“Building a ship is not about weaving sails,
forging nails, or reading the stars.
It is about awakening in people a taste for the sea.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Citadel

In this edition of the blog, TSU Rector Eduard Galazhinskiy invites us to look at the university’s employer brand not as a fashionable management topic, but as a question of institutional maturity. Today, a university competes not only for applicants, grants, and positions in rankings, but also for strong people: those who can teach, do research, bring teams together, launch new formats, and hold complexity. That is why the conversation about staff development is no longer about an auxiliary function. It is about what kind of place a university becomes as an environment for work, professional growth, and personal development. Why academic freedom needs a supportive infrastructure, why the simple logic of “rejuvenation” is risky, why TSU needed a dedicated Human Resources Development Office, and what a university as the employer of the future should look like: these are the questions at the center of this new blog entry.

— Eduard Vladimirovich, we are used to speaking about the university primarily through education and research. Why is it no longer possible to think about its future without also speaking about it as a place of work for strong, talented, and ambitious people?

— Because a university is not only an institution of knowledge. It is also a form of professional life. People do not spend just an episode of their working lives here, but a significant part of their biography. And these are people of a particular kind: complex, demanding, accustomed to thinking independently, and highly sensitive to the environment around them. Today, almost everything depends on how that environment is organized: the pace of development, the quality of decisions, the fate of research schools, the resilience of educational programs, the ability to respond to challenges, and the ability to avoid losing strong people along the way.

For a long time, universities could rely on the inertia of their own symbolic capital. For us, this is above all the legacy of Tomsk Imperial University. Simply belonging to a great academic tradition compensated for a great deal. People accepted overload, tolerated imperfect processes, and overlooked organizational failures because the place itself mattered to them. But today that inertia is no longer enough. The university exists in a much denser and more dynamic environment than it did twenty or even ten years ago. A teacher, researcher, engineer, administrator, instructional designer, or analyst now compares not only an institution’s status, but also the quality of everyday professional life within it. People quickly understand how others are spoken to here. Whether roles are clear. Whether their time is respected. Whether this is a place where one can grow, rather than merely survive. Whether one has a voice, room for initiative, the right to make mistakes, and access to feedback. If those things are absent, then talk of mission, tradition, and values may still sound attractive, but no longer convincing.

That is why the university of the future is competitive as a workplace not only because of its name, its campus, or its grant record. Its competitiveness shows in the way everyday life is organized. How does a young researcher enter a team? What does a lecturer feel in the first three months after stepping into a new role? Does an employee understand where they can move next? Do they spend their energy creating something new, or overcoming internal friction, opacity, and bureaucratic barriers? That is why the question of people has ceased to be a secondary theme. It can no longer be postponed until after supposedly “real” problems have been solved. This is the question of the university’s fate as an institution. A university stands not only on ideas, and not only on infrastructure. It stands on the quality of the environment in which a person can think, create, argue, take risks, build teams, grow, and stay for the long haul.

There is one more factor that is often underestimated. In a classical university, a person comes not only to a position, but into a particular cultural mode: a space of long memory, intergenerational dialogue, complex autonomy, and a high density of meaning. If that environment is poorly organized, it begins to work against itself. Outwardly, the university may remain strong and prestigious, while inwardly becoming a place of accumulated fatigue. Then young people arrive expecting freedom and horizons, but encounter opacity. Mature staff carry unique experience, but do not feel institutionally recognized. Managers spend their days extinguishing overload instead of developing the potential of their teams. In that sense, the employer brand is not an ornament of the university. It is a form of its internal honesty.

— Today, discussions of employer branding increasingly use the term EVP, the employer value proposition. How applicable is this language to the university? Is it too corporate for the academic world?

— At first glance, it may indeed seem more like the language of business than of the university. But in essence, it refers to something without which a modern university can no longer function. An employer value proposition is an honest answer to the question of what exactly the university offers a person in exchange for their knowledge, time, professional energy, and loyalty. And here it is important not to oversimplify. A value proposition is not just salary, benefits, and a convenient schedule. If that is how we think, we quickly turn the university into just another player in a market bargain: whoever pays more wins. But a strong university cannot build its relationship with people as a business transaction.

