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2023 DEI 2.0 Plan Report

Faculty Recruitment & Retention Practice Initiative

Thanks to ADVANCE’S STRIDE Faculty Recruitment Workshop and the Office for Health Equity and Inclusion’s (OHEI) new Faculty Development Unconscious Bias in Hiring training program, all Ann Arbor campus faculty—including those within Michigan Medicine— have access to relevant content that underscores our shared commitment to diversity, equity and excellence in recruitment and hiring.

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Since 2002, the Committee on Strategies and Tactics for Recruiting to Improve Diversity and Excellence (STRIDE) offers a Faculty Recruitment Workshop on U-M’s Ann Arbor campus focused on enhancing diversity and excellence in faculty recruitment and addressing any structural biases in hiring practices based on an evidence-based approach. Unfortunately, clinical scheduling barriers make it nearly impossible for Michigan Medicine (MM) faculty to attend the Faculty Recruitment Workshops on a regular basis.

In Fall 2022, to bridge this gap, the Michigan Medicine Office for Health, Equity, and Inclusion (OHEI) and the Office of Faculty Development (OFD) developed a new training initiative tailored to the specific needs of medical and basic sciences faculty, hospital staff and Graduate Medical Education (House Officers). These workshops target MM community members involved in faculty, staff and resident recruitment, offering both foundational knowledge and practical advice to enhance the effectiveness of candidate searches.

ADVANCE has had an extended relationship with Michigan Medicine. During DEI 2.0, the Director of ADVANCE intends to engage in conversation with OHEI to further support faculty recruitment and retention within Michigan Medicine. Ideally, conversation between ADVANCE and OHEI could lead to identification of key elements that should characterize and form the basis of strong and effective faculty recruitment workshops for both Michigan Medicine and non-Michigan Medicine faculty on hiring committees. Identification of these key elements can inform the development of faculty recruitment workshop content (specifically, content that includes the most up-to-date research evidence, strategies, and approaches) that is uniform across schools and colleges but with recommended practices and procedures that are tailored to the various ways that faculty searches are conducted within different schools and colleges.

The ultimate goal is to develop workshops that have broad objectives that include:

  • Collaborating with department chairs and leaders to bolster broad diversity, including with respect to underrepresented minority (URM) recruitment
  • Addressing a wide range of pertinent goals, from recognizing current hiring nuances to mitigating any bias-related effects during the hiring process 

ADVANCE and OHEI are committed to achieving productive campus partnerships, sharing and implementing best practices to meet shared goals regarding faculty recruitment, retention, climate, and leadership.

Responsible Unit(s): ADVANCE and the Office for Health Equity & Inclusion (OHEI)