Chair/Lead:  Roberta Lembke

Members: Kristell Benson, Jeff Dixon, Shelbie Pleskonko

The Problem

While LITS hiring practices have carefully followed college procedures, it has not been enough to significantly change the diversity of the staff. For our services to be seen as truly available to all in the St Olaf community, everyone must be able to find themselves mirrored in the faces of the LITS staff.

Goals

Increase the diversity of the staff and ensure that for each hire we go beyond the basic recommendations prescribed by Human Resources. LITS will add additional measures to our staff searches to broaden the pool of candidates and change our practices and procedures to give all candidates a more equitable opportunity to be selected for an interview and potential hire.

Actions Taken

A small team of staff will be formed to research and document best practices in hiring diverse staff. Some possible ideas could include:

• inserting a DEI statement in each job description (see next section), 
• removing gendered words from postings and descriptions (such as dominate, ambitious, challenge, decisive, etc.), 
• removing the preferred statements from postings and descriptions (as some groups of people automatically remove themselves from the pool if they don’t think they have those qualifications),
• changing job postings to include the benefits of employment with St. Olaf (salary, retirement contributions, workout facilities, taking classes, etc.), 
• expand the advertising reach to include non-traditional schools (HBU’s) or websites like hiretechladies.com. 

Accomplishments so Far 

1. A DEI statement has been written and work to update all descriptions will begin in June of 2021 and will continue over the course of 2022 academic year.