Modern approaches to EVP show precisely this: what keeps a person for the long term is not only material conditions, important though they are. What keeps them is the opportunity to grow, to belong to a strong professional community, and to see meaning in their work. This is especially true of the university person. It is telling that in the difficult 1990s, when the considerable treasures of TSU’s Research Library and museums were still only loosely inventoried, no one laid a hand on them; everything was preserved. In other words, by its very nature the university is not simply a place of employment and material gain, but a space of intellectual development, professional dignity, and socially meaningful work. That is why the university’s value proposition must be broader than an ordinary HR package. It begins with decent and transparent working conditions, but does not end there. It includes the opportunity to teach and do research in a living environment, to grow professionally and realize one’s strengths, and to feel that one’s work matters to students, to scholarship, and to society.

And perhaps most importantly, the university’s value proposition cannot be merely declarative. It cannot simply be formulated elegantly on a website. It must be confirmed by the real experience of employees. If a university speaks of freedom but people feel only bureaucracy, if it speaks of development but career pathways are opaque, if it speaks of community but a person lives in institutional isolation, then no powerful wording will help. That is why, for us, the question of the university’s value proposition is not a matter of fashionable terminology. It is a matter of institutional maturity. How honestly does the institution understand what it can offer a strong person? And how capable is it of fulfilling that promise?

— At what point does the question of people become strategic for the university?

— The moment we truly acknowledge that no strategy implements itself. One can write a strong development program, identify frontier areas, create new centers, align projects, and lay everything out in roadmaps. But if the university lacks an environment in which strong people want to work seriously and for the long term, all those documents remain nothing more than a well-designed scheme. It seems to me that universities have treated the personnel issue for too long as a supporting contour: important, yes, but still secondary to research, education, and innovation. That perspective now has to change.

Not because the language of fashionable management demands it, but because reality itself has changed. Increasingly, universities run not into a shortage of ideas, but into a shortage of environments capable of holding those ideas, unfolding them, and passing them on. That is why personnel policy today is not only about staff shortages, though that certainly matters. It is about the quality of the human environment that determines the scale of what is possible for a university. In other words, the question is no longer how many people we have. The question is whether the university environment itself can strengthen a person, or gradually exhaust them. In this respect, our university has enormous potential to strengthen people. Otherwise, we would not have people capable of creating a world-class laboratory such as the microelectronics lab, or of developing the university’s cultural center in such a way that it becomes a place of attraction for the whole city.

— What does a university lose if it does not know how to work with its internal community?

— If we speak of the earliest and most dangerous loss, it is the loss of pace and trust. At first, nothing especially dramatic is visible. People go on working, performing tasks, and even showing respectable results. But inside, fatigue begins to accumulate. A feeling emerges that energy is going not into development, but into mere overcoming. A person begins to conserve effort, proposes fewer new ideas, and links themselves less and less to the future of the university.

Then other losses begin to appear. Loyalty weakens, because it cannot rest on former greatness alone. It becomes harder to attract strong people fr om outside, because they read the atmosphere very quickly. Continuity begins to erode when experienced staff no longer feel needed, while younger colleagues see no clear route for themselves. A dangerous gap appears between beautiful institutional rhetoric and the actual experience of everyday work. That is why working with the internal community is not a concession to the HR agenda. It is a question of institutional honesty. If a university wants to remain a place of strength, it must know how to be a strong environment not only for the student, but also for the employee.

— What exactly has changed, within the university and around it, that has forced us to view the employer brand not as a secondary function, but as a distinct strategic direction?

— Several things have changed at once. First, the university has ceased to exist in a relatively stable academic environment wh ere one could slowly accumulate reputation and rely on familiar forms of personnel reproduction. Today we are in a situation of high turbulence: technologies are changing, the labor market is changing, forms of employment are changing, expectations of work are changing, and ideas of professional self-realization are changing. The university is not standing outside these processes. It is inside them. Second, the cost of an кадровой ошибки? Let's translate clearly. Second, the cost of a personnel mistake has changed. Poor hiring decisions, unclear roles, or overloaded procedures used to be problems too, but they did not always immediately affect strategy. Today they do. One strong researcher can build an entirely new school. One failed management node can destroy a whole team. One overburdened lecturer can lose their feel for university life for years. Complexity has grown, and with it the price of internal carelessness. Third, the university is now competing much more sharply not only for students and resources, but also for people who can work at the intersection of science, management, technology, design, and communication. This is a very scarce type of professional. And they do not choose only between universities.

