I admit I've been off the market for almost 10 years, but when my school made some sweeping administrative changes that more or less undercut the authority of proffies, I decided to get back into the game.I'm newly divorced. My kid is in college. I could use a new living arrangement.
And I've been horrified at the new online job application process that seemingly at least half of the colleges are using now. These online sites go through a university's HR page, and I find I'm asked to enter tons of information already in my letter, vita, etc.
I was asked yesterday the following questions on a variety of application sites for a goddamned humanities teaching job:
- Do you have a valid driver's license?
- Have you been convicted of a felony in the past 7 years?
- Do you have any friends or family who teach at Xxxxxxx College?
- Can you lift items over 25 pounds?
- Do you have any other skills?
I've had to fill out where I went to high school, even though that was 30 years ago. I had to look up the address of the high school, and enter the dates of attendance using 01/01/1981 format. (In fact when I just typed in 1981-1983, I had to start the whole page over.)
And then the entering of all the references. Are you serious? My referees, their addresses, and their phone numbers are on my vita. I had to cut and paste, cut and paste endlessly yesterday. Each job application took far longer because of the online hoops.
And as I did more and more of these, I noted how the actual portals were nearly identical, right down to the password retrieval hint section - favorite childhood friend, mother's maiden name. Sheesh.
If different HR office are using this same portal, why can't there be a common application? If I have to type out my 4 colleges attended with full dates and majors and so on, and type in the last 10 years of my employment (plus salary!), I'd think once would be enough.
So, while I sort of enjoyed looking at the Chronicle for jobs in my field, I did not have fun doing the computer applications.
(And don't even get me started on these schools that in October want a letter, vita, teaching statement, 5 years of teaching evaluations, writing sample, sample syllabus, official transcripts, 3 letters of rec, and a research agenda, when they're just going to cut 90% of the applicants at the first round anyway.)
My husband's been looking for a new job in Human Resources, and he's experiencing the same thing. I usually help him because I have marginally more free time than he does and I type faster, and I usually just want to type "see resume" into every one of those damn fields.
ReplyDeleteHow hard is it to follow directions? Remember this the next time you bust a flake for not following the prescribed format for a paper you so clearly outlined in your syllabus or when they used a comma instead of a period in their MLA citation. And this is a fill-in-the-blank form.
ReplyDeleteSnarkiness aside, this is a standard application for ALL positions at the school. HR dumps the information directly into their datafiles eliminating data entry errors (on their part, anyway) achieving a more streamlined (theoretically) operation. The easiest way to cull out applicants is to ignore those who can't (or refuse to) do what is asked of them.
I'm with Miranda. And I don't think Sawyer's reply - too smug by about 40% - is on point.
ReplyDeleteYes, we KNOW that HR forms exist now, and in greater quantities, but knowing if we have driver's licenses and can lift 25 lbs is hardly relevant to our role as professors.
But, students knowing how to accurately avoid plagiarism and meet the requirements of standard academic text IS relevant to their work in a writing class.
And, I just have to say, just because the world IS a certain way doesn't mean I have to like it.
If I saw a job I wanted and it asked me if I had a driver's license, I'd know they were too stupid to treat future professors with any kind of sense. Fuck that noise about datafiles. Let the dweebs wrangle that shit.
It was 15 years ago, but I honestly did not apply to Harvard grad school because of the forms. I applied to several other top-level schools with mixed results. But I literally took Harvard off the list because they wanted me to fill out, by hand (pen, not keyboard), loads of information that was - as Miranda says - already easily available to them. Sure, they can think, "If he's not willing to sit for a few hours and fill out the forms, he doesn't really want this. He won't have what it takes to finish our rigorous program." Fair enough. I say, "If they're too stupid to read a normal CV, I can't imagine their program is really that good. Looks more like a bureaucracy than a community of scholars." Stanford and a few other schools weren't like that - at least not back then.
ReplyDeleteAs for teaching jobs:
- HR doesn't need this stuff for every applicant. They might think they do "because that's the way things are." But I don't think they really do.
- I've voiced Miranda's final complaint on this blog before. To have a shot at a job, you need targeted letters of recommendation. To have a shot at a job, you need to apply to 10, 20, maybe 30 schools. "Hello Dr. Advisor! How about 15 individually minted letters for each of your ABDs this fall?"
- I don't really like Sawyer's comparison with term papers, at least not for how I read and grade papers. I don't have a melt down about format. I look for functionality. I ask for a title page with complete information (title, name, class, date, etc.). I don't care all that much about format and I certainly don't ask for information I don't need.
