I have on my books about 25 active job candidates. I don't know if that's a lot or a little. It's mostly kids, people finished out of my old department in the past 2-3 years. But I have some old timers. I have one guy who worked here 15 years ago, and who's never found his home.
Anyway, since job season is hopping, and since these folks are all applying to a variety of places, I've started getting these automated emails from HR departments asking for me to electronically send a letter for so-n-so, whozin-jammits, etc. For the past week it's been several EVERY DAY.
Listen, I want my former students, employees, and colleagues to get jobs. But the old dossier system (Interfolio or similar) allowed me to do my nice letter once a year and then JUST FORGET ABOUT IT.
Now I feel as if I'm involved every minute in the hopes and dreams of each person whose letter I carry.
"Hmmm, Joanne is going for that spot at that lousy Big 10 school." "Look, Jimmy is trying for a department chair job!" "Oh, no, William is applying to the school he did his BS at!"
I don't want to be in 25 other job searches beyond the ones we're running here way outside Duluth.
An open request to departments everywhere...accept rec letters from a service. Don't make me work poor Stephen (my assistant) to death with all of these requests.
- Dean Derek
It's something I've ranted about here before: We complain about the system, but in some cases, we are the system. The people writing all those letters and bitching about it are often on search committees that want others to do the same.
ReplyDeleteTo be fair, usually that is not a decision which the search committee makes, it's "HR Policy" which must be followed in order to be allowed a search.
ReplyDeleteFair enough - but I hear again and again how damn important those letters are. Their extreme importance is probably not something HR requires. I can see the problem, of course: once done, I can imagine that they are, in fact, quite telling, so the committee is happy to have them.
ReplyDeleteThank you for taking that all seriously though. Every time a school did that I was panicked that one or more of my reviewers would not come through... they were busy, they were tenured, and mostly they just didn't care.
ReplyDeleteOh, I agree with Derek. I went through a little of that, and 2 of my referees were great, even dropping me emails when they got asked. One, though, never replied to the automated requests, and at least one job's deadline passed with me not having enough letters.
ReplyDeleteI wonder whether, in some cases, the HR forms automatically send requests to the letter writers' addresses, even if the hiring department will, in fact, accept a dossier? But I can imagine that that would then result in HR thinking an application was "incomplete" (because the letters hadn't arrived via an online form), while the department thought it was complete (because they'd received the dossier). And, of course, it confuses the letter writers. It sounds like online application software is in its infancy, and seriously in need of tweaking in several areas. It also sounds like tenured professors who are themselves being inundated with such requests are in the best position to agitate for improvements -- at least at their own institutions (which are, of course, the minority of the hiring institutions).
ReplyDeleteAlso, as someone who may be going on the market again in the next few years, and who will need, for various reasons, to recruit an entirely new list of letter writers, this really worries me (all the more so because I'm in a field where even a fairly selective nationwide search could easily entail several dozen applications -- not a factor which would affect letter writers if I used a dossier service, but one which could affect them quite severely if they're going to get an emailed request every time I fill out an application).
OK, you had my sympathies until you mentioned your assistant would be doing them.
ReplyDeleteInsert sound of record scratching.
I really prefer the applications that only ask for a list of references to be contacted later (i.e., if the school is actually interested in my application.)
ReplyDeleteTell me true, folks that have sat on hiring committees: Do you really go much further than the cover letter and CV before tossing the application into the NO or YES pile?
Bison - for jobs, references matter A LOT. References matter more than the cover letter and as much as the CV. The cover letter matters only if it's badly written or doesn't appear to know which job it's applying for. References tell us if everything you said in the cover letter was true, if there's some chance we could work with you, how you stack up against others the referee has seen - everything we really want to know about you.
ReplyDeleteThe CV tells us if you've done any work lately. It matters. But everyone's got a CV.
R&G, I'm with you - an assistant? For reference letters? Wow. When he's done all your reference letters, please can he do mine? I've got 2 to send out today ...
All the deans I know have assistants. This seems like a perfect job to fob off on someone.
ReplyDeleteKimmie - I cannot tell you how much I would love to fob this job off on an assistant. Words cannot describe the gleaming , utopian academic wonderland that opens up before me at the mere thought. No one is arguing that this job should not be fobbed off on an assistant. We are lamenting that 99.9% of us do not HAVE such assistants, or indeed assistants of any kind.