— In other words, the university has found itself in a fundamentally new kind of competition: no longer only, or even primarily, for students and grants, but for people capable of working at the intersection of research, management, technology, and communication?

— Exactly. And perhaps this is one of the most underestimated shifts of recent years. By inertia, we still imagine university competition through the applicant, the ranking, publications, and grant funding. All of that matters. But today something else increasingly proves decisive: who exactly will make the university complex, alive, and strong fr om within. What is scarce now is not simply a good teacher or a strong researcher in the traditional sense. What is scarce is a person who can think interdisciplinarily, build a team, speak with industry, and understand project logic without losing scientific depth. It is no accident that the draft personnel strategy at TSU includes new roles: research engineers, technology entrepreneurs, technology brokers, product managers, and experts in data governance and educational design. This is not a fad for new terminology. It is an attempt to honestly name the new personnel reality in which the university lives. And the competition for such people is not taking place only between universities. It is taking place between universities and IT companies, EdTech, industrial R&D centers, research platforms, and international projects. We have already begun to see people emerge fr om within the academic environment who are capable of holding a substantive dialogue with industrial partners in their own language, something that was not the case before. And if the university wants to be persuasive in this struggle, it must offer not only higher meaning, but a professionally well-organized life.

One telling example of such a systemic, or at least comprehensive, approach is ITMO. The university has both a staff development strategy, wh ere employees are named a core value and strategic resource, and a dedicated recruitment and onboarding center responsible not only for hiring, but also for developing the employer brand and helping new employees enter the environment. It is no accident that ITMO has for years been among the better-known employers in St. Petersburg, standing out as a rare university able to speak about itself in the labor market in a contemporary rather than bureaucratic language.

The Russian experience of HSE University is also instructive. There, onboarding new employees has been placed within a distinct management contour: the university offers not just formal induction, but dedicated materials and entry scenarios for integrating into the environment. At first glance this may seem like a detail. But it is precisely in such details that the maturity of an employer becomes visible. A strong person evaluates an organization not only by the content of the work, but by how quickly it helps them cease to feel external and begin to feel part of a whole. In this sense, a university’s employer brand begins not with a presentation of values, but with how a new employee lives through their first week, first month, and first semester.

There are also interesting Asian examples worth studying. At Nanyang Technological University (NTU Singapore), for instance, there are dedicated entry pathways for early research careers. At the National University of Singapore (NUS), staff development is directly linked to the idea of the “flexible university,” which should not only demand flexibility fr om people, but create conditions for their deep professional growth. This is a very important shift: a strong university no longer waits for a person to adapt to complexity on their own. It learns to accompany them within that complexity.

— When we speak about the university’s employer brand, what are we actually talking about: reputation as an employer, the experience of everyday work, culture, the quality of leadership, the clarity of career routes, or all of these at once?

— All of them at once, but not as a mechanical sum of features. I would put it this way: employer branding is the way all these elements come together into an integral human experience. It is very easy to oversimplify the issue and reduce it either to polished external communications or to a set of benefits. But an employer brand is born neither in a presentation nor in a slogan. It is born at the point wh ere promise and reality meet. A person comes to the university, reads the website, hears the right words about freedom, development, respect, and opportunity, and then encounters real organizational life. That is wh ere everything is decided. If the words are confirmed by experience, the brand begins to work. If they are not, then a crack opens between the promise and everyday reality, and the employer brand very quickly turns into a reputational debt.

So the university’s employer brand, as a kind of composite image and shared understanding of it as a workplace, is of course about reputation, culture, quality of leadership, career routes, and the style of internal communication. But the main thing is the alignment of the institution’s image with its everyday practice. Not at the level of rare exceptions, but at the level of norm. The Russian labor market shows this clearly. Candidates increasingly check an employer before they ever come into contact with it, and strong professionals are especially sensitive to the gap between what is declared and what is real. In this sense, it is no longer enough for a university to be respected in the broader public sphere. It must also be comprehensible, honest, and internally coherent for its employees and students.