Agreeification on the web application thing, but some schools have the common decency to exclude the whole HR pop quiz. There's one thing even *worse* than that: the school that asks for a custom-written document that you will never, EVER use for any other application.
ReplyDeleteDuring my n+1 years on the market, I've been asked for a "statement of diversity experience," a "statement of helping students with research," a "statement of multicultural acceptance," and a "statement of experience with students" (WTF??), among other insipid requests.
This has always happened during the FIRST stage of the process. Considering that each one of these takes a couple of hours, even if you half- or quarter-ass it, and considering that you might have 300 or more applicants for one position, you've just wasted at least 600 hours of time in one fell swoop. Good times.
To be fair, I pretty much just copied a lot of the "statement of diversity experience" and pasted it into the "statement of multicultural acceptance." Sometimes half-ass is exactly the right amount of ass.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was looking last year, I faced the same hurdles. And, as it worked out, the places with the easiest and most human of application processes wanted to interview me. The insipid HR-driven applications just went into the void.
ReplyDeleteI even got one HR-generated rejection in September of 2011 for a job I applied for in September 2010.
Colossus is right. It doesn't have to be that way.
I'm always tempted to add inane details - thus prolonging my own misery - to these HR forms.
Under "Additional Skills," once, I wrote "Makes a whale of a strawberry shortcake," and "Once hit a home run against Thomas Aquinas high school in a softball game. Mindy Kelly was the pitcher. Suck it, Mindy."
This is a battle we wage continually with HR. They don't get that faculty, professional staff, and administrative positions (at least those they don't farm out to overpriced "executive search firms") are not the same as the classified staff jobs. One size does not fit all. Some questions on those computer generated applications cannot be removed, so people get stuck answering them or they can't move through the process. Someone should be able to fix this, but IT always has better things to do, and besides, we can't go customizing things too much. That would be unfair.
ReplyDeleteBut even when we get to the interview stage, the stupid rules hamstring us. We've had HR training sessions where we were told that a teaching demo or asking how an applicant might react to a student paper could be grounds for a lawsuit. When I was on the market, I had several campus interviews which included meeting an entire department. We're now told that's illegal also as it might taint the search committee's process because of "undue outside interference."
Oh well, at least Large Urban Community College is broke and won't be hiring anyone anytime soon.
Although I generally agree with Miranda about those annoying HR forms, can I just say that I detest those jobs that won't take anything electronically? It's a PITA. Not so much for me (after all I do know how to put my package in a priority mail envelope), but for my letter writers. I provide postage of course, but I have a letter writer that isn't in the country at the moment.
ReplyDeleteI SO hear you. A few years ago I filled out 28 of those (five of which were for ONE community college district, and could have been on a SINGLE application). I hope all of your efforts come to some result.
ReplyDeleteBig problem when trying to fill out electronic forms if one didn't go to an American high school or college. Most applications wouldn't allow me to enter another country's information, so I had nothing to put in the "State" category (or zip code, for that matter). This simple problem caused many an application to be considered "incomplete." Grrrrrrrrrrr. Why does it matter WHERE I went to high school in the first place?!! Shouldn't my PhD speak for itself?
I tried applying for a job at a state CC near me. You have to fill out everything in your job history. Does it really matter that I was a dishwasher in a restaurant for a couple summers thirty years ago? I'm not applying for a restaurant job! I never heard back about the job and wasn't sure that I filled every field out correctly.
ReplyDeleteFrom the recommender's point of view, the ones demanding individual uploads are infuriating. Fortunately, Interfolio seems to have figured out a workaround.
ReplyDeleteAnd yeah, I have no interest in working for a place that is already wasting potential faculty productivity by making applications pointlessly time-consuming. That shows the wrong priorities.
Are there seriously places which would deny a faculty position to someone because he or she doesn't have a driver's license?
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like some sort of common application would be a solution, perhaps one with the possibility of adding a few customized questions or requirements at the end. Colleges do know how to do that; after all, they do it for the potential paying customers -- er, students -- and spend lots of staff time and money making sure it goes well. I wonder how many glossy-brochure mailings would need to be sacrificed to pay for setting up and staffing a sensible hiring process? Or perhaps they could just lay off the football coach for a day or two?
ReplyDeleteIt also seems to me that, at schools which insist on their own applications, it would be possible to put together a faculty-specific HR form, which would give departments a choice of potentially-relevant questions to include or not, and exclude the ones that are clearly irrelevant, and possibly discriminatory (one of my colleagues doesn't have a driver's license because she's blind, which is no bar to the teaching of literature, and I can think of several people with able minds but temporarily or permanently uncooperative bodies who are quite capable of teaching, but might have trouble lifting 25 lbs).
