's being hired for a technical job, we might have them do an assessed exercise through again some software or it might just be some questioning that is useful for, I guess. filtering out people that put something on their resume, but don't really live it. And I happen to think in the registrar business, I always found facility with Excel is a really good, you know, predictor of if you get this kind of work. If you have skill with Excel, that's a really good start. And I always love when the people put their expert at Excel and I'll, I'll say something like, out of the blue, I won't give them any prep that I'm going to ask them this kind of question. I'll say, what are the parameters for a V lookup? And just sit there and wait. And sometimes they stumble, they have no idea what I'm talking about, and sometimes they, they launch right into it. Sometimes they're like a V lookup and and then like, oh, OK, and then they, they say it, they figure it out. So I'm not trying to trip people up. I'm I'm trying to confirm that what they put on their resume and in their their letter is accurate. Right? |
| 0:27:39.85 | 11.5s | Doug McKenna | If you put it on your resume, it's fair game to be asked about. And if you try to represent yourself as expert in Excel, a V lookup is not, it's out of the bounds. It's, |
| 0:27:51.64 | 5.8s | Mike Burke | it's for someone who says they're a facility with Excel and you really need it in our line of work. And |
| 0:27:57.40 | 34.9s | Doug McKenna | this is a fun thing too. I tell my team, go do professional development, start with the Microsoft Office Suite. We use 1% of what Excel can do. So dive in, get into pivot tables, get into V lookups, get on all the things like learn some formulas and make your life easier. But this is such a great example because it's like, then if they would do that, if they would only listen to me, they could put on their resume that they have some. Expertise or proficiency with Excel and then they would be able to answer your question. You know, |
| 0:28:32.36 | 32.2s | Mike Burke | when I retired from my first job at Harvard, I had on their experience with SQL, SQL and my future boss said, what does SQL sta she said, what does SQL stand for? And I actually knew structured query language because I actually knew it. And uh she, that was kind of her version of that job, that question. I'm not sure even to this day whether she knew what SQL was. But it was an effective question and it impressed her that I wasn't putting some piece of BS information on my resume. |
| 0:29:04.83 | 42.5s | Doug McKenna | So great. Can I say one other funny story similar? I started my career at IBM and during my interview with IBM, my third line manager during that part of the interview asked me what does IBM stand for? And I said, innovation, excellence, outstanding customer service, and he literally was like, I was looking for international business machines, but that I like your answer better. I didn't know that IBM stood for international business machines, had no idea. And so like, yeah, right. But some quick thinking, I was like, truth, justice, American Pie stands for that. |
| 0:29:47.58 | 91.6s | Rebecca Mathern | Um, I wanna, I wanna, um, just add one more comment because I, I love the question, the example of the question that Mike just gave about sort of testing knowledge. I have a behavioral question that I ask almost every candidate or I encourage the search committee to ask, and it gets to the root of, of two things for me anyway. It gets at humility, which I think is a huge skill, a, a hugely needed skill in our, in our work, but it also gets that self-reflection. And the question that we ask, and we don't, we don't add on, we don't offer explanation, we just ask a short question and we wait until someone responds. And we say, what is the most useful criticism you've received? And then we just pause. And the reason we ask it is because there will be candidates who just say, oh, you know, I haven't really gotten any, you know, I think I'm doing just fine, right? That tells you a lot. But a lot of times in the moment, it's hard to come up with something that maybe just sort of hones in right to where, you know, where your weaknesses are, right? But But usually you can assess if somebody is self-reflecting in that period of time to give you a thoughtful response, and you can also measure someone's humility. So that is very similar to the, to the skills question that Mike asked, I like that behavioral question because I think it helps assess two different behavioral skills that are important for our work. |
| 0:31:19.31 | 13.0s | Doug McKenna | And aspects of the individual's personality and character, I think are really important in terms of like how they're going to gel with the team and how they're going to respond to the kinds of pressure that Our offices deal |