— What, in your view, does a person read first when they arrive at a university as an employee?

— Certainly not declarations. Atmosphere. And they read it literally in the first few days. A person quickly understands whether people answer here or remain silent. Whether one can ask a question without feeling like a nuisance. Whether one is welcomed into a living environment, or is immediately dropped into a space of disconnected functions and overburdened people. A first impression of the university as an employer is formed not by strategic documents, but by the micro-gestures of the environment: how understandable the entry point is; whether the person feels they were expected; how onboarding is organized; whether they can see coherence between units. Finally, one hears it in colleagues’ voices: fatigue, irritation, indifference, or on the contrary attentiveness, professional composure, and interest. That is why an employer brand cannot be “made” by the efforts of a communications team alone. It can only be grown fr om within. A university may talk endlessly about freedom, respect, development, and dialogue. But if, in practice, a new employee spends months not understanding who is responsible for what, wh ere to seek support, and how their path is structured, the employer brand collapses at the point of entry.

Of course, we must admit that in matters of internal communication we have more often relied on self-organization than on the development and maintenance of conscious strategies. In some places, our actual practice of professional relations still falls short of the high standards we speak about today. But unless those standards are articulated, it is impossible to see the horizon toward which we all should be moving. That is the central point of today’s conversation. Incidentally, in this respect we have something to learn fr om Asian universities. For example, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) explicitly links the attraction, development, and retention of talent in its public rhetoric to care for people as the university’s key asset, not simply as carriers of functions. At first glance, this looks like an elegant formula. But behind it stands an important managerial idea: a person is retained by the university not only through task and status, but also through the quality of the institution’s attention to them.

From HKUST’s strategic development plan through 2031:

“What makes a university great is its people. Our highest priority is to attract, develop, and retain outstanding talent. The University will create an environment that enables members of the community to realize their multidimensional potential. Together, we will build a community of lifelong learners and innovators capable of changing the world for the better. Our staff play a vital role in every aspect of our mission. HKUST will recruit for all positions efficiently and on a competitive basis, and will strive to become an employer of choice by offering a supportive and dynamic work environment and by remaining competitive in the market. A priority task is to strengthen a culture of performance that rewards outstanding results and provides opportunities for career advancement. This will include support for staff learning and development through leadership and management training programs for mid-level and senior leaders, as well as advanced training programs in new technologies.”

In general, many universities recognized this issue not because they fell in love with beautiful words, but because practice forced them to. One can create a strong research project, win a major program, and assemble a rare team, only to discover that people do not integrate well into the system, burn out quickly, or leave not because of the content of the work, but because of organizational ambiguity. And then a simple truth becomes clear: an employer’s reputation does not collapse in a public scandal, but in quiet professional conversations. One strong colleague who leaves often takes away not only their own expertise, but also several potential candidates whom they will no longer recommend that university to as a place for long-term work.

— You have already mentioned academic freedom as one of the university’s most important values. How do you see the balance between that freedom and the need to build a more systematic, supportive environment for lecturers and researchers?

— It is very important here to move away fr om a false binary. Sometimes freedom and system are presented as two competing forces: either we have a free university wh ere everyone acts as they please, or we have a well-organized environment, but at the cost of losing freedom. In my view, that is simply the wrong way to frame the issue. Freedom without support quickly becomes loneliness, while system without freedom becomes a quiet dead end. Academic freedom is not freedom fr om the university. It is freedom within the university. It is the right to think, search, argue, test hypotheses, take intellectual risks, and follow not the easiest trajectory. But for that freedom to be real rather than declarative, it needs a supportive infrastructure. It needs understandable rules, transparent procedures, a normal administrative foundation, respect for the scholar’s and lecturer’s time, and protection fr om meaningless organizational noise. Today, academic freedom can no longer be defended only as a principle. Increasingly, it must be defended as an organizational practice. Because a person may be formally free, yet in reality live within an environment of chronic overload, opacity, and micro-bureaucracy, and then the space of freedom begins to contract. That is why the university has a double duty. On the one hand, to support intellectual risk, bold hypotheses, and interdisciplinary experimentation. On the other, to create such conditions that a strong person does not spend most of their strength servicing the internal complexity of the system.

