Thursday, January 17, 2013

Neilson in Newmarket With a Big Job Search Thirsty.

We just finished a dozen phone and Skype interviews for a position we're hiring for at my large regional college.

These interviews ranged from the ridiculous to the sublime, and the after-interview thank you letters were very instructive.

One guy got three of our six names wrong, had typos in his email (which started with "Hey!"), and more or less completely contradicted what he said in his actual interview. ("I actually have never taught such a class, but I know I could.")

One woman wrote a brilliant letter - sent as a PDF to our department secretary, with a polite request for them to be printed and placed in our boxes - that summed up her and our questions, and left us all with a new idea for a fledgling program that would actually work.

I went to our search chair and said, "Can we reply to these notes?"

His face went stony. "Oh, no. We are forbidden from having any contact with candidates. You must not reply via email or even take a phone call if anyone calls. It would invalidate the whole search."

Now, I've often read in the Chronicle that job hiring practices are fraught with this kind of nuttiness, but is it true?

Regardless, our job search has felt inhumane to me at times. We didn't respond to query letters. When people asked questions about the college or the town, we were told to delete the emails and not respond. We didn't follow up on questions about the interview process. We weren't allowed to reply to voicemails, even on ordinary requests like, "Can I send you my latest book?" Anything we did was a single email from the search chair to all candidates at once. Even when people had been cut from our list we did not alert them. (There are 145 people right now, I think, who imagine they're still candidates for our job. Well, you're not!)

Q: What would you do differently in academic hiring to make the system work better, be more humane, and result in better hires?

42 comments:

  1. Treat candidates like future colleagues, not just impediments to your day. During my brief job search a while back, some schools treated me so poorly that I had no interest in going there.

    Other places, especially private colleges, were always quite warm and receptive.

    I am buffaloed by all EEOC regulations regarding contact with candidates. It all seems like bullshit.

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  2. Good question. "Nuttiness" is a polite word; "bat-shit crazy" is oftentimes more appropriate.

    However, sometimes I have been humbled by fellow committee members who identified excellent candidates whom I'd have let slip through the cracks.

    The "nuttiness" you described is actually quite tame. Tolerate it.

    And be the best you can be. You are seeing other people's nuttiness; they are seeing yours. Be well rested.

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  3. If you think so highly of this woman who "left us all with a new idea for a fledgling program that would actually work," then hire her and help her to start up this program once she's arrived on campus. You search chair has good reason to be concerned that all communications related to this hire go in an orderly fashion through official channels: if anyone should steal this woman's idea and she isn't hired, she could sue you, and I wouldn't blame her. If you want the system to work better, I therefore strongly suggest you do take the humane approach. Part of this is doing things in an orderly manner, with the search chair's full knowledge of everything. This means no loose cannons.

    Also, people cut from the list should be notified as soon as possible, in a fair, orderly, and official manner. This can take longer than many people like. In my field, astrophysics, there are job rumor web pages, which attempt to alleviate this. I have mixed feelings about the rumor page. The people who post to it are anonymous, but the people whose names are listed because they've been shortlisted, interviewed, or hired are most certainly not anonymous. Most didn't consent to have their names posted here; indeed, most of them were never even asked.

    Nevertheless, here's the current astrophysics job rumor site:

    http://www.astrobetter.com/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=Rumor+Mill

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  4. The job wikis exist because the lowly job seeker is trying to plan their life. Knowing where they stand in the hiring process enables them to move on to plan B (or start prepping for the pending campus invite). Ignoring emails, months of silence - does that sound like humane hiring practices?

    The secret ways SCs conduct themselves don't work anymore. A SC chair recently admitted to me that the job wiki was, "surprisingly accurate and timely" regarding their own search. I told him that he shouldn't be surprised, sometimes if the job seekers aren't updating the Wiki sympathetic members of the search committee are.

