When it comes to recruitment, colleges don’t just compete for star athletes and gifted students.

Each year across the country, professors are offered housing incentives, endowed chairs or departmental prestige as universities court them in a process that can be all but invisible.

As Northwestern competes to build its faculty, it has teamed with other institutions to broaden its pool of applicants and make a career in Evanston seem attractive.

At the end of October, a Web site was launched for the Greater Chicago Higher Education Recruitment Consortium. Five of the 22 member institutions – NU, University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory – teamed up because they all had problems recruiting faculty and staff, said Jean Shedd, NU’s associate provost and the consortium’s NU representative.

“We’re focusing particularly on assisting dual-career couples in finding suitable employment for spouse or partners,” Shedd said.

The question of two academic careers can often make or break a candidate’s decision.

When Prof. Robert Orsi, the Grace Craddock Nagle Chair in Catholic Studies, joined NU this fall from Harvard University, he was looking for a place where both he and his wife could teach together. NU opened that possibility.

Orsi said NU was also “visionary” because the university hoped he could start a Catholic Studies program.

Expanding or developing a field of study can open up multiple positions. For the past year, NU has been trying to expand its Middle East faculty, recruiting for the political science, history, anthropology and art history departments.

“Ever since Sept. 11, 2001, the Middle East has become very competitive,” said history professor Carl Petry, who is spearheading the initiative. “The demand exceeds the supply.”

But unlike Orsi, who entered NU’s esteemed religion department, Petry said NU has not maintained a major center of Middle Eastern studies.

“We have to encourage (candidates) to come into a sense of a pioneering situation,” he said.

Though it might seem unusual for NU to partner with a rival like the University of Chicago, groups around the country have found that collaboration in recruiting reigns over competition.

DePaul University has been a member of the Chicago consortium since summer 2007, said Kelly Johnson, DePaul’s assistant vice president for academic administration.

One of the reasons DePaul joined the consortium was because it doesn’t have a unified electronic approach for faculty recruitment, she said.

“It can help us collect better demographic information from our applicants as well as tools that’ll help us improve our ability to recruit,” she said.

The members of the consortium want closer ties and more ways to help each other recruit and retain faculty, said Phyllis Brust, the consortium’s director and the former career director of the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

The most useful aspect for NU has been connections between the different provosts at institutions, Shedd said.

“Now I know who to call if I have a question or if I want to have a contact there,” she said.

Still, other schools have their own recruiting tactics.

Though his university is a member of Southern California’s Higher Education Recruitment Consortium, Michael Kassner, the chair of the University of Southern California’s Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Department, said he was unaware of USC’s involvement.

“The senior faculty are typically recruited on a one-to-one basis – they don’t apply through the usual channels,” he said.

There are also other variables, he said, including the general quality of a university, the academic reputation of the individual department, salaries and climate.

At NU the main aspect of recruitment is always “the fit with the candidate’s interests and goals,” Shedd said. Once that is established, the next step is to analyze what it’s like to live in Evanston.

The same is true in California, Kassner said.

“If someone wants to live in the same quality house and leave NU to come to USC, they might have to pay twice as much,” he said. “Often USC has to give them extra money for their housing or we can’t recruit them.”

To sweeten the deal, USC sometimes uses incentives like endowed chairs or professorships, which are common tactics in professor recruitment, Kassner said

“It’s not always just the money – prestige items can get added in (to a person’s decision),” he said.

Still, salary does play a part in the decision.

Although NU did not comment on the salary it offers professors, Kassner said NU pays “fairly well,” though he is familiar only with a few cases in his field.

“I think NU realizes that it has competition from places that have good academic reputations,” he said. “If they want to hold on to their faculty, they have to pay well.”

Kassner said USC tried to recruit three of NU’s faculty and that NU “doesn’t sit still.”

“In all three cases they made very good counter-offers to their faculty members,” he said.

Changing universities is no quick or easy decision for professors.

“Even in six years (at Harvard) I had a lot of students who were really counting on me,” said Orsi, now an NU religion professor. “(Changing universities) is something that people think long and hard about when they make a transition like this.”

When he moved to Harvard from his previous post at Indiana University, the decision took about a year, he said.

Yet he made up his mind in a week to come to NU.

“I felt I had done what I needed to do at Harvard, and I was excited and ready for a new challenge,” he said.

Reach Emily Glazer at [email protected].