Job hunt's end

I signed a tenure track contract, and thus feel somewhat comfortable in writing about what the past few months of my life have been like. Amidst all the "omg you guys never all post here's" I felt like owed something, anything, for my posting privileges.

The job market was nothing and everything that I had been told. Nobody told me how much money it would cost up front. The rumors about the big conference and the random hook-ups? Completely true. I had been on big conference soil no fewer than 8 hours when I was first propositioned (and said no, sadly).

Back at the beginning of this thing there was a Post That Shall Not Be Named that called schools on making them eat in the cafeteria and not giving them bottled water.

Well.

Well.

All I really have to say is that cafeteria food sounds wonderful in that it is, indeed, food.

I had several campus visits and more than one offer. I got the offer I wanted, they got the new proffie they wanted--in the end, all's well, no? Here, I pause.

In my current job I am an administrator. I run searches every year for adjuncts, and just recently we have done two full time searches. I'm not unaware of the insanity that goes on behind the scenes with finding someone, fit, funding, and finding classrooms to teaching demo in. No really, I know it's difficult.

But I also can see where people have been sloppy and let things slide that just shouldn't have. I present to you, the Visit From Hell:

It began okay. Someone would pick me up from the airport. I found this person with ease. My bag got there okay. Due to the time of my flight (evening) I had grabbed a quick snack in the afternoon. I'm not sure why in the hell I didn't just eat except, oh that's right, I was on a plane at just about my dinnertime. There was no time change though, so I found my ride and off we drove into the middle of nowhere.

Now, here I probably should have looked up where the nearest fast food places were to my hotel. I should have found out there was no cab service. I could have insisted on having my own vehicle to drive. Needless to say, I wisened up on future visits. I had packed snacks, but they were for during the visit itself (and thank God for that). So my ride took me straight to the hotel, told me that they would pay for room service if I needed food, and was on her way.

There was no hotel bar, and there was no food service past (insert such an early dinnertime that I fear it would identify the town and the school--no really). Figuring that it was best to take care of myself, I found the vending area--no food. I talked to the concierge and the poor thing actually offered to drive me somewhere. See, it was the middle of January. No sidewalks connected the hotel to the town. It was snowing up a storm. Oh, and there were no fast food places anywhere close by anyway.

Fab-u-lous. I looked at myself and said, "Self, you can totally wait till tomorrow for food. Suck it up."

Sucking it up gave me a bad "omgfoodnow" migraine the next morning, but I popped my imitrex and was on my way to my campus visit, even if somewhat shakily. They gave me pee breaks, they gave me bottled water--but they went to a very light place for lunch and then once again unceremoniously dumped me in the hotel, this time thankfully during room service hours (but it was a close thing).

The thing is this--I am my campus's details person. I'm the one always making sure that anybody we are putting up has food, water, and anything else they might need. We've even started putting together a little welcome basket that we leave at the front desk of the hotel for when people check in with some pens and pads of paper with the school logo and so on. It's not that I expect to find me anywhere else, but I do expect a certain level of human decency.

Compare this to the school I took a job at--they fed me. Repeatedly. Probably more than I wanted or needed them to. They were friendly, we laughed a lot, and we got along great. The extra "low stakes" time allowed us to realize that we really hit it off. I'm not sure if that contract will be the last one I ever sign, but I know I'd be okay if it was.

I understand that admins sometimes tell us we can't pay for X, Y, and Z. In fact, my business department regularly tells me that I can't have money for things I ask for--especially for searches. Sometimes they say "Oh, you can't pay for that candidate's dinner, they are getting in too late." Well, guess what: we offer anyway. I've never had a candidate order the most expensive thing on the menu, and I can (and do) afford a $15-20 per candidate charge on my own card. This is, and I repeat, not the end of the world. Not as many other department members show up when I'm not offering them free food, but I've really gotten the feel for many a candidate over such dinners--and some of them have been our hires.

I'll head this one off at the pass too--I know somebody out there is saying "Did she really just suggest that we should spend our own money on candidates? Did she just say that school should have done that for HER?"

Well... quite honestly? No. I'm willing to. I'm a bit of a freak. When we're hiring I need to know if this person in front of me fits, and I don't get a good feel for that in the Dean's office. I am willing to go above and beyond what the school thinks it "takes" to find out if they work or not. If I didn't do that I would have missed some really great people that have improved our school drastically. It is, in short, a very small price to pay compared to what our department and school has gained.

More importantly, I want candidates to have the sense that we care about them whether we hire them or not. I want them to realize we've actually thought things through a bit. If I had gotten an offer from that school--and I was so not surprised not to--it would not have been my first choice. I met some people I'd love to do research with on that visit, and I loved the teaching demo, but they made it fairly obvious that I wasn't their first choice. Not only that--I was pretty sure they'd already picked a candidate that had been out before me.

I suppose it might be easy to write this off as "well, of course she found the same sort of detailed orientated department to join" and that's probably fair--but, look. Even if you can't feed your candidates dinner, at least give them some recommendations of where they can pick some up. Make sure you are stranding them in the middle of nowhere without food or transportation. This is a stressful enough process without making the people you are bringing in wonder where their next meal will be from.