Successful recruitment is essential for KTH
Jens Bardarson, member of the SCI School Faculty Board, sees faculty recruitment and development as one of the most important issues for the board right now. During the latest meeting, discussions included improving communication between the Faculty Board and the Faculty Council, as well as decisions to initiate recruitment processes for new positions in advanced light microscopy and biophysics. “It is important that we manage to speed up the recruitment process while at the same time making sure we maintain a high level of quality,” he says.
What were the main discussion points of the last meeting?
"We had a visit from Susann Boij och Felix Ryde, who are members of the Faculty Council, and we discussed how to communicate efficiently between the Faculty Board the and the Faculty Council. We also had a few information points where the Dean of Faculty gave us some background on "Quality system for research" and "Broadened recruitment and participation". These two subjects will be a central focus for us in the coming months. But perhaps the most important discussion was related to the decision to initiate a recruitment procedure (Beslut om att påbörja ett anställningsförfarande) for an associate professor in Advanced light microscopy and an assistant professor in Biophysics."
Why are these issues particularly important to the Board right now?
"One of the main ideas behind the establishment of the Faculty Boards was to bring decisions closer to the activity. One of the important tasks of the Faculty Board is the recruitment of faculty, which is now largely done at school level. Faculty recruitment is extremely important for the development of the university and it is essential that we have clear and principled procedures in place to ensure that we can recruit excellent faculty. While we are of course building on the established procedures and processes we have used in recent years, it is one of our main tasks now to establish new School level procedures for faculty recruitment. It is important that we succeed in speeding up the recruitment process while ensuring that we maintain a high level of quality."
Is there any particular area or issue that you think the Faculty Board should focus on?
"For me, faculty recruitment and faculty development is the most important task that we have. This is why I have agreed to be the vice chair of the Faculty Board's Appointment Committee. In the committe we work with the actual individual recruitment, i.e. deciding on the appointment profile, assigning external experts, evaluating applications and interviewing candidates. But it is the Faculty Board that decides on the initiation of each recruitment, and it is there that we have the challenge of finding good principles on when to agree to the opening of a new position and when not. Personally, I think that the school needs to make a detailed long-term plan for faculty renewal, initiated in the departments and anchored in the faculty, including the Faculty Board. But this is a process that we have only just begun to work on, and while we have the broad outlines of how we want recruitment to work, over the next few months we will be fine-tuning these and finding out what works well and what works less well."