UW announced a hiring freeze, which took effect on Nov. 18, the same day as the recent virtual operating budget town hall. This meeting emphasized the need for the university to implement new measures to reduce expenses.  “Earlier this year, we shared that the university faced a $75 million operating budget deficit for the current fiscal year 2024/2025,” Goel said during the meeting. “Despite decades of careful financial management pressures on the entire post secondary sector Waterloo is facing significant financial challenges now and in the years ahead.”

The university has been operating under a limited hiring program, which concentrated on finding efficiencies instead of automatically hiring when positions became available. However, the university has not been getting the results needed from this program, so effective immediately, all hiring for faculty and staff positions will stop now with limited exceptions. Externally funded positions are exempt from this hiring freeze. 

The university stated that around 80 per cent of their operating budget goes to employee salaries and benefits. The university will aim to reduce these personnel expenses caused by inflationary forces, such as salary costs rising. There will be rare exceptions to the hiring freeze for staff and faculty positions after a strict review process. For the faculty process, requests can continue to be made to advertise a faculty position at any rank. These requests will need to be submitted by the Dean to the Associate Vice-President, Faculty Planning and Policy. The request will be reviewed by a cross-instructional working group of senior academic leaders before making a recommendation to the Vice-President, Academic and Provost. 

It is now up to a department’s hiring manager to decide if a vacant staff role is essential to fulfilling critical operations at the university. The manager must ensure that there are no other  alternatives and contact their HR partner to discuss making an exception request. If an exception can be considered, the hiring manager will have to submit the request to their Executive Council Member, which will then bring it to their unit’s Vice-President for consideration. If the Vice-President supports the exception request, it will be submitted to the Vice President, Academic and Provost and the Vice-President, Administration and Finance for their consideration. 

The university highlights the circumstances that will now require an exception request to the hiring freeze. These include filling a vacant position, creating a net new position (either temporary or permanent), moving a contract position to a permanent position, and repurposing an existing position. Other circumstances include increasing the base salary for a current employee, replacing employees on leave, and extending a current temporary contract or backfilling an existing temporary contract.