As higher ed institutions face pressure to fill open positions and offer more flexible work opportunities, many are responding by recruiting and hiring employees who live and work in a state different from where their institution’s primary campus is located. CUPA-HR’s Multi-State Workforce Survey was developed to better understand institutions’ policies, practices and challenges related to out-of-state workers.
Notable findings:
- 89% of responding institutions employ out-of-state workers.
- The most common types of out-of-state workers are adjunct/part-time faculty and salaried/exempt staff.
- On median, institutions employ out-of-state workers from 8 states.
- Most institutions have restricted policies for both recruiting and hiring out-of-state workers.
- Of the one third of institutions who avoid hiring from certain states, the most common states institutions avoid hiring from were California, New York, Washington and Colorado.
- Many institutions provide salary ranges on job postings, but most do not adjust salaries based on location.
Despite the challenges of a multi-state workforce, excluding out-of-state workers can decrease the quality of the candidate pool and may cause institutions to miss out on top talent. Institutions pursuing, or considering pursuing, out-of-state workers may want to look at Clemson University’s hybrid approach to managing a multi-state workforce.
Charged by senior leadership to explore options for out-of-state employment, Clemson University’s HR team, led by Chief Human Resources Officer Ale Kennedy, convened a cross-campus workgroup that reached out to several schools about their out-of-state work approaches. After reviewing the data, the workgroup recommended that in-house HR manage the green or “easy” states and outsource the more challenging states in order to minimize risk. To learn more about Clemson’s approach — and the full findings from the Multi-State Workforce Survey — be sure to watch CUPA-HR’s recent webinar “The State of the Multi-State Workforce: Employment Practices and Challenges.”
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