| 0:31:32.31 | 30.8s | Mike Burke | with. If I could just add one thing to that. I love that that question. Maybe I'll borrow it. I don't rescue people when I ask a question. I ask it and then just like Rebecca said, I clam up. I don't want to rescue them. I want them to hear the question. If they ask me to repeat it, I'll do that, but I won't explain the question to them. I won't say anything like that. If they say, what's a V lookup? I'm like, oh, that's OK, we'll just move on, something like that, because they have to be the ones talking, not me. Keep them talking. |
| 0:32:03.41 | 39.0s | Doug McKenna | Let's move from the interview, because we've got two parts of. that I want to dive into. This has all been very interesting and helpful. Gone through the interview, made the offer, found the right person. What does it look like from the time that you've extended the offer, they've accepted the offer? What is the new hires' first day look like? What is their first week look like? And then what other touch points? Is there like a 90 day. Something? Is there a one month something? How do you bring the person in and get them situated, acculturated, and part of the team? |
| 0:32:42.93 | 257.8s | Mike Burke | We want to have people start and have it seem like we knew they were coming, that we're ready for them, that all the things are done, kind of a humorous anecdote, again with my first job at Harvard, I came in and they said, Here's your office, and they opened the door. There were 3 desks in there, multiple printers. It was, it was clear there was boxes everywhere, clearly a storage room. No one had opened that door. They were surprised. I was surprised. And then they, they said, here, sit down, no computer on the desk, by the way, they handed me a brochure. And they're like, here, this is, it was the admissions office, so they're like, here, read the brochure so you can start to learn about this and we'll get ready with everything else. We don't do it that way, not in my office anyway. We have tried to figure everything out as much as we can beforehand, including even the the stuff that normally you think you would have to do beforehand if they're nearby, we say come in, get that I-9 identity validation done. Come in and get your ID beforehand so that you can swipe right into the building and come on up. We'll meet them the first day, uh, and walk them into our building. What we do, though, I think, which is we do a couple things that I'll I'll just go through really quickly. We create a welcome letter for everybody, which sounds like not much, but it's more than it sounds like. So about a week in advance, we will send this to them. It'll be in the supervisor's name. We have a template, of course, but it'll be in the supervisor's name and it will be customized to that person and it'll give a warm welcome, but it also goes a little bit into depth about what are the expectations for the 1st 3 months specifically. Now, by the time we've hired them, we've already disclosed to them some of the things we're going, that they're going to be walking into, right? If there's any personnel issues or financial constraints or whatever. So they know that already, but that goes into the letter as well. Uh, we give them background on whatever departmental issues they're walking into, even reports, reviews, so sometimes we, the department may have undergone a reorganization in the last couple of years and we'll include some material from that if we can and Then we, we dive into the, the mundane. We let them know where their office is located, what their phone number is, what their email address is, and uh how to dress, um, which is, it's not as prescriptive as it sounds. We're just saying like, don't worry about it, you'll figure it out and and there's people to talk to if you need it. Where are the bathrooms, when do people come in the morning, when they leave in the afternoon, we would just want to try to demystify it as much as possible. And then We give them a loose schedule for the 1st 2 weeks. We have the first thing they're going to do other than meet their supervisor is sit with IT to make sure not just that the computers there, we know it will be, but that they can log on to everything and they have access to everything they need. So that happens all within the first hour or two. So we actually schedule an IT person to sit with them in their office to do that. But we put important colleagues on their schedule. And give them a list of other colleagues that they should reach out to kind of part of the intro experience is to reach out to people and say, I'm new, this is my role, can we meet? And make sure that they do that. So we give them that list of people, but it also has a glossary of all those acronyms you mentioned, uh, that registrars and colleges have. And um even a, I guess a, a slight essay on how the heck do you understand Harvard, its organizational structure, its governance structure. We just try to put it all in there, not thinking that they're going to have this all memorized one week in advance and and have it coming in, but it's a reference point, it's a reference document for the rest of their time in this position. That's a big thing. Then we, we also do things like we do the, the, the walk around where we will walk them to important places. So if they're coming in one of the areas that reports to me is housing, so we will take them to the dorms, and if they're coming in the registrar's office, we'll take them to the classrooms. We'll take them to whatever the relevant, um, facilities are and where those people are and introduce them. We'll take them to lunch at a dining hall and we'll have a welcome breakfast that supports multiple new people, like maybe once a month or something like that. |
