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Higher Ed’s Hiring Crunch Was Already Bad. It Got Worse Over the Summer. By  Megan Zahneis September 26, 2022

A trying year for hiring in higher ed only worsened over the summer, according to a survey of college leaders this month, fielded by the Chronicle with support from the Huron Consulting Group.

Of 446 respondents, 64 percent reported that hiring in July, August, and September has been more difficult compared to the rest of the year, and 32 percent said it was about the same. “The pandemic and its aftermath has created a tsunami of hiring and retention challenges that would have been unimaginable three years ago,” one leader wrote. “And I’m afraid it will get worse long before it gets better.”

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A trying year for hiring in higher ed only worsened over the summer, according to a survey of college leaders this month, fielded by the Chronicle with support from the Huron Consulting Group.

Of 446 respondents, 64 percent reported that hiring in July, August, and September had been more difficult compared with the rest of the year, and 32 percent said it was about the same. “The pandemic and its aftermath has created a tsunami of hiring and retention challenges that would have been unimaginable three years ago,” one leader wrote. “And I’m afraid it will get worse long before it gets better.”

The problems plaguing hiring managers are many and well-documented: For example, fewer people are applying to jobs, and institutions often aren’t able to offer them competitive salaries. As several respondents to the survey — among them presidents, directors, human-resources administrators, and chief finance and information officers — pointed out, employees’ demands for remote- and hybrid-work allowances often cause friction for campus leaders who are looking for on-campus staff members. Adding to the difficulty for at least one respondent was that human resources was among the departments experiencing understaffing, making higher ed’s notoriously slow hiring processes even more protracted.

But campus leaders noted in open-ended survey responses that market forces aren’t entirely to blame for poor results. “The excuse we hear or give ourselves for weak applicant pools or unsuccessful searches is, ‘It’s just the job market right now,’ when often it’s our hiring processes or pay structures,” one respondent wrote. “Higher education is notoriously slow to react to the pressures of the job market that demand higher pay, compared to our private-industry competition for skilled labor.”

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