Since I had worked as a university dean and a department chair in higher education, I understand how demanding leadership posts can be. In higher education, an administrator’s day is fast-paced and involves long hours with loads of work. This applies to the C-suite executive, middle manager, or lower-level director.

Higher education administrators need to deliver results in adverse conditions, produce revenue for their fields, and handle diverse teams of employees with varied goals and personalities. So, they must be transformational leaders who can walk competently down a lonely road filled with worry, stress, and backstabbers. But finding an effective higher education administrator is a challenging task.  

If you’re a dean, department chair, director, or professor, who’s leading the hunt for a new higher education administrator, how can you ensure you hire a true leader always, like clockwork? The secret is asking the correct interview questions. This list of 27 interview questions will help you accomplish the task of finding excellent higher education administrators.

1.     What kind of higher education institution would be suitable for you?
2.     What made you apply for this post?
3.     If you could alter a single thing in education, what would you choose, and how would you execute that change?
4.     On the professional front, where do you visualize yourself in ten years?
5.     What should be learning analytics’ role in higher education?
6.     How do you integrate technology into your daily work?
7.     What experience do you have with online learning platforms?
8.     How experienced are you in building private sector partnerships?
9.     How experienced are you in handling adult students?
10.   What do you think of competency-based education?
11.   Do you possess any higher education teaching experience?
12.   How do you work across departments within the university, especially those that don’t have adequate knowledge about how your domain functions?
13.   How do you think higher education institutions can benefit from social media?
14.   Have you ever written or co-authored a strategic plan?
15.   What’s your approach to combining career preparation with a higher education learning setting?
16.   Share your experience regarding a strategic plan development.
17.   What strategies do you use to integrate academic learning and career preparation?
18.   Have you ever developed and managed a university budget? If yes, explain the process you used.
19.   Our university is tuition-driven. What alternative revenue-generation avenues can you suggest for us?
20.   Share any community partnerships led by you.
21.   Are you experienced in boosting student retention rates?
22.   Share an unpopular decision you had to make, which impacted quite a few campus departments.
23.   How do you guarantee that your efforts will positively impact this university’s students?
24.   Are you experienced in handling public relations or community engagement?
25.   What’s your experience in the field of employee recruitment process?
26.   What motivates you to put in your best effort? 
27.   Share a promising educational innovation you know about. What makes it ground-breaking, what value can it offer our university, and how have you integrated it into your administrative procedure?

That’s the end of this list. Remember to share how it helped.