— One would very much not want our colleagues to feel that the emergence of a new line of work “for their benefit” will simply lead to more workload, more procedures, and more control. How can that be avoided?

— This is a very understandable and very fair concern. It is crucial here to distinguish support fr om control. Support and system do not necessarily mean a stronger vertical. Sometimes, and especially in universities, they mean the removal of unnecessary pressure. Everything that does not require the unique intellectual effort of the scholar or lecturer should be organized in such a way that it does not drain their inner energy. When a researcher receives help fr om strong internal administrative services, when approval pathways are clear, when they do not have to collect data manually fr om several systems, and when HR and service processes do not humiliate people through their opacity, that is not control. That is normal organizational care for the university’s chief resource: human time and attention. And here we must be honest: sometimes university culture romanticizes the overcoming of difficulties. As if a genuine employee must endure everything, figure everything out alone, push through ambiguity, and prove the seriousness of their intentions through suffering. But that is not a sign of a strong environment. It is a sign of an immature one. A strong environment does not cultivate unnecessary obstacles just so that people can later heroically overcome them.

— The personnel agenda constantly returns to the theme of young employees and young scholars. But how do we avoid turning that logic into an overly simple scheme in which a person’s value is measured primarily by age?

— It seems to me that this is one of the most dangerous managerial simplifications. A university is not a startup that can be quickly rebuilt simply by replacing one team with another. It lives in long time. That means continuity matters especially here, as does the transmission of criteria, established schools, styles of thinking, and forms of professional conversation. That is why the word “rejuvenation” must be handled with great care. It is necessary as part of personnel policy, but becomes destructive when it turns into an ideology. The university needs youthful energy. It needs the entry of new people. It needs early careers, new practices, and new disciplinary and interdisciplinary formations. But it needs no less the maturity of those who have already come a long way, built schools, and learned to see beyond the horizon of the current project. The internal situation at TSU confirms this clearly. The average age of our teaching staff has reached 50. Nearly 30 percent of faculty are over 60. And we have only 11 Doctors of Science under the age of 40. These figures force us to think not about mechanical rejuvenation, but about a more complex task: how to unite renewal and continuity without tearing the fabric of the university. More broadly, world science also does little to confirm the naive belief that significant results are rigidly tied to youth. Scientific productivity is distributed much more complexly. A scholar’s major contribution may come at different stages of a career. That is precisely why the university needs this multigenerational complexity.

— What does the university risk to lose, if it thinks about staff development only in the language of rejuvenation?

— It risks losing what is hardest to restore: the density of a research school in the sense of its internal intellectual richness. A scholar or lecturer at fifty is often only just entering a period of genuine confidence. There are professions in which by that age a person is already moving toward a lighter workload. But at a university, that is often precisely the age at which a person can connect generations, hold the line, and become a bearer of genuine academic responsibility. This is especially common in the social sciences and humanities, wh ere beyond professional experience one also needs a philosophical view of one’s object and field of inquiry. And that ability usually develops only with age. To lose such a person simply because managerial optics have become too age-centered would be shortsighted. So the right question sounds different. Not “whom should we replace?” but “how do we build a multigenerational environment in which the young enter, the mature unfold, and experience is not preserved in formaldehyde, but passed on and turned into a resource for development?” Especially since a clear trend toward longer life has now emerged. In that sense, the university is a unique place of work for those who can and want to work to a very advanced age.

— Some time ago, TSU created its Human Resources Development Office. Why was it important to place this direction in a separate management contour, rather than leave it within the familiar HR logic?

— Because the familiar HR logic answers primarily the question of how to process a person within the system. But we needed to begin answering a different question: how does the university develop through the person? For universities of earlier eras, personnel support in the narrow sense may have been sufficient. But a research university today lives in a different level of complexity. When we speak about the development of TSU, we are speaking not only about vacancies, payroll slots, and procedures. We are speaking about the reproduction of research schools, new professional roles, the attraction of rare people, career paths, growth environments, talent pools, support for managers, and the calibration of internal services. None of this fits any longer within the old frame of HR as record-keeping. That is why TSU is moving fr om a model of personnel accounting to a model of managing human capital and human potential as an investment resource. The Human Resources Development Office is not a decorative superstructure. It is an attempt to build into the university a subsystem that helps sustain a conversation about the person, and with the person, not only in the language of formal employment, but in the language of further development.

