For 10+ years, I had worked in the field of education – as a dean, department chair, and professor. As a result, I realize the significance of having quality faculty members in a department or as part of the school staff. Without them, you won’t be able to execute your mission of getting students ready to accomplish their ambitious career goals.

Additionally, a higher education institution and its individual schools as well as their respective departments must meet certain criteria to stay accredited. These include exhibiting that their professors are qualified for the post, possess proper credentials, and have generated positive student outcomes in the past.

If you’re a faculty member (such as dean, department chair, director, or professor) who has to lead the hunt for a new professor, how can you ensure that you’re recruiting an effective instructional leader consistently every time? The solution lies in asking the right interview questions. But how can you achieve this? Here’s a list of 21 interview questions that will facilitate finding quality professors.

1.     Share a promising educational innovation you know about. What makes it pioneering, what value-addition will it do for our university, and what steps have you taken to integrate it into your teaching?
2.     What inspired you to become a professor of (put in the academic discipline)?
3.     What motivates you to give your best effort?
4.     What category of higher education institutions would be suitable for you?
5.     Given a choice, which college course would you instruct?
6.     Why are you interested in this post at our university?
7.     For a university professor, what do you think is the perfect research, teaching, and service role?
8.     What percentage of time (and percentage weights) do you devote to research, teaching, and service?
9.     Talk about your research interests and how you visualize your research evolving with time during the next decade or so. 
10.   What resources would you require to finish your research?
11.   To which category of journals do you submit your research? Do you prefer working alone on your research or collaborating with others?
12.   How do your research interests line up with the mission of the school, department, and university?
13.   What’s your educational philosophy?
14.   How do you boost student learning in your class?
15.   What teaching processes and strategies do you employ in your classroom?
16.   How do you assess if your students have met your learning goals or not?
17.   How do you integrate tech into your classroom?
18.   How do you contribute to your field, university, and community?
19.   If you could alter a solitary thing in education, what would you choose, and how would you carry out that change?
20.   Since students of color are underrepresented in your domain, how do you propose to contribute to minority students’ recruitment and retention?
21.   On the professional front, where do you see yourself ten years down the line?

And that concludes this list. Don’t forget to share how this list helped you find effective professors.