| 0:37:01.13 | 1.9s | Doug McKenna | Cool. Right, what about you? |
| 0:37:03.36 | 156.5s | Rebecca Mathern | Well, that is extensive and amazing, and the first time I heard about Mike's welcome letter, I thought, when I have time, I want to replicate that. It's not happened yet. Um, but we, we generally do a similar approach. I usually call the, you know, kind of the paperwork all the administravia, right? And so we try to take care of the administravia ahead of time. There are bureaucracies that we need to work through. And there are things that, you know, are sequential. You can't take care of one until the dependency of the other is resolved. And so we do as much as we can to get that completed ahead of time. And then we, we've probably had experiences where someone akin to Mike's experience where there's 3 desks in a storage closet, right? And, and so we've learned to, to try to actually create a welcoming environment in the workspace they'll be in. Many of our staff work out of cubicles and workstations just because of the nature of where we're located and the limiting number of offices. And so we try to provide some accouterments for their desk, right? That just make them feel welcome. And we do external notices to not just the folks in our office, but to units outside of our office so that everybody knows who's coming. And oftentimes by then, they know because they've participated in some sort of activity during the search. But that first, that first day is a lot of introductions, right? The walking around, the meeting people, getting logged in, some of the basics. But we actually have a kind of a 3 week onboarding protocol that we use, and during that 3 week onboarding, somebody's schedule is pretty set. There are definitely buffer periods throughout the day for, you know, I'm gonna say work or just recovery, um, so that we're not scheduling them sort of from 8 to 5 every day. But that onboarding process includes, um, meet and greets that are 20 to 30 minutes long with each person in our, in our office and in our area, so that they can learn the different aspects of a registrar's office. And that is really useful when we're hiring someone from outside of higher ed. It's also useful when we're hiring someone internally, right, within the institution. But really getting folks acquainted. So the onboarding process may grow or shrink in size or length depending on who we're hiring and what sort of background and skills that they have. Um, but, but we do try to use a pretty structured 3 week process that entails meetings, trainings, and by the end of the 3 weeks, we're not expecting someone can perform all the functions of their job, but we are expecting that they have all the tools to start learning how to do their job. |
| 0:39:40.28 | 3.1s | Doug McKenna | How do you know if the hiring process has been successful? |
| 0:39:43.72 | 164.2s | Rebecca Mathern | Well, let me, let me, let me keep going a little bit because, you know, I talked about 3 week onboarding and one of the questions you asked earlier is, is there a sort of a period of time of measurement and evaluation and I want to differentiate that we are, we operate in a union environment and so our folks who are um part of a bargaining agreement, there's actually very structured time periods for assessment and evaluation to determine if the position is a good fit for. That individual. And so we use that time period. And oftentimes it's, you know, approximately 6 months and we have the ability to extend that, but we must do it formally. If we think someone is starting to grasp the work, but just not there yet and we want to Allow them more time to work towards the work towards the job and for us to assess their skills. We can extend that probationary period if it's clear someone's not cutting it, we can, we can cut it short any time in that initial window. But for our professional faculty positions, our administrative positions, we don't really have that specific period of time. So we just have to assess and then we, if, if it's not working out, we have a certain period of time we need to give notice for somebody. But sort of to your broader question about, you know, how do you know if, if it's going well or if it's a success, we really do look to specific measurements of some of the tasks and functions of work, right? Even at higher level positions, they might not be performing sort of day to day tasks. But we look for the functions of their work and how are they completing them, and are they completing them successfully and what is their level of thoroughness when they're performing their work? That is usually quite telling for us, right? If