Today, truly strong universities no longer treat work with people as a secondary subplot. A structure such as the Human Resources Development Office makes it possible to see what usually falls out of sight. Wh ere does the university lose people at the point of entry? At what stages does onboarding break down? Which units know how to grow leaders, and which live in a state of continual personnel turbulence? Wh ere are the hidden points of strength that have not yet been noticed, and wh ere, on the contrary, does everything rest on one or two overloaded people? Without such an analytical and project-oriented contour, the university almost always reacts to personnel challenges after the fact. Which means it is managing consequences, not development.

— What kinds of problems are, in principle, impossible to solve if the university has no structure that looks at a person not as a staff unit, but as a bearer of potential, a role, and a developmental path?

— First of all, it becomes impossible to assemble a coherent personnel policy. Without such a center, the university almost inevitably lives in a logic of fragmented efforts: research works well in one place, training issues are addressed elsewhere, mentoring is locally configured in another, useful services exist somewhere else, but none of it is tied together into a single system. Without a separate development center, it is also difficult to build long, cross-cutting processes: mentoring, a talent pool, preparation of academic leaders, internal mobility, support for a person’s transition fr om a strong researcher to the head of a laboratory, and then into a management role. And the modern university increasingly lives precisely through such transitions. If those transitions are not supported, the system begins either to lose people or to advance them by inertia, without helping them master a new professional optic.

Then it becomes almost impossible to design new roles and anchor them normatively, build career tracks and special contract types, run a meaningful succession program for research schools, form a talent pool, support management teams, configure onboarding, and gather proper analytics on human capital. A great many useful initiatives appear, but there is no architecture that allows them to work together. Yet perhaps more important than the list of functions is the shift in the very subject of the conversation. As long as we speak about the employee only in the language of personnel paperwork, we inevitably impoverish the human reality of the university. And that means we also impoverish our own managerial imagination.

— If we try to describe TSU as the employer of the future, what should it become? What should a person feel, understand, and receive here in order to say: yes, this is a strong place for work and development?

— The university of the future as an employer is not a place wh ere a person simply feels comfortable. Nor is it a place wh ere everything is promised in advance. It is a place wh ere a person truly has reason to be. Speaking very simply, an employee should feel at least three things here. First, that they are seen not as a function, but as a bearer of strength, experience, intention, and possibility. Second, that the environment does not flatten their complexity, but helps it unfold. Third, that their work is part of something larger than a set of current tasks: part of the movement of a university with scale, memory, and horizon. That is why I see TSU as the employer of the future as a strong, demanding, open environment in which a person understands: much is expected of me here, but much is also given to me here—room for growth, the possibility of moving between roles, respect for professional dignity, and the prospect of leaving behind not only a function fulfilled, but a professional trace. If you like, a strong university as an employer is a place wh ere a person stays not out of habit and not out of fear of change, but because of the felt scale and meaning of their work. I think that is the main criterion.

— What signs will show that the university has truly moved in this direction?

— For me, the main sign is when it is not the rhetoric that changes, but people’s internal feeling of work at the university. When they stop living in a mode of hidden overcoming and begin living in a mode of meaningful movement. When leaders speak not only the language of workload and deficits, but also the language of development. When employees see their future inside the university more clearly. When the young no longer feel temporary, and the mature no longer feel written off. There is another very important sign as well. The university begins to depend less on accidental heroism and more on the maturity of the environment itself. In other words, the quality of work ceases to rest only on the extraordinary effort of individual people. The system itself begins to help a strong person remain strong. And, speaking more practically, the signs will also be visible in more measurable things: the quality of onboarding, the stability of teams, the narrowing of reputational gaps, the emergence of real career trajectories, and the ability to attract rare specialists and keep them not only through salary, but through the quality of the environment.

