Iowa State enters LinkedIn contract to help with hiring, curb costs

In a hypercompetitive higher education landscape — where campuses are vying not just for top students but the best and brightest faculty and staff — Iowa State University has entered a new partnership with employment-centered social media platform LinkedIn aimed at making the campus “an employer of choice regionally and across the world.”

“The collaboration between Iowa State University and LinkedIn showcases the university's unparalleled career opportunities within the world’s largest professional network,” according to an ISU summary of its new partnership, which took effect June 1. “As a result of this partnership, all ISU jobs will now be featured on LinkedIn.”

Under the initial one-year contract, costing ISU $15,664, all job openings posted to its jobs website — including faculty and staff opportunities — now will be automatically shared to LinkedIn, where they’ll appear on the ISU company page.

Iowa’s other two regent universities also have company pages on LinkedIn promoting job openings, alumni and recent hires. But the University of Iowa doesn’t pay LinkedIn, meaning the social media job site simply scrapes postings from UI’s public hiring site to populate its UI-LinkedIn page.

The University of Northern Iowa also doesn’t contract with LinkedIn like ISU, but it does pay $1,500 annually for a “LinkedIn Recruiter Lite” subscription — letting hiring managers access a wider talent pool, search more efficiently for qualified candidates and message with prospects.

“This provides the functionality and flexibility that we find useful,” UNI spokesman Pete Moris said. “Hiring managers are offered the option of sponsoring a job to increase its reach when (human resources) is reviewing the recruitment strategy with them.”

Employment aches

Hiring aids, recruitment tools and retention efforts — including campuswide initiatives to attract and retain the best, brightest and sometimes the only available faculty and staff — have grown increasingly popular and necessary across colleges and universities in the wake of a pandemic-compelled workforce shake-up.

HigherEdJobs.com last spring conducted a survey that found 63 percent of responding institutions have seen their hiring demand increase since 2022. At the same time, 39 percent reported a drop in qualified applications, and 31 percent noted a dip in applications.

Some of the hardest-to-fill have been jobs in information technology and in facilities — like custodians and groundskeepers, according to the research.

A separate Higher Education Employee Retention Survey published in September through the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources found voluntary turnover among higher ed staff during the 2022-23 academic year was the highest it has been since the entity started tracking it in 2017-2018.

For full-time, exempt staff, turnover has nearly doubled from a low of 7.9 percent in 2020-21 to 12 percent in 2021-22 to 14.3 percent in 2022-23. By far, pay was the top reason employees said they left or wanted to, followed by remote-work opportunities, promotion and work schedule flexibility.

Leaders across all three of Iowa’s public universities have highlighted maintaining a strong and talented workforce among their biggest challenges and priorities.

“Building a campus community that is talented, inclusive, and rich in diversity of backgrounds and perspectives is fundamental to the university’s mission of excellence in teaching and research,” according to a UI “High Impact Hiring Initiative” to which it has committed nearly $16 million since 2021.

‘Save time and money’

Despite the campuses’ best efforts to fill their vacancies quickly and with top-tier individuals, all three are constantly hiring and continually promoting job vacancies — with the UI currently showing more than 900 openings, including UI Health Care jobs, graduate assistantships, postdoc opportunities and temporary posts.

ISU reports 76 vacancies across all departments — including athletics and its various colleges. And UNI, with a much smaller workforce, currently has 14 open jobs — from associate dean of graduate studies to custodian.

Before signing its initial one-year contract with LinkedIn, ISU was spending $30,000 a year to manually promote posts on LinkedIn, spokeswoman Angie Hunt said, with campus units and departments covering the cost to list job openings on the site.

“The partnership will save time and money — an overall cost savings of 50 percent — and it’s more convenient for job seekers as they can apply in Workday directly from LinkedIn,” Hunt said. “University human resources started exploring this new partnership with LinkedIn in September 2023 in an effort to reduce overall costs and improve efficiency.”

The partnership, according to Dawn Kepley, associate director of talent acquisition in ISU human resources, has five key benefits.

In addition to the cost savings and ease of application, potential candidates can opt in to receive job alerts via email for certain fields and positions, receiving notifications via their LinkedIn profile.

Candidates also can see ISU openings in their LinkedIn newsfeed. And ISU employees can share university openings with their own LinkedIn network.

"We're excited about this partnership,” Kepley said. “It will save time and money while also sharing our university job opportunities with an audience of millions.”

ISU also partners with the Higher Education Recruitment Consortium to share job openings at the university, costing $7,800 a year. And all three campuses have a recruitment contract with the Des Moines Register, costing an estimated $40,000 annually.

Other campus partnerships

Additionally, UNI buys “posting packages” through sources like HigherEdJobs, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Monster, Waterloo Courier online, and others.

Although the UI doesn’t have a LinkedIn contract and doesn’t plan to get one, it does have contractual agreements with HigherEdJobs, Indeed, the Higher Education Recruitment Consortium and CorridorCareers, operated by The Gazette. It also uses job aggregator Broadbean to automatically share job openings on boards like Talent.com, ZipRecruiter, Zippia, Iowa Workforce Development, Disabled Job Seekers, Seniors to Work, Veterans Connect and Jobs for Disabled Veterans.

Diversifying its job advertising has become increasingly important — with directives from lawmakers and the Board of Regents to “explore potential recruitment strategies for advancing the diversity of intellectual and philosophical perspectives in faculty and staff applicant pools.”

“We’ve updated resources for both types of searches (faculty and staff) to ensure that we’re thinking about and helping our (hiring) committee members think about intellectual diversity,” UI President Barbara Wilson told regents in April. “And we’ve added, particularly on the staff side, some new places to advertise positions that weren’t already in place.”

Although the UI didn’t immediately make available their contracts or spending on job recruitment and advertising partnerships, between the 2021 inception of the campus’ high-impact hiring initiative and May, it reported committing $11.7 million to fund 60 initiative requests, including 41 faculty recruitments across 10 colleges. For the new 2025 budget year, UI administrators have committed another $4 million to the initiative.

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com