This year’s Row house staff application process included a new step that aimed to expose all applicants to all houses. In the new process, prospective Row staff applied to particular residences, but participated in group interviews for all of the houses, due to a new Residential Education policy. Current staff interviewed rotating groups of about a dozen candidates for three-hour stints, four nights in a row. The new process allowed applicants to gain exposure to other residences and later express interest in additional houses to which they did not originally. Row staff then extended individual interviews to selected candidates.

Though this process increased applicants’ exposure to co-ops, several of the houses are nonetheless struggling to find staff.

Many self-op Row houses, including Phi Sig, Bob and Mars, had vastly more applicants for staff positions than many co-ops, which meant that self-op applicants outnumbered their co-op counterparts in group interviews.

Stanford co-ops differ from self-ops in that co-op residents are responsible for the house’s cooking and cleaning, while self-op residents have a hired cooking and cleaning staff.

Co-op house managers in houses such as EBF and Kairos were confident they had a good selection of qualified applicants, but staff in Terra worried that despite the new interview system, their applicant pool was smaller than last year and it looked like they would lack a Residential Computing Consultant (RCC)

“I think we had one applicant for RCC, but I think he was applying to all Row houses,” said current Terra RCC Amanda Christian ‘08. “We’ve asked other co-ops to tell any co-op-minded RCC applicants we would like to interview them.”

Justine Seidenfeld ‘08, a fellow Kairos staffer, said that in theory, introducing all applicants to all house staff allowed co-op staff to recruit more potential applicants.

“If you see someone during the interviews who you think would make a good candidate for your house, you could invite them to an individual interview,” she said, as applicants could potentially approach a staff member of a house where they had not applied and arrange an interview with them.

Co-op staff nonetheless expressed dismay that many participants in the group interview process were not interested in living in a co-op.

“It would have been helpful if they had had a separate group interview process for co-ops,” said Seidenfeld, who is the Kairos kitchen manager. “There were times when everyone would introduce themselves and list the houses they were applying to, and there wouldn’t be anyone in the group applying to a co-op.”

EBF kitchen manager Ruth Levine ‘08 estimated that only about five percent of total applicants applied to both co-ops and self-ops, and the majority of participants in the group interview process were only interested in self-ops.

“It’s a waste of our time to sit for three hours to hear from applicants not applying to co-ops,” she said. “I don’t want to hear the life story of a sophomore applying to Bob when I need to be studying for midterms.”