somebody is taking care of, you know, has responsibility for something, how thorough were they when they were taking care of it? When you're looking at more entry level positions or more transaction-based positions, it is much easier, right, to perform that evaluation. And so it really sort of depends. I would argue that We as professionals need to do a better job of putting those measurements in writing so that we can be clear and transparent to our employees, and most of the time, really good managers just sort of know in their gut over a period of time if someone's performing and able to get to where they need to in the job. And that's great, but we can't just use our gut, right? We need to be transparent about what those outcomes look like and what those expectations are. And so it's, it's taking what, you know, what about your gut is telling you that they're gonna get there? Write those things down, because then when they've got a candidate who's new in a position, who is doing OK, but not quite getting there. They can use those written measurements to actually assess how close they are and if they think they can get there. |
| 0:42:28.26 | 41.0s | Doug McKenna | And provide corrective counseling and coaching to that person because they may not even realize. And one, I want to go back all the way to the must have, what's the MQ? Why isn't it an RQ? qualifications versus the preferred qualifications. As you said, like articulating those things out, that's not just for the, the hiring process, that those things translate really well into, here's, here are the things that you're doing well, here are the things that you're missing on, and then there's actual coaching that can be done for that person to To make sure that they have an opportunity to succeed before you're like, hey kid, out of the pool. |
| 0:43:09.46 | 4.3s | Rebecca Mathern | Because it's in everyone's best interest for that incumbent to succeed in the role, right? |
| 0:43:13.90 | 5.6s | Doug McKenna | Absolutely, absolutely. Like, how do you know if someone, if you've been successful in the hiring process? |
| 0:43:20.17 | 169.4s | Mike Burke | It does start from the beginning for us with the letter and even in the final stages of the interview where we're clear about what success looks like, we put it in writing in that letter and we do say in that first in the first. months, here's what you should focus on and here's what we we even use the word. This is what we will assess to make sure that everything's going well. I meet with them regularly, so people that are that I'm hiring, they're reporting to me, I meet with them at least once a week, sometimes twice a week if it's a highly, let's say, a critical period and we need to make sure that we're we're understanding how they're, how they're doing. And those are just check-ins. If I'm actually training them, then we have more time together than that, not to mention the intros and all the other things. So we will constantly assess throughout. At Harvard, we have a 3 month standard orientation and review period and we will track against that time period and they're informed even in their offer letter that that is the case. And I talked to everybody in these meetings that I have and I asked them, what do you need from me to be successful? And so they can see what their, what their benchmarks are for the 1st 3 months. What do you need? Are you waiting for me on anything? How can I help you? And also proactively jumping in, if you see something, of course, and you almost always will see things that you're like, oh, I think I need to talk to you about that. And so we do that. Rebecca's right that there is a difference, so some positions, there's a lot of technical work and you can tell pretty quickly, I think usually if they're productive enough, if they're skilled enough, and if they're collegial enough, if they're, if they're being, if they're able to interact with our constituents appropriately, whether that's faculty or students or alumni, staff, And then for positions that have more responsibility that maybe they have their own staff and are reporting to me, I will check in with the team. I will check in with the people that they're working with and see how's it going, um, what are you hearing? And I will, I guess it's probably not the right exact word to say, but I will quiz them a little bit as we go through just to see if the things I would be asking if I were in that position, if they've learned them, if they're getting. A sense of what are the challenges they're going to have and how are they going to approach those challenges. My staff, my direct reports have come to tell me that these are called mic questions that, you know, they, they dread the mic questions and there's a little bit of that in the interviewing too, but I now know that there is a terminology for it, but it's really, it's often a Socratic method trying to get to the heart of, are you getting this? Do you understand what you, what your job is, are you learning? Are you working well with people? |
