Vice President of Business & Administrative Services Update

Dear Colleagues,  

Shoreline Community College Procedure 4111 Equal Opportunity in Recruitment & Hiring provides the opportunity for exceptions to the normal hiring procedure in unusual, or unforeseen emergency circumstances as determined and authorized by the College President under Section 9.  You may recall in my Trust memo #1, I stated “Since I arrived on July 1, 2022, all new positions reporting to me have been and will continue to go through the standard recruitment and hiring processes. Appointments will only be considered under rare/unique circumstances and will still involve input from the campus.” 

In terms of permanent positions, the College is in the process of responding to significant staffing and operational gaps in all areas of fiscal management. Recent recruitments in both the Budget and Financial Services offices have failed due to a lack of qualified applicants, and in some cases recruitments had no applicants at all. This situation presents as a rare scenario of urgent need and I believe it would make sense for the College to utilize any means possible to identify and immediately bring in individuals from similar state-wide positions with expertise in the areas we are lacking amongst permanent staff.  

The College is aware of an executive level person in our CTC system who may be interested in our Vice President of Business & Administrative Services (VP-B&AS) position. In order to be totally transparent with our campus community and to work toward the goal of stabilizing the College, I am moving forward with a modified recruitment that will expedite the process but still involve targeted campus feedback as part of the decision-making process.  

Step One: I met with union leaders to discuss this process. Both unions expressed an appreciation for the transparency and that while they believe a full recruitment is ideal for all positions, the situation here was a reasonable one to consider an alternative method. 

Step Two: Communication to campus (this message).  

Step Three: Assemble an interview team comprised of (a) Two Classified with connection to B&AS (b) Two admin with connection to B&AS and (c) Two faculty members (one from the Strategic Planning & Budget Council and another from a discipline that overlaps in content expertise (accounting, economics etc.), and 2 Students.  

Step Four: Have candidate meet with the Interview Team above, B&AS leadership, and ET. 

Step Five: Have all groups provide feedback to me as Hiring manager (as we normally do) 

Step Six: Take all perspectives into consideration, and make a decision about the candidate. 

 Step seven: Alert the campus as to the result. 

My intent is to genuinely listen to the campus leaders providing feedback here and allow this to be a shared process for decision making. Though this isn’t as ideal as a regular recruitment practice, it does allow us to move quicky in hope of resolution to urgent fiscal need at our campus.  

If you have questions, please let me know, I hope you can appreciate the attempt to develop this compromise method at a challenging time. 

Cheers,

Jack

Jack S. Kahn Ph.D.

President