I also like Prof. Tingle's suggestion. It would save many, many human-hours on the part of applicants, and, if relatively few people were filling in the form, then staff would be available to help when someone was trying to find a way to get the form to understand that she was home-schooled by her father in a rural African village while her mother was busy fighting AIDs with Medecins Sans Frontieres, and successfully completed an IB diploma (but not the GED) before entering Yale at 16 and beginning a Ph.D. at 20 (which isn't exactly the biography of one of my undergrad classmates, but isn't far off, either, and any institution would be lucky to hire her, if she wasn't scared off by the form first).
Also, if the forms are really bad, they can lead to a situation like the one described on CM in an August post , in which nobody is hired despite there being plenty of qualified applicants. That wastes everybody's time, and runs the risk of losing the line -- a real danger these days.
ReplyDeleteI hated those forms as well. I also thought that a single form could have been used for many schools.
ReplyDeleteOne school wanted to know the date, state, and county of every speeding ticket I'd ever gotten. Christ. The last time that happened I was 19, and I never could dig up the info (nor was I gonna call the police department and find out as HR suggested, seriously). I estimated. I got an interview.
Another school wanted to know if I had been a foster child.
The job market was expensive, obnoxious, and time consuming and by the end I was sending out shitty form letters (which still got interviews) and faking my way through the HR nonsense. Ugh.
@Darla
ReplyDeleteI'd give you an interview just for adding your softball experience. I want to hire a qualified person who is confident enough to poke fun at bullshit forms as a colleague.
I'm beginning to think that Asst Dean may be our local troll in yet another guise, but just in case not:
ReplyDeleteDear sir and/or madam: please consider all the injuries, illnesses, and congenital conditions that might prevent the lifting of 25 lbs. yet not be resolvable at the local gym (and might indeed make more than average use of health insurance, but most colleges and universities, unlike small businesses, are large enough to avoid person-by-person scrutiny from insurers). I believe you've just declared that you wouldn't even consider hiring Stephen Hawking or Bob Dole, not to mention a number of other, more recent combat-injured veterans. I'm sure others could add to the list.
Actually, my last position had a 50 pound lifting requirement...
ReplyDelete...and it wasn't all crap.
I mean, how many of us have pitched in to help move furniture and books when offices are relocated?
In that job, I spent plenty of time crawling in tight spaces to plug in cords for laptops in classrooms that were never designed for students to own them (including one memorable time when I got stuck under a desk in a storage room when I was plugging something in and a stack of book boxes fell over... blocking my escape...)
I also had to stand on ladders and help decorate bulletin boards, and hang out the window of a car on the freeway taking footage for department promotional materials. I did these things because I'm youngish, relatively fit, SOMEBODY had to do them, and I feel comfortable doing them--not because they were a job requirement.
On the other hand, there were several people in equivalent positions in other departments who had disabilities that prevented them from doing those things. This was known at time of hire, and nobody DIDN'T hire them because of that.
Ass!Dean is just being reactionary--omg! if they can't lift 25 pounds they must be out of shape and fat! They will cost me money! No sir, they might not. They might have lost an arm in the war (true story of a super cool faculty member I know). Or they might be fat and ABLE to lift a ton of weight, who knows?
What's important is knowing that HR won't pre-winnow candidates based on this shit, and making sure that hiring committees don't either, especially if the "requirement" has little to do with the important parts of the real job.
This is going back a bit in the thread, but EnglishDoc's comment hit a nerve for me:
ReplyDelete"Some questions on those computer generated applications cannot be removed, so people get stuck answering them or they can't move through the process. Someone should be able to fix this, but IT always has better things to do"
I'm always AMAZED how many people in the registrar's office are willing to say, without a trace of irony, "The computer won't let us do that".
What?
It's a frackin' computer fer the love of Zaphod Beeblebrox. It does what humans tell it to do!
I remember (in a different context), suggesting that Tuk U's online database of woven baskets should keep a record of the material from which baskets were woven. Everyone in the registrar's office agreed this was an excellent idea. Such a shame that the computers won't let us record this.
It's a bleeping SQL database you turds! Zarking Fardwarks, I could program the changes myself. I get that you probably don't want every Tom, Dick and Tingle monkeying around in the guts of the database, making ad hoc changes. But for the database manager, it's a half-hour job tops.
Nope. Can't.
Strooth!