ReplyDeleteBut I promise you, it's on my Santa list.
We are the 99% without assistants...Occupy HR!
ReplyDeleteOK but: I thought Interfolio now had a workaround for those individual e-mail requests. See: http://www.interfolio.com/blog/post.cfm/how-to-send-an-email-delivery-in-three-steps
So I guess you forward the request to your student, and your student tells Interfolio to send the docs to the e-mail address?
from Redlands Rick:
ReplyDeleteThe way my HR's department's portal works is this. We require applicants to enter the email addresses of 3 letter writers. As soon as they press "confirm" those 3 addresses get notes from us requesting a letter to be uploaded through a different entry in the portal in support of the candidate.
The addresses have to match exactly - no coming in from a dossier service - or the letter registers as a zero or "not arrived" in the system.
Redlands- I hope you indicate the necessity for the e-mails to match exactly to the candidate and/or the letter writer. I have more than one e-mail address coming in to my box, and typically send out on only one, and several schools I know of have a stock (firstinitiallastname@school.edu, or some similar format) and personalized (nickname.lastname@...) that all feed to the same person.
ReplyDeleteIf you are doing this in an effort to be more secure, you only need to check your spam filter and count how many messages showed up there ostensibly from you to know just how insecure this system is. The dossier service would be significantly more secure, less work and have fewer failure modes.
I just uploaded on of these. It took me 45 seconds. So Derek, if you have 25 of these to do this year, then that's 18 minutes and 45 seconds out of your year (or your fucking assistant's year). Are you seriously telling me that roughly 20 minutes spread out over several weeks counts as "working yourself (or your assistant) to death?" Or is your file structure on your hardrive so fucked up that you can't find the letters in under five seconds?
ReplyDeleteEither you have an incredibly inflated sense of your own importance (and I'm going with this choice) or you have no idea what it means to be overworked.
from Dean Derek
ReplyDeleteHi. Archie thanks for writing. I have 25 people who I currently write letters for. The job candidate that spurred my job tells me in a recent email he's planning on applying to about 70 positions.
How's your math?
I received 18 reference requests for one of my former grad students last week: 12 for this uploaded letter thing, and 6 for actual letters in the mail. I'm NOT a Dean, DON'T have an assistant, this is one of 10 people I'm currently writing for, AND I have official letters in dossier files at Interfolio and AWP which are apparently not being used widely as they once were.
ReplyDeleteJob season is a pain even when I'm not on the market.
First reaction: There are 70 of anything for one person to apply to in this profession?
ReplyDeleteMore serious: Look, I get that it is a bit of a pain in the ass. I write for a lot of people too, in a lot of modes and venues. But my own anecdotal experience is different from Reg's anecdotal experience above. To wit, I'd guess that less than a quarter of all requests can't be done by the candidate via interfolio. So in a given year, I'm probably uploading at most fifteen to twenty job/fellowship letters myself, and producing another five or so hard copy letters a year for the law school/med school clearing houses.
Total time spent on this is a relative blip in my life, not to mention a tiny fraction of the time I spend answering stupid emails concerning the committee I'm chairing this year. Or to put it differently, if you added up all the time I spend on writing letters, 98% of that time is spent, you know, actually writing the letters. A few extra minutes spread out over a period of two or three months to send them out just doesn't register.
Maybe I'm just older than a lot of you, but this is how it always used to be before the interfolio thing, except that instead of printing out my letters and throwing them in the department's out basket on my way to check my mailbox, I'm now doing it electronically while I wait for my coffee maker to spit out its product. It is the relative golden age of the one letter deposited electronically that is the anomaly (historically speaking), not what's going on now.
Anyway, the guy who is applying to 70 positions is obviously just throwing shit at the wall and hoping some of it sticks. That's a waste of everyone's time, including (and mostly) his own. But this is your fucking job. If you don't want to write, then don't take students. Even if you are uploading and mailing 50-75 letters a year (and I'll bet that's way more than almost any of you are doing), that's still less time than you probably spend fucking around online in any given two day period. So, sorry buddy, but I'm still dialing 9-waaah-waaah on this one.
