Staff quality challenge at a regional higher education institution: experience-based solution

This article describes the experience of Vladivostok State University of Economics and Service in staff policy on the example of open competition for academic and teaching positions. The aim is to look at approaches to solving staff problems at regional institutes. Today staff quality defines the quality of university performance. Staff selection is one of the main tasks for university management. In order to solve this problem concrete tasks for competition were formulated and solutions to each task were suggested. Tasks stated in the article were described by means of labor market analysis in the field of education, summing up experience of leading Russian universities in head hunting in Russia, conducting interviews with newly employed lecturers aimed at defining factors influencing the choice of an university, motivation and ways of looking for a job in an academic environment, use of expert evaluation method. As a result of using different staff management instruments the University managed to create an alternative competition, conduct rotation of about 10% of academic and teaching staff, increase the percentage of lecturers with academic degrees and lower average age of academics and lecturers from 47 to 42 years. Conducted research in this area will help other universities attract lecturers from external environment including other regions, ensure inflow of new ideas, create new academic trends and schools. In terms of academic novelty we should point out introduction of matrix as academic and teaching staff selection criterion. This matrix is formulated in terms of performance coinciding with lecturers' effective contract terms. В качестве научной новизны статьи стоит выделить внедрение матрицы как критерия подбора. In order to broaden the horizontal career opportunities outside the traditional position of an associate professor it introduces research associate professor and business consultant associate professor. Each of the new positions has its own effective contract form according to its title. The University sees this project not only as an important step towards developing its own staff potential, but also as an input into the development of the city and Far East region, which faces an acute problem of brain drain among qualified staff.