There is another indicator, one that is rarely captured in official reports but says a great deal about the quality of an employer brand. In a strong university, people begin to come on the recommendation of those who already work there. Not because they were invited through personal connections, but because the internal reputation of the environment has become convincing. Graduates return in a new role. Invited researchers remain, even though they originally came for a short project. Heads of units stop perceiving recruitment as an endless struggle for survival. All of this is evidence that the university has learned to be a place of professional attraction, not simply a place of professional use.

— What main principle would you place at the foundation of this movement? If everything were reduced to one formula, what does it mean today to be a university that truly knows how to work with people?

— I would place at its foundation the combination of two things: demanding standards and trust. Separately, they do not work. Demanding standards without trust quickly degenerate into a cold system in which a person feels not like a partner, but like expendable material. Trust without demanding standards is no more stable: it easily turns into a loose environment with many kind words, but little genuine growth. A university needs a high bar without devaluing the person. And here it is important not to confuse comfort with respect, or loyalty with submission. A university does not have to be a space of endless convenience. On the contrary, a real academic environment is almost always connected with a high bar, intensity, argument, and intellectual strain. But a person must feel that this complexity is not indifferent to them. That the university does not simply demand results, but helps them achieve those results. That here one can be strong without constant self-destruction. Then the employer brand ceases to be a managerial shell and becomes part of the university’s very mission.

If everything were reduced to a single formula, mine would sound like this: a strong university as an employer is a place wh ere a person is given not only a job, but scale, support, and the opportunity to leave a professional mark.

Eduard Galazhinskiy, Rector of Tomsk State University,
Member of the Council for Science and Education under the President of the Russian Federation,
Vice President of the Russian Academy of Education,
Vice President of the Russian Union of Rectors,
Deputy Chair of the Higher Attestation Commission of the Russian Federation

Interview recorded and background materials prepared by Irina P. Kuzheleva-Sagan

Olesya Babanskaya, Head of the TSU Human Resources Development Office:

— In our university’s personnel development strategy, the Human Resources Development Office is described as the “architect of the system.” To me, that is indeed a very precise formula. The task of this contour is not simply to accompany individual HR processes, but to help the university see them as a unified system: from attracting a person and helping them enter the environment to development, role changes, career trajectories, participation in projects, and management programs. We organize our work in such a way that we move not from a set of disconnected initiatives, but from a shared methodology. First, we develop solutions on the basis of interviews and staff surveys, then test them in pilots, and only after that scale them across faculties and divisions. This takes time, but it allows us not to multiply chaotic services, and instead to build an architecture that truly works. 

Part of this work has already moved into practice. The personnel strategy includes the 2026 launch of the Project Exchange and Employment Assistant services, the development of digital solutions, including a prototype of the employee’s personal account, as well as the design of an HR administration center and regulations for interaction between units. This work on new services is being carried out jointly by several offices: human resources development, digital solutions, HR, accounting and control, and planning and finance. Together with the Department of Social Communications at the Faculty of Psychology of TSU, we have launched a series of studies—surveys, focus groups, and expert interviews with employees from various divisions of our university—as a necessary stage in developing TSU’s employer value proposition (EVP), which will be incorporated into all HR communications, from job descriptions to conference presentations. These are important steps because they make the university environment more understandable and more coherent: the university employee begins to see not only their current responsibilities, but also new opportunities in project participation, internal mobility, development, and interaction with the management system.

Ahead of us lies the transition from individual services to a full HR ecosystem. The personnel development strategy envisions the launch of an employee’s personal account and a manager’s personal account, a unified learning and development platform, digital individual development plans, HR dashboards for managers, and the institutionalization of HR partnership in the university’s largest divisions. At the same time, programs for managers, educational teams, and research teams will continue to develop: Management and HR Practices for heads of departments and laboratories and for heads of offices, as well as The Competencies Workshop, internships, and internal and external training programs for different categories of employees. It is also important to note that, together with the Institute of Distance Education, we are building a comprehensive staff training program on the use of generative artificial intelligence in professional activity. For me, this is the central promise of the new office: to help the university build an environment in which employees understand their possibilities more clearly, managers gain better tools for working with teams, and HR decisions are made as part of TSU’s overall development strategy.