Student Centers Team Highlight: Student-Led Hiring Team
by Virginia Richards and Catheryn McDowell
Student Centers offers our student employees the opportunity to apply their skills beyond their respective building areas in smaller employee teams. These smaller employee teams allow our student staff to work in more intimate professional settings on specific projects and objectives. One of these teams is our Student-Led Hiring (SLH) Team. Check out some insights on SLH from the Project Manager of the team, Catheryn McDowell, below!
When was the SLH Team founded?
While we have had students involved with the hiring process throughout the years, the team was officially founded in Fall 2021 to create a more formalized student-led process.
How many team members are there?
We are a five-member team! Bri is our [Graduate Assistant] lead, I am Project Manager, Caroline just joined as our Marketing and Outreach lead, Andy is in charge of Candidate Communications, and Gracie does our Interview Logistics.
What are the objectives of the team?
We strive to create an efficient and friendly hiring process for the entirety of Student Centers. By creating a student-run process, we hope to give our current student workers the power to help select their future coworkers and community in order to create Student Centers environments that meet the needs of our Vanderbilt community and workers. Further, through this process, we hope to give our team members valuable experiences and skills to help them in their future career aspirations.
How do members of the team facilitate the hiring process?
We facilitate all steps of the process from marketing that we are hiring, to application creation on eRezLife, [application] review, interviews, communications of decisions, and all the way to sending over beginning steps of the hiring paperwork. To do this, our team works together to divide labor into manageable sections and train other employees on how to interview and take part in the hiring process successfully.
Do team members interview prospective employees of Student Centers?
Yes! While we are currently not entirely independent of pro staff in our interview process, a goal of this semester is to create training on both interviewing and implicit bias to prepare students for the interviewer role.
What is the team currently working on?
We are currently working on establishing a rolling hiring process. Upon reflection and conversation, we realized our traditional one significant hiring push is no longer sustainable and efficient for our spaces. We hope to do a monthly hiring push to staff our spaces effectively starting this semester. On top of this, we are creating new training for student interviewers, exploring new marketing tactics, and looking into how to best prepare the committee for the selection and integration of its latest members upon graduation of the seniors (such as myself).
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SLH offers our student staff an opportunity to be directly involved in choosing their future colleagues. Student staff members are integral to the functioning of Student Centers and the Vanderbilt community, and we are fortunate enough to have such capable students leading us through the professional hiring process! Go SLH!