    SCs have two options now - either be more open yourselves or continue as you have been and let things slip out anyway on the Wiki. If your SC want's some control over it, setup your own hosted job search blog and include updates on the process ("We have narrowed our shortlist to 10"; "Campus interviews start next week").

    The old ways don't work anymore.

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    1. Oh, I used to watch them anxiously, since they did often shorten the agony. Once I got hired, though, my attitude changed, since there was my name, for all the world to see, listed with no permission whatsoever from me. I therefore have mixed emotions about the wikis. Also, if they get their information wrong, watch out.

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    2. My field doesn't list names on the Wiki, although occasionally talks will be linked to the job ad if they are posted by the institution. I've also seen the wiki be wrong, one more reason for the SCs to take control of the info.

      As a job seeker, I don't need to know the names of the folks interviewing. That does seem a bit much.

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  5. Also, people cut from the list should be notified as soon as possible, in a fair, orderly, and official manner.

    I wholeheartedly second this comment. I spent a few lackluster years on the job market, and what enraged me more than anything else was the carelessness with which rejection letters were prepared. Oftentimes, departmental apologists pass the buck to HR, claiming that their regulations limit when rejected candidates can be notified. I'm not denying that. However, I'm also not excusing department-level assholery or HR-level incompetence.

    Of the many rejection letters I received, three stand out.

    One came directly from a department chair who took some kind of zany, ironic approach to the letter, seriously saying that it was a "dubious decision" to choose another candidate. I have no idea what that statement was supposed to mean, particularly when I'm quite sure that the same letter went to the "hundreds and hundreds" (his exact words, in the same letter) of other rejected candidates.

    Another letter was, quite understandably, generic. However, it arrived in my mailbox in late-January, weeks after the Big National Meet Market Conference for my field. The letter was dated early December, and it was informing me that the search committee would not be meeting me "at this year's Big National Meet Market Conference."

    The worst offender--and I've written about this one somewhere on this website--was a deviously thick letter that came to me in early December. The deadline for applications for this position was some obscenely early day very early in the fall, and the first notification I received from the program in question was this very letter. It contained three documents. One was an acknowledgement that my application packet had been received. Another was an HR form asking me to fill out demographic information. The other was a letter indicating that I had not made the short list of candidates and would not be interviewed at the Big National Meet Market Conference. So, to paraphrase, that letter, in total, read: "Hello, nice to meet you! Please tell us more about yourself. I'm sorry, we're no longer interested in you."

    There's absolutely no fucking excuse for that kind of systemic disorganization. And that statement doubles for the HR robots who make salaries that far outshine what so many of us adjuncts/desperate job candidates make. Stop playing goddamn Angry Birds and stuff your envelopes already.

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    1. Total agreement. I think that the content and wording of communications makes almost as big an impression on applicants as the (in)frequency of those communications.

      Address applicants by their actual names rather than "applicant" (more like "supplicant," amirite?). If they've finished their degree, give them the appropriate title.

      I've read a lot of rejection letters that, weirdly, seemed designed to make the *applicant* have sympathy for the *committee*. They say things like "there were, like, 600 of you applying for this position and we were totally overwhelmed" or "the process of weeding out people was really tough and agonizing" or "we're so flattered that so many people want to come to our awesome school but we can't give them all jobs, boo hoo." You're already rejecting people; do you really need to make them feel worse about how things are going?

      Worst of all are the ones that just don't seem to give a shit about you or the search or anything. I got one once that said "Dear Applicant: You were not among the six [or so, I forget] candidates we invited for a conference interview. Yours, Search Chair." Boy, that sure made me feel good about printing out fifty pages of stuff for you guys and shelling out some more dough to Interfolio.

      It makes me feel sort of squicky to say it, but I think that rejected applicants need to be soothed a bit. Tell them that their credentials are excellent. Wish them luck in the job search. Show that you acknowledge the sort of situation they're in and how hard the market is, and that you sympathize with that. You can do all these things without coming off as stilted or vain.

