LEAD 6163 Module 2 Recruitment and Selection Strategy Example

Recruiting Nurse Faculty Where Few Apply: A Grow-Your-Own Pipeline, an Honest Job Preview and a Structured Selection Process for a Rural Nursing Department

Student Name

American College of Education

LEAD6163: Management of Human Capital

Module 2 Assignment

Instructor Name

October 19, 2026

Introduction

My Module 1 analysis put the department's need at roughly 30 full-time faculty hires over five years, against a recent pace of three a year, and that the hardest losses to replace are doctoral preparation and knowledge of our clinical partnerships. This paper designs a recruitment and selection strategy for that gap. It draws on research about how organizations attract applicants and choose among them, and it adapts that research to a rural department whose open positions often draw two or three applicants.

What Recruitment Research Suggests

Breaugh (2008) reviewed research on employee recruitment and organized it around decisions employers make: whom to target, which recruitment sources to use, what message to send, when to recruit and how the site visit and job offer are handled. Among the findings he emphasized were that the people an organization targets and the sources it uses shape the quality and fit of the applicants it gets, that recruitment messages should give accurate and specific information and that applicants judge an employer partly by how they are treated during the process. For our department, the most important implication concerns targeting: we have been advertising nationally for applicants who rarely want to move to a small Panhandle city, while overlooking the nurses already living here.

Recruitment Strand 1: Grow Our Own

The region's hospitals employ about 140 nurses with master's degrees, and several dozen more are enrolled in online graduate programs. Many of them have precepted our students and know our clinical sites. The first strand turns that pool into a pipeline. Each year the department will offer four teaching fellowships to master's-prepared local nurses: a one-semester paid appointment teaching a clinical group alongside an experienced faculty member, with a course in teaching methods and an offer of a full-time position for fellows who meet the department's standards. For nurses enrolled in doctoral programs, the department will offer a tuition contribution in exchange for a teaching commitment of three years. A nurse who already lives here, knows our hospitals and has taught one of our clinical groups is the closest thing to firm-specific human capital that a hiring process can find.

Recruitment Strand 2: Targeted External Recruitment

Some positions, especially doctorally prepared faculty for the nurse practitioner track, will still require external recruitment. Rather than national postings alone, the department will target three groups more likely to accept: faculty with family ties to the region, identified through alumni networks; doctoral graduates of programs in Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico; and experienced faculty nearing the end of careers in larger cities who might prefer a smaller community. Advertisements will name the specific advantages the department can offer, including a lower cost of living, a collaborative small faculty and a clinical practice day each week for nurse practitioner faculty, rather than generic language.

An Honest Job Preview

Faculty who leave within two years often say the job was not what they expected: heavier clinical supervision, long drives to rural clinical sites and lower pay than practice. Phillips (1998), meta-analyzing studies of realistic job previews, found that providing applicants with accurate information about a job, including its drawbacks, was associated with modestly lower turnover and attrition and slightly better performance, with effects that varied by how and when the preview was delivered. The effects were small, but in a department where each departure costs a year of recruiting, small effects matter. Every finalist will spend a day with current faculty, including a ride to a rural clinical site, and receive a written description of workload, salary and the first year's expectations.

Selection

Selection has traditionally relied on an unstructured conversation with the search committee and the dean. Schmidt and Hunter (1998), pooling almost a century of findings on how employers choose staff, reported that interviews run from a fixed script and tests that ask candidates to do a slice of the real work forecast later job performance far more accurately than an open conversation does, and that pairing methods forecasts better still. The department's selection process will therefore combine a scripted interview, posing an identical set of questions to each finalist about teaching, clinical supervision and working with students who struggle, scored against agreed anchors, with a work sample: a 20-minute teaching demonstration with current students in the room, followed by a debriefing in which the candidate reflects on what went well. For fellows from the grow-our-own strand, the fellowship semester itself serves as an extended work sample.

Fairness in the Process

A structured process is also a fairer one. When each finalist faces the identical script and every answer is judged on preset anchors, committee members have less room to favor candidates who remind them of themselves, a risk in a small department where most faculty trained at the same two universities. The search committee will include a faculty member from outside nursing and a clinical partner representative, and members will score candidates independently before discussing them. The grow-our-own fellowship raises a fairness question of its own, since fellows enter through relationships with faculty; to keep it open, fellowships will be advertised to every partner hospital and selected with the same structured interview used for permanent positions. The region's nursing workforce includes many Hispanic nurses, and the fellowship's advertising will be shared through the local chapter of the national Hispanic nurses' association as well as hospital channels.

Expected Yield

If the four fellowships each year convert at about 60%, the pipeline would produce about 12 hires over five years. Targeted external recruitment, if it raises applicants for each posting from two or three to five or six, might fill four positions a year. Together the two strands could approach the 30 hires the gap requires, though the doctoral positions will remain the hardest to fill. These estimates will be tracked each year against applicant numbers, offer acceptance and first-year retention.

Timing

Academic hiring follows a calendar that often works against rural departments: by the time our searches close in late spring, many candidates have accepted offers elsewhere. Searches will open in September for the following fall, and fellowship applications will close in October so that fellows can teach in the spring semester and be offered positions before the national hiring season ends.

Risks

The grow-our-own strand could pull experienced nurses away from partner hospitals that are themselves short-staffed, damaging relationships the department depends on. The fellowship will therefore be designed with the hospitals, allowing fellows to continue part-time clinical work, and offered first to nurses whose hospitals support the arrangement. A second risk is that fellows hired locally may lack doctoral preparation, which the tuition commitment addresses only over several years.

Conclusion

A rural department cannot recruit its way out of a faculty gap using the methods of a large urban university. This strategy targets the nurses already here, tells every candidate the truth about the job and selects with methods that research shows predict performance. Module 3 will turn to developing the faculty the department hires, because recruitment fills positions but development keeps them filled. The test of the strategy will be simple: whether, three years from now, the department's vacancy rate has fallen below 10% without draining the hospitals that train our students.

References

Breaugh, J. A. (2008). Employee recruitment: Current knowledge and important areas for future research. Human Resource Management Review, 18(3), 103-118. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2008.07.003

Phillips, J. M. (1998). Effects of realistic job previews on multiple organizational outcomes: A meta-analysis. Academy of Management Journal, 41(6), 673-690. https://doi.org/10.2307/256964

Schmidt, F. L., & Hunter, J. E. (1998). The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings. Psychological Bulletin, 124(2), 262-274. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.124.2.262