Journal of College & University Student Housing Vol. 47 No. 3 - 84

Across institutions, the variety of strategies and philosophies for hiring
paraprofessional RAs results in as many different RA hiring infrastructures
as there are existing departments. As a result, no two systems are
necessarily consistent, making them difficult to study.
the most consistent feature is some level of
reduced room and board rate. Therefore, we
used the " combined charge for room and
board " mean of $9,341 (n = 432; U.S. Department of Education, 2019) as the standard
total value of an RA's remuneration package. For the purposes of this analysis, we assumed RAs worked 20 hours per week for
two 16-week semesters plus two additional
weeks of training and closing responsibilities
totaling 34 weeks of employment. Therefore,
tan RA's hourly rate converted to $13.74.

Planning and Application Review
We only considered staff involvement for
components with a specifically defined time
duration. For example, certain components
have a defined start and end time (e.g., a
structured interview lasting 30 minutes, an
interest session lasting one hour) whereas
the time involved in reviewing applications
varies by staff member. Therefore, time spent
in interview components and during the interest session was included while time spent
reviewing candidate applications was excluded. We also did not include the amount of
time spent by the recruitment committee
planning, marketing, and recruiting candidates even though " [c]ommittees consume
time " (Murphy, 2015, p. 145).

Optional Components
When offered, interest sessions may be optional for candidates while other processes
require attendance to advance applicant candidacy. We decided to include the personnel
time involved in hosting interest sessions,
even if optional, since the act of facilitation re-

quired dedicated resources even in the event
a majority of candidates opted not to attend.

Candidate Elimination
Occasionally, but especially with larger candidate pools, departments will reduce their
applicant pool based on candidate performance in preceding components. Put another way, departments will only advance
the highest performing candidates to subsequent components in their hiring processes.
Such practices will save personnel resources due to a lower number of candidates, but
the variability of when and how this practice
occurs between departments increases the
complexity of generating generalizable and
comparable example processes. Therefore,
we assumed any reductions in candidate
pool size occurred after application review
but before extending invitations to interview.

METHOD AND ANALYSIS
To understand the investment necessary to
facilitate RA hiring processes, we created a
" baseline " departmental recruitment process based on commonly employed structures, components, and formats to serve as
a miniature case study. The baseline process included interest sessions, structured
interviews, group process, and an assumed
staffing structure. Next, we presented minor alterations to certain components to explore changes in personnel time and wages
between the baseline and altered processes:
size of groups in group process, number of
group process stations, eliminating group
process, alterations to structured interviews,

Volume 47, No. 3 * 2021

Journal of College & University Student Housing Vol. 47 No. 3

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