      One of my favorite rejection letters had a sentence somewhat on the order of "I realize how difficult the job market is now, but nonetheless I hope that you all (somehow) find rewarding positions." That little parenthetical made the whole business sound so much more human and so much less disconnected.

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    2. Absolutely agree with all of this. And also don't go gushing about your new hire. A letter I got last year went on about how superbly qualified and awesome their new faculty member was. Seriously? Get fucked.

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    3. Bison:

      That happens all the time in industry. It's their way of saying that you rolled the dice and you lost.

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    4. My favorite rejection letter was sent to me three years after the application was due. I was tempted to write them back, to say, "Don't strain yourselves."

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  6. I just finished co-chairing a search committee. I made sure two things happened: letters went out immediately to those not selected for interviews and those who came for interviews got phone calls informing them of the committee's decision.

    I'm grateful to you folks who have shared your job search misery here--it's because of your stories that I realized (duh) HR doesn't always have its shit together about these things. They were surprised by my requests--but were receptive to my reasons.

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  7. I've chaired a few hiring committees over the years, and this year I sent out a few applications, so I'm experiencing the process from the other side. I think of rejection letters as a formality; if I haven't heard from a school at this point, I just assume I'm not in the running.

    I had my first skype interview recently, which I thought went well; everybody relaxed and smiling and I answered all the questions apparently to their satisfaction, though I'm aware these impressions don't necessarily mean very much. It didn't occur to me to send them a note (why add to their email traffic?) I know when they'll have a short list, and I know the campus interview dates. So I can plan ahead.

    The main thing is (as said above) to treat job candidates as colleagues, not as powerless peons. An important part of that is keeping people informed of how the process is developing: letting candidates on the "long list" know when a shortlist is ready, whether they're on it or not. Answer queries politely and briefly, without giving the impression of favoritism (the committee chair or secretary should handle all queries from candidates.)

    As a job seeker (and I've been one a few times) I don't take rejections personally. (It helps to be tenured at an R1 place, though not one I particularly like.) It's not an exact science, and in most cases I can understand after the fact why something happened or didn't. There are good matches and not-so-good matches, as well as personal recommendations (phone calls). In a pool where comparable people outnumber the available slots, what happens is rarely a reflection of "abstract professional desirability".

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    1. Maybe I'm misunderstanding. Did you have a video interview for a job that you wanted and you did not send them a thank you?

      If so, it's almost unthinkable to me.

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    2. @Hiram, you understood it right. Unthinkable? I don't know, in the times I've chaired a search I don't recall getting notes from candidates, and I certainly wouldn't hold the absence of a thank-you note against a candidate.

      Maybe it's cultural. Maybe some people think sending a note is being "pushy", or trying too hard. Just in case, I just fired off a brief note to the search committee chair (it's not even 48h since the interview). So thanks for the heads up. Maybe we math people are more blase' about this than people in other fields.

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    3. Yes, you're right. I could have said unthinkable to me. I've been on a number of committees and if I didn't get a thank you note or email, I'd think the candidate wasn't really interested. And I've made short list decisions - as have the committees I've been on - based in part on these notes.

      The best notes further address a sticky or difficult question from the interview, but at least express continued interest after the new information gleaned from the interview itself.

      Not writing after an interview is, for me, a message that the candidate isn't interested anymore.

      I'm in the Humanities.

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    4. I have to agree with Hiram.

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    5. Maybe I'll start sending thank-you notes to schools which I know are hiring. I'm not looking for a job so I wouldn't apply. I'd just send them a very warm thank you note expressing my enjoyment of talking with them during our recent interview. Just to fuck with people.

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  8. what is preferable, a polite email or a "real" thank you card??

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  9. Do search committees act the way they do and get away with it because there are so many candidates?

    My wish is that in some small way committees actually courted candidates instead of acting as if they were bestowing some grand favor to job seekers.

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  10. We're dealing with this right now. For the past month, we've been advertising a position. I've read over 100 resumes so far and have been pulling out the best ones. Then, last week, I find out that A Decision Has Been Made to no longer hire anyone for this position.

