Administering faculty searches across an institution can be daunting—not only do you have to consider the logistics of the search process itself, but you also have keep up with data about applicants and positions across your institution, in every division and department. We’ve heard from our administrative users that finding meaningful patterns that span the entire university can be really difficult, if not impossible.
But here’s some great news for our administrative users: we’ve just released a new feature in ByCommittee Faculty Search called Combined Reports that makes running reports simpler and more comprehensive than ever before. Now, administrators have the ability to run reports on all of the data involved in faculty hiring across their institution and can create custom reports based on filters such as position information, forms, and institutional unit.
If you’re an administrative user, you’ll find the new Combined Reports feature on the Reports page of ByCommittee Faculty Search. Once logged in, you’ll be able to draw upon data across departments and schools to run detailed reports about your institution, bringing together data that could previously only be accessed by running multiple reports or looking in various places. But the new feature isn’t just comprehensive, it’s also customizable. Combined Reports allows you to filter all of the information about faculty hiring at your university by category in order to obtain the exact results you need.
This type of flexible searching and reporting is based on the same technology you’d find on an online shopping website, like Amazon. Here’s a simple analogy: you’re online trying to buy a new laptop, and decide you want to see all laptops made by Toshiba that have at least 4 GB of ram and are priced between $200 and $300. In this example, selecting brand, ram, and price allows you to see products that meet all three criteria. We’ve created a similar experience with Combined Reports: administrators can create a report that spans their entire institution, but filters by unit (pulling everything in the College of Liberal Arts, for instance), position (all the English, History, and Philosophy positions for that year), degree of applicant (Ph.D. in hand, or just A.B.D.), and applicant response to customized questionnaires included in their application packet.
One of the most important and user-requested aspects of this feature is the ability to filter applications by applicant responses to custom forms (the self-built questionnaires administrators can create and add to an application). Combined Reports also includes the ability to filter by EEO data, as well. Administrators with access to EEO data will be able to use Combined Reports to gather lists of applicants who have given specific responses to EEO form questions.
And to be clear: nothing will change about who has access to data in ByCommittee; if you’ve set permissions, they’ll stay in place. The only change will be a more robust way to create reports across your institutional hiring processes.
There are lots of way to use Combined Reports, but our hope is that it is now much faster to discover and report on all of the information gathered over the course of your institution’s hiring process.