by Denise L. Davidson and Mark Bauman
Michael walked anxiously into the large multipurpose space on his college campus. It was a Saturday afternoon, and he was here because he was considering becoming a resident assistant the following year. After all, his RA had been instrumental in helping him acclimate to college life, and Michael liked the idea of helping others in the same way. After finding the registration table, signing in, and putting on his nametag, he looked around the room. What he saw did little to decrease his anxiety about what was to come during the next three hours. He didn’t see many people who looked like him, let alone people that he knew. While he leaned up against a wall, quiet and alone, he watched other students clustered together, actively chatting, most appearing energetic and excited. “Maybe being an RA isn’t for me,” he thought.
Eventually the group was asked to find their assigned seats, and the program began. As the day moved on, Michael and the others navigated a welcome speech, icebreaker exercises, and a number of different small group activities. Throughout, he felt out of place in a group of outgoing peers, was uncomfortable about being observed, and continually was worried that he wasn’t behaving the right way. At one point, Michael found himself sitting in a circle with others around a stack of paper plates, markers, several sheets of newspaper, a box of cotton swabs, a carton of eggs, and several other items. “What,” he wondered, “do eggs have to do with being an RA?”
In recent years, a growing number of institutions are reconsidering what exercises with eggs, and other group activities, actually do have to do with selecting which students would be most successful as an RA. This is a notable development in a field where the group experience has long been a mainstay of the RA selection process. The process itself can vary from campus to campus, but most involve a small group of candidates who collectively engage in at least one activity while being observed and evaluated by residence life and housing staff. For example, at Lafayette College, following a written application, recommendations, and conduct and academic status checks, candidates engage in a group activity and two individual interviews. The purpose of the group process is, for Terrence Haynes, Lafayette’s assistant director of residence life, “to see candidates in action, working with each other.”
The group process has practical applications as well, serving as a means to efficiently communicate information to all RA candidates and to minimize oversized effects on professional staff. Haynes notes that current RAs lead and facilitate the group process. Partly out of tradition, this tactic offers leadership experiences to the RAs and reduces demands on their small number of professional staff.
For many years, this framework of group and individual interactions has guided various residence life and housing programs. Observing candidates in real time has been a key element to the group process at many institutions. Yet there are those who, like Spenser Norman, assistant director of campus life at Arcadia University, have wondered, “Are we just doing this because we've done it in the past? Do we really need to be doing this still?”
Questions about the RA group process tend to revolve around ethics and efficiency. Ethical principles offer a useful guide to residence life and housing work at any time and are especially helpful in times of disruption and tumult. Karen Strohm Kitchener, a noted psychologist who studied the process of complex decision-making, applied five ethical principles to student affairs work, an extension of those used in the biomedical field: respecting autonomy, doing no harm, benefiting others, being just, and being faithful. In this case, being faithful relates to an individual’s loyalty, dependability, and – central to any hiring process – trustworthiness.
The re-evaluation of the group process, as well as the development of novel and interesting methods to gather information about candidate abilities, may mark a dramatic shift in one of the most traditional aspects of campus residence life departments.
The ethics of a group process was a specific concern for Joe Hawkins, assistant director of residence life at Miami University, who approaches RA hiring in general and the group process specifically from a research and data perspective. Upon assuming responsibility for RA hiring, Hawkins took time to educate himself about RA hiring practices. At the time, the group process was an element of Miami’s RA hiring process and, according to Hawkins, department personnel believed that it offered the opportunity to “actually see [candidates] practicing their leadership styles, and [staff could] actively observe what roles they might fall into when they went in a group.” However, a close examination of data revealed that group process scores at Miami made no statistically significant difference to hiring decisions. In other words, the same hiring decisions would have been made without group process scores. Hawkins commented, “If no one's making decisions based on [group process], why are we using it?”
Though some programs, like the one at Miami, have removed the group process component and have relied instead on one or more individual interviews, others have combined a conference interview approach with a touch of informal interaction. The University of Rhode Island (URI) stopped using the group process several years ago when Kayla Mosko, assistant director for residential education, noticed that evaluator feedback was not contributing to hiring decisions. Bearing some similarities to Hawkins’ revelations at Miami, Mosko notes that, even after considerable training of evaluators, “there wasn't a lot of meat and potatoes to [the feedback] . . . and there wasn't much we were learning about the candidate. If we can't make good hiring decisions based on this process, we're kind of wasting each other's time.” At URI, the group process involved a three-day commitment for staff in addition to advance preparation, which “felt like it was a lot of time for not a lot of gain,” according to Mosko.
Currently, the URI hiring process resembles a conference interviewing approach where candidates engage in four individual interviews and, between the interviews, gather in a waiting area with a few current RAs. The RAs engage with the candidates, help them debrief the previous interview, and gather informal information about the candidate’s experience with the process. As Mosko explains, the individual interviews allow professional staff interviewers to meaningfully interact with a considerably greater number of candidates than they observed during the group process. This helped meet a key priority for the professional staff.
Echoing Mosko’s concerns about trustworthiness and the utility of evaluations arising from observations of candidates during the group process, the University of North Texas residence life team, led by Amanda Vaughn, assistant director for residence life talent management, is radically re-envisioning hiring for RAs, housing ambassadors, and facilities assistants. Under the new process, RA applicants must meet a grade point requirement, be in good conduct status, and achieve a minimum score on their written application. Professional staff use a rubric, shared in advance with candidates, to evaluate each application. As Vaughn describes, staff are selected via lottery from the group of candidates who meet all three qualifications. The lottery is drawn based on specific housing configuration needs that may arise, such as gender-fluid housing. “Part of the concept is everybody is trainable,” said Vaughn. “I can train this staff member if you can already prove that you can be a student leader by meeting the qualifications of the GPA, having the conduct check done,” and developing a strong written application. From this perspective, eliminating all interviews removes concerns that arise from poor interview skills, nervousness, feeling unwell, and a myriad of other issues that may negatively affect a candidate’s trustworthiness and validity.
In another departure from the group process, Indiana State University requires applicants to complete a two-credit 200-level course on peer leadership. Amanda Knerr, ISU’s executive director of residential life, compares the group process to the ability, through this course, to “watch them do activities; we can see how they engage, and see how they're learning” in a greater number of activities and contexts and across a 16-week semester. The 11 course instructors, all residence life professional staff, develop a summary of each applicant’s progress. This is combined with the written application and recommendations and reviewed prior to their selection meeting. Knerr, who will become the associate vice president for student affairs and director of housing and residence life at Ball State University, notes that campus partners have remarked on how the students coming out of the class are better employees and leaders than the ones hired through general applications. As a result, oftentimes those other departments will funnel their applicants into the pre-hire class.
The re-evaluation of the group process, as well as the development of novel and interesting methods to gather information about candidate abilities, may mark a dramatic shift in one of the most traditional aspects of campus residence life departments. With these new approaches, hiring managers can better assess students like Michael who may possess many of the hallmark traits of a successful RA – such as leadership, responsibility, empathy, and communications – but may not best demonstrate them in the midst of a condensed, hectic, and unfamiliar exercise. Clearly, the traditional approach to the group process is evolving in new and exciting ways as campuses demonstrate that it is possible to elicit more insightful hiring decisions, achieve multiple goals, and keep the needs of the department and residential students front and center throughout the process.
Denise L. Davidson, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Educational Leadership and College Student Affairs program at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania. Mark Bauman, Ph.D., is an associate professor and program coordinator of the Educational Leadership and College Student Affairs program at Bloomsburg. The authors previously wrote about using the group process for RA selection in ACUHO-I’s The Journal of College and University Student Housing.