    Okay, I understand, these things happen. So I ask if someone can please take down the ad to stop the flow of resumes--and I'm told that the ad will stay up, advertising a nonexistent position, because we paid to post it on certain job boards for a certain period of time, and we want to get our money's worth. And it's certainly not harming *US* to leave the ads up.

    We still receive five or six applications a day for this job. They arrive at an e-mail inbox that no one checks. This is nuts.

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    1. I don't even understand the reasoning. What are you getting your money's worth of?

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    2. Bison:

      It's internal bureaucracy.

      I knew someone that happened to. At the place where I used to teach, I saw an ad for a job which was right up his alley. It required the same education that he had and he also had teaching experience. I passed the information on to him and he gave the place a call.

      A few days later, he told me the whole story. The position had been filled by the time he contacted the institution. The requirements were that it had to be advertised because, apparently, no internal candidate was chosen. If I remember correctly, the decision had been made around the time the ad was first posted.

      Nice system we had....

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  11. The Chronicle threads are so up and down on this issue. Some former SC members feel sending thank you cards/emails is a slimy practice ("You had your chance to answer questions, any further contact is awkward at best."). Others don't think it hurts or helps a candidate. To be safe I usually send a "thank you for your time" email to the chair to pass around and call it good.

    Of course, I guess if it really helped I'd have a TT right now.

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  12. Many of the positions being advertised might actually be bogus. Those ads may have been posted because someone is considering something and wants to have the people on hand if and when approval for that project is given. Other times, a candidate has already been chosen but internal regulations dictate that an ad must to be posted.

    Then there are those interviews in which several candidates are brought in, though, like I just mentioned, whoever gets the job was already decided. Those interviews are conducted merely to confirm the decision, so one might already be out of the running before the meeting takes place.

    Rejections are another story. Cheesy brush-offs were commonplace even 30 years ago. The employer claims to have been overwhelmed by one's qualifications, but uses some mildly insulting way to tell the applicant to get lost. There are many variations on that theme. But those letters claimed that the application will be kept on file for "six months", indicating that there must be quite a large dustbin which is emptied only twice a year.

    But, even back then, one would be lucky to get responses to 1 in 5 applications. Now it's, maybe, 1 in 20. Then there are the employer follow-ups to interviews.

    Again, there are the usual cloyingly annoying rejections, little better than the ones I referred to before. However, many employers taken the we'll-call-you-if-you-got-the-job approach. Often, I'd have an interview and I'd be promised a decision within a few days. Usually, though, the said number of days come and go and there's nothing but silence. Finally, I took the initiative and contacted them, only to be told that I didn't get the position (oh, really?). But then they proceed to insult me by claiming that they were just about to call me when I telephoned them (yeah, right).

    One college I had an interview with several years ago went completely silent after our meeting. I didn't bother contacting it because, if it was interested, it could find me. I haven't disappeared from the planet.

    I've also had the case in which I was contacted directly by telephone to come in for an interview, had the meeting, and was told I didn't get the job by e-mail. The worst was a different college and, in this case, I knew who my boss would have been as we knew each other during my early days as a grad student. I got the e-mail rejection and I took umbrage. I figured knowing someone for so many years counted for considerable more courtesy than that. I evidently was wrong.

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  13. You keep candidates in the dark so then they won't be able to turn around and sue you for being rejected (along with some fun logic like "I wasn't hired because I was born in X country/state/city" or "I was discriminated against because of my tattoos"). You can't sue for discrimination if no decision is ever officially rendered, or if it's rendered a year later and chances are you've already moved on.

    Second, it's not the company/university/employer's responsibility to soften the blow. You should be happy you're getting any notice at all, because once they don't want you it's just wasting time and money to spend any more effort dealing with you. It's impolite, but efficient.