| 0:46:09.90 | 38.5s | Doug McKenna | I appreciate you both sharing your perspectives on the hiring process and the onboarding process. This is one of those things that I don't think we talk about enough explicitly because we do it all the time and a lot of times there's not training involved with like how to go about doing a search, conducting a search or making sure that the person that you've hired is actually the right person. And so thank you both for taking some time and sharing your perspectives. Is there anything that I didn't ask about? Your hiring and onboarding processes that you would have expected me to ask. |
| 0:46:48.76 | 47.8s | Mike Burke | The importance of networking. When I post something, I talked, I, I may have mentioned at the beginning that I'd like to enrich the the applicant pool, and that is not a passive action. It is seeking places where we might find qualified people, but it also might be placing a comment in someone's ear that We have this position open. Have you, uh, have you heard of it? Is this any interest to you? So I think on the recruitment side, we, we try to line up people that might be good for this, and ̽»¨Â¥ and our regional association, NEACRO has been fertile ground for us, uh, and certainly word of mouth from people that maybe I haven't met personally, but they've they've interacted with our staff through these associations and it's, it's been useful. |
| 0:47:37.26 | 15.9s | Rebecca Mathern | I want to just offer this one piece because I personally can tend to have a tendency to overanalyze things, right? My critical analysis skills are decent, but the length of time that I perform them for is sometimes too long. And so, |
| 0:47:55.41 | 0.0s | Doug McKenna | I recognize it. |
| 0:47:58.91 | 116.2s | Rebecca Mathern | Um, so one of the things that I try to do is I try to distill things into quick one-off questions that I can use to help think through decisions. And years ago, maybe 5 or 6 years ago, I read this article that in the interview slash article was from 2016, but Jim Koch, who is one of the co-founders of Sam Adams beer, was interviewed about leadership. And they started asking him questions about hiring. And at the end of the day, they said, Well, how do you know who to hire? And one of his sort of one liners in this interview was, I look at the candidates and I ask myself, will they raise the average of the team? And that to me has been a question that I have used to speed up my analysis paralysis that I can sometimes get caught in. So I look at these finalists, right? So a search committee or a screening committee has come up with 3 finalists, and I'm presented with them, and there's pros and cons about each candidate and they all seem great and you want to hire all 3. And I go back to that question that I read in this article, um, where he was being interviewed, because I think it helps to still so quickly whether or not you should bring that person on board. Because if the answer is no, I don't think it's a hire you should make, right? Right? And it's, and I would, I would say a failed search is better than a failed employee. It doesn't help anyone to hire someone who you don't think or you are worried about whether or not they can perform the work. So I would rather do a search 3 times to get the right person, bring in someone who can raise the average, then bring in somebody who were worried from the beginning about them being successful and having it not work out. That doesn't help anyone. Right. So that, so that's my nugget, right? That's one question that I put to myself every time I'm reviewing finalists for a position. |
| 0:49:55.47 | 25.2s | Mike Burke | I would agree with that and since I heard you say that some years ago, I've been using that too. So thank you for teaching me that. And I will convey something else I learned from another registrar, Doug from, boy, was he USC maybe? He said, what basically you're looking for is someone who's smart, hardworking and harmonious. So pair that with, will they raise the average and you're off to a pretty good start. |
| 0:50:23.52 | 37.5s | Doug McKenna | What a great conversation. Thank you to Mike and Rebecca for sharing their insights and tips for how to hire an onboard successfully. It's one of those areas where you can almost always improve, and hearing about how they approach it has been super helpful. And thanks to you for listening. What are you reading this summer? I'll post the link to the recommended reading list from a few episodes ago in the show notes, and I encourage you to dig into a good book, even if it makes you mad, maybe especially if it makes you mad, or if it's been banned. Oh, banned book summer. Let's go. |
| 0:51:07.17 | 6.7s | Doug McKenna | Until next time, drink some water, stretch your legs. I'm Doug McKenna, and this is for the record. |
| 0:51:32.96 | 17.6s | Rebecca Mathern | Part of our session that we participated in at ̽»¨Â¥ was about professional development and how we develop folks, and so, Doug, I'd like a guarantee from you that we get to come back sometime and talk with you about that topic because I think it's just as exciting. |