Faculty profile pages are the often-overlooked superstar of graduate student recruiting. Many prospective graduate students identify potential degree programs based on faculty information. Yet, these valuable, highly trafficked pages are too often neglected and underutilized due to lack of personality and thin or outdated content. Not only can you utilize faculty profile pages to recruit graduate students, but you can also save your faculty members time and effort with an online presence that helps connect them to students.
So how do you go about maximizing the potential of these pages? First, it’s valuable to understand the key role faculty pages play in your web ecosystem.
Why are faculty pages so important to graduate student recruitment?
While they may be several levels deep in your information architecture, faculty pages are the front door to your website for a lot of visitors.
When we look at Google Search Console data, it often shows faculty names are among the top searched-for terms driving traffic to college and department content. We regularly see faculty profile pages showing up among the top landing pages for these sections.
Review your faculty profile pages from the perspective of a first-time visitor to your website. Do these pages offer easy and obvious links to the academic programs a faculty member is affiliated with? Do they provide clear routing to related areas of the site such as research and graduate student admissions? If not, you’re missing an opportunity to connect these pages to other critical content in the prospective student journey.
Next, consider the top tasks of prospective graduate students. As part of our journey mapping service, Carnegie regularly conducts in-depth interviews with students about the application and enrollment process. Prospective graduate students consistently tell us that they start their research by reviewing faculty profile pages to identify potential advisors with similar research interests. As one prospect told us:
“You really have to look into, what are the faculty doing? What are their labs researching right now? Making sure that the faculty aligned with my research interests and that their faculty interest pages were up-to-date was a big thing.”
Read more about our research on marketing to graduate students.
Highlight which faculty are open to new graduate students
While graduate students are searching for faculty by research interest, they’re also looking to see if they’re accepting new graduate students. You can do one better than listing research interests by clearly identifying faculty that are accepting new students, which is information prospective students are craving. One prospective graduate student told us:
“It was very frustrating because of all the emails I sent, just one lecturer from [institution name] contacted me. Nobody else did. It was heartbreaking. If you don’t have funding or you cannot take me, I just wanted a reply so I can move on.”
For your faculty, clear information about openings or requirements for potential advisees can cut down on unwanted or irrelevant emails. Have a way for faculty members to indicate whether or not they’re open to inquiries, how best to make contact, and what information they should send.
Use faculty pages to showcase the person behind the research
Prospective graduate students don’t just want to find an advisor with similar research interests— they want to find a mentor. Students told us about details like shared hobbies or being from the same home country as key factors in helping them feel confident about their choice of prospective advisor. Make sure to include a personal bio that helps site visitors get to know the person, not just the research. In the words of one graduate student:
“Your advisor is much more of a boss figure, between your teaching and your research obligations. Me and my advisor really hit it off on a personal level. This person is supposed to usher you through two to three years of professional development.”
Maintain faculty pages for best results
Keep faculty pages simple and to the point. Not only will cutting down on content ensure pages are user friendly but it will also cut down on time spent on updates and maintenance.. If your faculty members are maintaining detailed CV content elsewhere, you can link to it from your institutional web pages.
To keep these pages useful and usable, develop simple, achievable processes around updating faculty pages. When content can be evergreen, such as a bio, make sure it is. For more fluid content, consider an online form faculty can fill out to request updates. Soliciting updates on an annual basis is generally sufficient and aligns well with hiring cycles when new faculty are joining your institution. Finally, enlist your champions and allies like deans and department chairs when you need a supporting voice reminding faculty that an up-to-date web presence is key to many of their goals.
Faculty Profile Page Checklist
Your template for faculty profile pages should include the following:
- A personal bio: Written for a lay audience, explain who this person is, what they do, and why it matters to them. Provide some guidelines for faculty members to help standardize content submissions. Do you want them to use first person or third person? About how long should the bio be? What essentials are you asking them to include?
- A high quality and recent photo: Strive for some degree of uniformity here, but consider your institutional culture when setting photo guidelines. For some institutions, professional headshots may be the way to go. For other schools, photos of faculty doing field research or engaging in a hobby can add a little personality. Whatever style you choose, appropriate cropping and resolution are critical to achieving a polished look.
- Contact info: For many visitors, that’s the main draw of this page. Make it easy to find.
- Program affiliations: Include a faculty member’s college, department, or school affiliations, and list the graduate programs in which they teach.
- Representative publications, presentations, and awards: Focus on a few high-impact or generally representative publications here to give a flavor of someone’s work without trying to be exhaustive.
- Courses taught: Some institutions have integrations that allow dynamic display of a faculty member’s current course schedule. That’s great, but if you don’t have that, don’t worry. A static listing of representative courses will help prospective students get a sense of what they could learn from this professor.
- Links to news stories, media coverage, or research publications: Establish expertise and authority, which in turn can boost SEO. We often see faculty profile pages get more traffic at the college or department level than news pages, so if you have news or accomplishments for a particular faculty member, consider these pages as places to promote that content.
Don’t let faculty pages fall by the wayside of your graduate student marketing strategy
Faculty program pages should be a key consideration in your college or university’s graduate student recruitment strategy. Want to learn more about how Carnegie can help with your higher education institution’s website? Let’s connect.