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IV. General Recruitment Points
38. Recruitment Programme. A considerable amount of my time was
taken up discussing the recruitment time-table for 1975, including
a lengthy item in a meeting of the Academic Committee which I
attended. There are approximately 200 posts to be filled by
September 1975 and up to 70% of the appointees will have to be
found from overseas, mainly Britain. Successful candidates from
the latter must give notice by the end of May, and to prevent last
minute changes of mind and withdrawals it is considered necessary
to get the offers out by the middle of May. The only convenient
programme for the interviewing and the processing of recommendations
is unfortunately precluded by a visitation from the University and
Polytechnic Grants Committee fixed for mid-February, for which it is
mandatory that all Heads of Department and senior staff must be
available: and the incidence of Easter at the end of March isapher
awkward handicap. This means there would be barely sufficient
time to complete the recruitment process if all was to depend on
advertisements making their first appearance in January. Although
neither the staffing complement nor even the financial estimates
to 1975-6 had been approved, and December is always found to be an
unsatisfactory month for advertising, I was accordingly asked to
place trawl advertisements (which TETOC dislikes at the best of
times) on 6th December followed by more specific announcements in
January, and to stage two batches of interviews, the first of which
would not include Polytechnic representatives. It was not
practicable to refuse to publish the trawl advertisement but I
stipulated firstly that Polytechnic representation at the interviews
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