Each year, FSW appoints/renews 15 teaching assignments. The appointment process is complex and takes 9 months on average. At each step in the procedure, communication takes place with various stakeholders within and outside of the faculty, such as the Executive Board, relevant research and programme directors and the department chair, the Appointment Advisory committee and sister faculties. There is no single owner for the entire process; within the faculty, this is the board. The nature and content of the process beg for care and confidentiality.
What do we want to improve?
We want to become more efficient and reduce the margin for error in the appointment process. The limitation here is that we cannot remove, modify or add steps in the process without consulting the Executive Board. We have therefore limited ourselves in this project to matters for which we are the process owners, allowing us to implement changes ourselves.
Approval for open and closed recruitment
In order to improve efficiency, we have looked at the stakeholders in the faculty, among others. The appointment request is made by a research director, programme director and department chair. One of the current follow-up steps in the process is to ask the two directors to approve the appointment of the candidate nominated by the Appointment committee. This is a logical step for open recruitment, but not for closed recruitment, considering the candidate was nominated by the directors themselves. Therefore, this step will be skipped in closed recruitment processes from now on.
More efficient correspondence
During the process, we also looked into the content of correspondence and the way in which it is formatted. There are a number of templates in Word that contain many fill-in fields. It consistently costs a lot of time to find the needed information and put it in the letter. For each letter, we considered its essence, which information is generic and specific and consequently scrapped everything that was superfluous.
Every letter mentions which teaching assignment it concerns, which units are involved, whether it is an open or closed procedure, a regular or special teaching assignment and which external party is involved. This information is already known at the start of the process and usually does not change. That is why, from now on, we will create a one-off overview at the start of the process, containing this recurring information. This overview will then be included in all letters and referred to in the letter. This reduces the amount of searching and the risk of errors.
For the letters, a template will be made in Xential (the application with which we generate letters), with only a few fields left open for each letter, linked to the process phase.
We expect that the above changes will save our department approximately 80 hours per year in the appointment process.
Next steps
Once these steps have been taken, we in the Faculty Office department want to continue optimising the appointment process, for example in terms of how we send the information to the various stakeholders.