EDI resources for inclusive recruitment

The following resources have been curated as part of the updated PIMS Postdoctoral Fellowship process to encourage nominators to incorporate inclusive practices when recruiting candidates for nomination.

Comprehensive guides

• The Canada Research Chairs program's Equity, Diversity and Inclusion: A Best Practices Guide for Recruitment, Hiring and Retention is a common national reference across Canadian institutions and the baseline that many campus guides build on. It covers the full recruitment cycle and, while framed for academic hiring, most of it applies to any search, including nominating a candidate.
• UBC's Guide to Equitable Hiring Practices: Faculty Recruitment (Equity & Inclusion Office, May 2024) walks through eight stages from framing the search to onboarding with concrete practices at each step. It references some UBC- and BC-specific policies, but much is broadly useful.
• The University of Alberta's Best Practices for Faculty Recruitment is a concise, high-value guide on strategic search design, inclusive advertisements, and building a diverse applicant pool. It also makes the useful point that over-reliance on superlatives like "excellence" and "exceptional" in job ads can discourage strong candidates from applying.
• The University of Waterloo's Equitable Faculty Recruitment and Selection Toolkit is especially useful for its worked examples: it includes a diversity checklist for committees, examples of implicit bias in recruitment, and sample recruitment evaluation rubrics. Helpful if a nominator wants concrete templates rather than principles.

Understanding and reducing bias

• The Tri-Agency Bias in Peer Review training module is a short (~15–20 minute) interactive course explaining what unconscious bias is, how it affects evaluation and search processes, and concrete strategies to mitigate it. It was built for the research community and is the module the Canada Research Chairs program requires for its own committees. It's hosted on CIHR's learning platform: https://cihr-irsc.gc.ca/lms/e/bias/ and the same content is also available there as a PDF.
• The Canada Research Chairs Limiting Unconscious Bias in Letters of Reference guidance is a short, practical read for anyone writing a sponsor or reference letter.

Tailored workshops and local training

Many campuses offer live inclusive-hiring or search-committee workshops. One example is the University of Calgary's Precision Equity and Social Justice Office (Cumming School of Medicine) which runs well-regarded workshops and can be contacted directly through this page.

If your site would like PIMS to help coordinate a session, or has an in-house offering worth sharing across the network, let us know and we can help connect people.

A note on local policy

Employment equity legislation and institutional hiring policy vary across British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, and from one university to the next. The resources above give sound general practice, but for anything binding (restricted or preferential hiring provisions, self-identification data handling, required committee training) faculty should confirm the rules with their own campus HR or equity office.