Managing a Multi-State Workforce: Key Findings From the CUPA-HR Survey and a Public University’s Hybrid Approach

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.”