I've been thinking about this thread all day. Sawyer's response really hit a nerve. "Don't want to follow instructions? Well then don't complain when students don't follow instructions, you bunch of whiny entitled slacker snowflakes!" was about the tone.
ReplyDeleteIt assumes (as others have pointed out) that all instructions are equally arbitrary; that my instructions to students to (for example) cite their sources in a research paper is every bit as pointless and irrelevant as HR's insistence that I give my driver's license number when applying for a job that does not depend on my being able to drive.
It assumes that those in power get to make the rules, however pointless, arbitrary, invasive or irrelevant, and that those not in power not only do not but should not have any choice but to suck the proffered dick and say "thank you, sir, may have another?"
And it assumes that by ever insisting that my students do anything - say, cite their references; write on a topic relevant to the subject matter; check their math - I am buying into a corrupt system in which those with power have absolute power, and get to exercise it arbitrarily, irresponsibly, and with no concern for the time, rights, or simple human dignity of those over whom they exercise it.
I do not have absolute power. I don't exercise the power I do have irresponsibly. I don't make arbitrary demands. I insist that students do those things that will further their learning what they're paying me to teach them. That's all. I respect their time and their rights.
It is not too much to ask that others do the same. The simple fact that University X has a job I want does not give university X the right to treat me like dirt. It only gives University X the POWER to treat me like dirt.
Sawyer is assuming that might makes right. And that's really repellent.
Wherever it is you work, Sawyer, I hope I never have to apply for a job there, and I hope none of my students ever think of going to graduate school there. Because I assume your attitude is not yours alone; it is one that has been fostered in you by your colleagues and the toxic corporate culture you've been forced to work in for too many years. But it makes wherever you work not a good place to be.
What gets me about job ads that require such extensive applications for the first round, in which they'll cut over 90% of them, is how much extra work it is FOR THEM to review 100+ tomes. Doesn't it occur to these people that it might take less time to review 100+ skinny packages, consisting of cover letters and resumes (or vitae) only?
ReplyDeleteDoesn't it also occur to them what a huge waste of other people's time they're making when they do this, as others above have observed? Requiring such a detailed application on the first round like this may well be a warning: if you get the job here, don't be surprised to be working with people who are oblivious to what they dump on others, and even on themselves.
Having spent three of the past four years on the job search (landing a great community college position and then a tenure-track job at a small liberal arts college), I experienced much of what you described here.
ReplyDeleteOne page that I thought was particularly horrific, and which you apparently have not encountered yet, was from a community college. It asked for an individualized list of the courses I took in my field. Every single undergrad and graduate course had to be hand typed in, with the course number and name, as well as the semester I took them and where.
These are on my transcripts, which were also required.
I know that SACS requires 15 graduate hours in the field. They could have just asked me for five graduate classes on the subject, if the point was to save HR from having to read our transcripts.
It was a pain!
And, yes, I think it is mostly hoops so all the applicants are treated equally (badly).
I blogged about the whole (mis)adventure at
www.TeachingCollegeEnglish.com
I'm gonna hold out for requiring the writing sample upfront, in addition to the cv, cover letter, and recommendations. To me the writing sample is the most democratic object in the packet, and I start my review of a file by reading it. If it's great, I want to interview you, whether you went to the University of the Boondocks or Harvard. The cv and recommendations are often records of privilege, and cover letters aren't enough to get a sense of the mind of the candidate. I would hate to weed out a candidate based on these.
ReplyDeleteI agree with most of this; I have to say, however, that as someone who is perpetually broke, I have great appreciation for what seems to be a permanent turn toward online applications. Interfolio fees notwithstanding, it's going to save me a healthy chunk of Ramen-and-beer funds.
ReplyDeleteAlso, if you can't lift 25 pounds, just lie and say that you can. Your new colleagues will probably help you move if you ask them nicely.
For the record, I never said I agreed with the application process; I played the HR office's (or the Devil's or Catbert's for you Dilbert fans) advocate.
ReplyDeleteMy point was we Miserians are quick to jump on what we deem "pointless" or "below our station" and that special exception needs to be made for us. Numerous posters have stated in this thread and in others that they are "looser" with their assignment requirements than their more uptight colleagues. I get that. I agree with it. If a rule has a loophole to be exploited I'm the one that's going to find it and point out the inanity of the rule.
Miranda and, most recently, Merely Academic assume the university HR office has a say in the application. I can assure you, state-funded institutions have very little (read: approaching zero) say regarding the inclusion or exclusion of questions on the application. EEO, much? It's been around a while.