The student of mine is in English composition, and while I won't have to provide refs for many of 70 of his job apps, it's going to be a lot, and already I've done more of this than in past years.
ReplyDeleteAnd to be clear, I'm not upset with the students of mine on the job market.
I'm 100% upset about the system that is changing that is taking Interfolio and others out of the equation. Why a direct bit of work from my office is better than something from an approved and reliable dossier service is unclear to me.
And you're right. I could just not take on so many letter responsibilities, but I had great mentors and try to be one as well.
I'll do the work, and have my assistant help me, but I feel as though bitching about it at College Misery is not such a strange thing.
You obviously can't know how many jobs my 25 former students and colleagues are applying for, but it's a far easier task in the former system. Many of them have written to me to tell me that they're coming up against a different style of HR portal than in past years, and that's what's generating these extra steps for letter writers.
I got another ding in my email box from a Florida school's HR while I wrote this.
Archie,
ReplyDeleteAnd the MLA Job List (which we're dealing with this year in a job search we're running), lists over 150 jobs in composition so far.
I get that you're mad at the system and not the students. But your anger is based in part on the notion that the interfolio system was the new normal. It turns out it wasn't. But if you are asking me whether I'd rather return to the old way (which, incidentally, is almost certainly what all those great mentors of yours had to do for you) where I had to print, collate, sign, and mail every letter of rec for every student for every job and fellowship, then this new, somewhat stinky way of doing it still represents an improvement.
ReplyDeleteCould we do it better? Sure. And because Interfolio seems at least reasonably competently run, my guess is its operators are working on solving this so that they get to keep their business.
In the meantime, you are still being asked to do less than your mentors probably did for you, and their schedules were no less busy than yours.
So is it ok to whine on CM about it? Sure, but just because you think your whine is righteous, doesn't mean everyone else will agree. And this particular whine strikes me--old fuddy-duddy that I am--as a little self-indulgent.
Archie, that's certainly valid.
ReplyDeleteOf course, so is my view that for the most part on this page you act as if nobody else's experience is quite right, since it's not what you think is the norm. That egocentric view of the academic world is not uncommon of course, but you wield it as often as most people I know.
Of course you come from a western school of thought about these things, so it's not even your fault.
Yeah, I blame the fucking enlightenment.
ReplyDeleteHey, do you guys know each other? You argue as only two friends really can.
ReplyDeleteWhat irks me, though, and I say this with care because I like you, Archie.
After you expressed your doubt that there could be 70 jobs in a field, and Derek pointed out that there are at least 150 in comp - and he was being cautious because the MLA lists more than 160 entry-level comp jobs - you really could have said, "Wow, I was completely wrong about that. My experience and my field told me I was most assuredly right. Yet, I've been proven wrong. That does change the situation in substantial and interesting ways."
But you just dropped it. That's the sort of thing I'd call bullshit on if I knew you IRL.
Is anyone else reading this far back on the page?
OK, here goes. Wow, I was slightly surprised about that particular data point, in the same way that Marc Bousquet was surprised by the exact same thing (availability of straight comp jobs) at his first tt-job (I'm too lazy to go back and find the reference for the article in which he describes this epiphany, sorry).
ReplyDeleteBut even the embarrassment of riches in the comp market doesn't substantially change my point that a) before interfolio (for those of us who have been writing recs that long) we used to have to individually print, sign, and mail all the letters (and don't pull departmental dossier services on me, because very few departments had or have those). And presumably the world of comp jobs hasn't changed that much, so people in Derek's position used to have to do a lot more labor on this front than they currently do, even factoring in the small step backwards of some of these electronic portals not accepting interfolio type services. And b) that I'm still betting that not nearly all of those 70 comp jobs that his guy is applying for use a non-interfolio-compatible portal. Or to put it another way, despite the fact that Derek thinks that I am taking my own top-of-the-food chain experiences and making them normative, I was actually the one who was trying to point out that what he took as normative (the interfolio system) has only been around for a very short time, and that things were much, much harder and whineworthy, and for a lot more years, before any of these amenities existed.
In case you are wondering: yes, I did walk to school in eight feet of snow, uphill, both ways. And that was in the summer. In the winter we had to dig our own tunnels through which we were forced to low-crawl.
And, for the record, I still blame the Enlightenment for my own self-absorption.