Director – School of Engineering for leading universityLeadership Search
Traditionally, engineering institutions are conservative and reluctant in appointing young leadership. However, looking at the declining interest in engineering education across India, progressive institutions are considering young academic with dynamic personality and global outlook.
EduShine assisted one of the leading engineering focused university in searching Director – School of Engineering.
The Institution
The institution is one of the oldest private universities of India.
The university has more than 8000 students on campus and it is focused on Engineering & Technology courses at UG and PG level. The university is positioned as a premier institution, benchmarked against global academic standards. The engineering school has 3000+ students studying across UG and PG courses in various subjects.
Recently,due to transfer of management control and change at academic leadership the university is going through transformation process. It is professionally managed institution with dynamic work culture and academic rigour.
Search Objective
The university is going through transformation process, from being a traditional academic driven university to dynamic globally competitive university. To meet this institutional goal, the university aspired to appoint a young, dynamic academic leader with proven track record in large institution.
Director – School of Engineering is one of the most important position from the university point of view.
The objective was to hire Director – School of Engineering, who can rejuvenate traditional institution and bring balance between academic rigour and student learning experience.
Search Strategy
The university is a large engineering focused university with 3000+ students in school of engineering. The university board wanted young and dynamic academic leader with proven track record. However, EduShine provided the pragmatic view of the Indian education ecosystem and available talent. Based on discussions, university board and EduShine agreed upon securing high potential academic leader who worked under mentorship of exceptional academic leader in a large quality focused academic setup.
EduShine mapped 26 universities / engineering institutions meeting with these criteria and prepared a long list of 11 candidates. After internal evaluation, EduShine recommended 5 shortlisted candidates to the university board.
The Outcome
The university board met with all the 5 candidates recommended by EduShine. After rigorous selection process, consisting of 6 rounds, the university board selected 2 candidates and extended the offer to the first choice candidate.
Unfortunately, due to mismatch in candidate expectations and university’s standard compensation, the university was not able to offer the compensation expected by the candidate. EduShine assisted the university in compensation negotiation with the first choice candidate on one hand and kept the secondary choice candidate engaged. In spite of all the efforts from the university board and EduShine, the first choice candidate declined the offer.
As the search was time sensitive, immediately after offer decline by the first candidate, EduShine initiated compensation discussion with second choice candidate and university board made him the offer. Finally, the candidate joined the university during the second week of April.
The newly appointed Director – School of Engineering is MTech & PhD from IIT Delhi with 5 years of industry experience and more than 15 years of experience in academia, consisting 7 years of academic administration in engineering focused premier university. He also has teaching experience in Europe and Singapore.