Facilitator Recruitment

Recruiting facilitators and guest speakers for your short course requires thought and preparation to ensure that you gather the right mix of people. This section gives you advice on where to look to recruit facilitators, what to include in your facilitator application form, and tips on interviewing and selecting your facilitators.

Where to Recruit Facilitators

Aside from reaching out to peers and others in your team's personal and professional networks you can reach out to alums from across the UWC movement via the UWC Hub. Here you can type in keywords related to your theme such as 'human rights' or 'sustainability' to find alums working in those fields, and approach them via the Hub to ask whether they're interested in facilitating at your short course or attending as an expert guest speaker.

You can also advertise your vacancies to the Hub community under the Opportunities section, and UWC International will also advertise your facilitator vacancies centrally for you, from the UWC International Job and Volunteer Opportunities page. To do this, please submit your facilitator vacancy descriptions and key details (application deadline, interview date etc.) in your endorsement form.

It's also worth reaching beyond the UWC network. Seek out local organisations which are aligned to the mission and values of UWC, or people working and/or studying in the field which you are exploring through your course - innovative Master programmes for example. You can contact these organisations and institutions to recruit facilitators and guest speakers.

You should find a balance between open applications and referrals. Commitment matters the most among your facilitating team, and it's often the hardest element to assess via an interview.

Facilitator Applications

Once you've decided what platforms you're going to use and which groups you plan to contact, you should gather expressions of interest or application forms from interested people. In this form you should include:

  • An introduction to UWC and the UWC short course (including participant group age and volume, duration and location)
  • An overview of facilitation to make everyone shares a common understanding
  • What you're looking for (specific role(s) and how many you will be recruiting)
  • Whether there will be any expenses covered
  • Deadline
  • Contact email address

Like with participant recruitment, how you develop your application form is at your discretion. Some things you should gather are:

  • Personal information (name and email address)
  • What they're currently doing (i.e. student, part-time employed)
  • What their interest is in your short course
  • How they heard about the opportunity
  • Why they would like to be involved
  • What role they would be willing to take on
  • Their specific interests relating to the vacancies (coordination, fundraising, participant recruitment, community engagement)
  • Whether or not they have a drivers licence
  • Confirmation that they are available during the dates of your short course
  • Their prior experience (possibly a CV upload option)
  • Details on their leadership experiences, and experiences working in and with similar groups

An example of a facilitator recruitment form, provided by the 2018 Transformational Crossroads team, is shown below.

Role Description Lead Facilitator, GLP 2018..pdf

Interviewing Facilitators

You may wish to interview your short list of potential facilitators, speakers and coordinators. To assist you in doing this, examples of interview questions are provided below:

Teamwork and overcoming challenges

  • Please tell us about one facilitation experience you have had. Elaborate upon challenges you faced and how you overcame them?

Affinity with participant group

  • As a facilitator/speaker/coordinator you will be running some workshops, but you will also be responsible for the general welfare of the participants. Describe how in your opinion facilitators/speakers/coordinators should best relate to the participants.

Decision making

  • As a team, we need to take a lot of decisions on site, how should the team ideally go about it?
  • All participants have arrived and spent one evening together. The next morning, the rules and guidelines for the Short Course, i.e. the next [X] weeks, need to be set up. Every participant will then have to strictly follow them. How would you go about setting rules and guidelines?

Resilience

  • The coordinator team has taken a decision that you are very unhappy about. How do you go about it?
  • A conflict has arisen between two team members. One of them has harshly criticised the other who has now completely dropped any level of communication within the team, and started excluding themselves to hang out with a group of participants, talking badly about the other team member. How can this situation be resolved?

Contribution

  • How do you see your contribution to the short course? What would you like to do? Which tasks would you love to carry out, which areas do you feel rather unconfident or less excited about?

Scoring Interviewees

During your interviews, it's helpful to 'score' interviewees against your assessment criteria. This will help you to select the best candidate for the role, once all of your interviews have been held. You may want to adapt the below assessment grid to help you. To use this, please make a copy and save it to your Drive, and edit from there.

Facilitator Assessment Grid

Role Reminder

A reminder of the facilitator role description, as per the Short Courses Organising and Facilitating Team Role Descriptions is again provided below.

Short Course team role descriptions.pdf