How to solicit feedback from students about faculty candidates? I am the grad student on the hiring committee, and I have been tasked with gathering feedback from grad students about our faculty candidates. All of the grad students were invited to attend each candidates job talk and an open meeting between the candidate and students.

My first attempt was to simply have the department send out a mass email telling the grad students to email me with their feedback. The next thing I tried was asking a handful of students from various labs to attend the talk and meeting then email me with feedback. So far I have received zero feedback on any of the candidates. 

I believe my problem is that these talks are often sparsely attended (e.g., only people in the same field as the candidate) since many students have no motivation to attend and my feedback requests have been too open ended (e.g., feedback on what??).

How can I improve this process?

My ideas:


A rubric of what aspects to give feedback on
An organized committee of students that provide feedback and try to get other students to attend
As someone who was a graduate student until recently, I would have no idea how to respond to a request like this. Even if I were qualified to judge potential faculty hires (which I very much am not, even now, as a postdoc) you've simply asked for "feedback" without giving any specifics. Do you know what kind of feedback you're looking for? You have to answer that question for yourself first.

It sounds like this task was thrust on you. Can you get anything more specific from whoever put you in charge of this? 

This whole thing sounds odd to me. In fact, I suspect it's really all for appearances, to make the grad students feel included or to appease some high-level administrator who thinks it's a good idea. If you think that's the case, my advice is to provide free food for grad students after the job talks (without the free food, no one will stay) and hand out evaluation forms with a few questions about the content/style of the talk. The forms are unlikely to be read by anyone, but you'll accomplish the task you were given and the students will get free food. Everyone wins.