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    1. The problem with this approach is that a small field like mine, astronomy, is very much a global village. There are barely 7000 professional astronomers in the entire U.S.A., with a comparable number elsewhere on the planet. Because of this, everyone knows everyone, so don't be the village idiot. What goes around has a way of coming around, so we're usually pretty cordial to each other, at least to each other's faces.

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  14. You should be happy you're getting any notice at all, because once they don't want you it's just wasting time and money to spend any more effort dealing with you

    I disagree. Reputable departments want to remain reputable. If they ignore their applicants, or send them nasty letters, or just generally treat them like shit, they complain about it to their colleagues, their advisers, the people on the wiki, etc., and the department's reputation takes a hit.

    It doesn't cost anything to send an email, and I would think that having even rejected applicants regard your department favorably is absolutely worth the time you'd spend putting together a sympathetic rejection letter.

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  15. Randy from Redding writes:

    The issue of thank-you notes may have been discussed before, but it still confuses me. I’m in a humanities discipline and didn’t even hear about sending thank-you notes after a conference or phone interview until after I received my Ph.D. When I then asked my advisor about it, I was told that it wasn’t a good idea. That made sense to me, given the general “don’t call us, we’ll call you” vibe that search committees give off. But given some of the comments I’ve seen on the site (and I’m not picking on Hiram, his comments today just jumped out at me), apparently that isn’t the case. I’ve made a point to express interest in a place during my interviews, but it never occurred to me to push that further with additional communication. Given that it is an unspoken rule or custom (i.e. people like myself have been absolutely unaware of it while on the market) and doesn’t seem to affect one’s qualifications, it seems an odd thing to have decisions hinge on. For people who do give them weight, how do you deal with that?

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    1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  16. I've been on several search committees and have never received a thank you note from a candidate, nor did I expect to. This is because I understand how the search process works and additionally because one of the SC chairs told me that cultural norms differ, so we shouldn't consider a candidate stronger for having sent a note, or weaker for not having sent them. Apparently, she was in the habit of collecting them and not sharing.. oh well.

    In terms of making things better, it seems to me that, since we require online applications, we could provide a password for applicants to let them know the progress of the search -- so, when interviews are scheduled, you could log in and see that and know that you weren't a finalist etc... A caveat -- sometimes a SC needs to contact someone who wasn't on the list because finalists back out... so, a person who wasn't notified could be notified late -- better a surprise call from a job you thought was a goner than not knowing at all... At the end, when an offer has been made and accepted, that would be posted as well.

    I think having someplace a candidate can look, on their own, would be more kind than compulsively checking for an e-mail note that will never arrive...

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    1. The issue of cultural norms is relevant here. It's similar to the problem of students in different cultures feeling at ease when participating in class.

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  17. Three weeks after I applied for a job, I received a very nice letter informing me that I had not made it to the first tier of interviews, but if anything changed, they would like to hold on to my materials.

    It was a mass email personalized only in that it had my name on it. But it told me that they were thankful for my application, that a teeny tiny chance existed for a future contact, but that I should move on.

    Everyone should do this.

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  18. In my experience we always get thank you emails from at least 90% of all candidates. Some are perfunctory and brief but many expand on items we couldn't cover on Skype.

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  19. My physics department usually gets thank-you notes, in the higher-impact form of postal mail notes. The department secretary typically shows them off on her desk, for us faculty to see. They're usually perfunctory and brief. The last time we did a hire was in 2007: I don't know what the norm should be today.

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  20. I chaired a whole slew of searches before we were told to reduce our ranks by a double-digit percentage. I always tried to send out news to everyone as soon as I could, never to anyone singled out, and never personalized in ways that could compromise the search. It wasn't rocket science. And I was proud to get notes back from rejected candidates saying that we ran a humane search. Some of the people we did not hire got jobs elsewhere, and I keep track of them. Some I even regret not hiring! So it pays to be decent, on both ends.

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  21. Here is one small, easily avoided bit of discourtesy. Suppose a candidate gets a campus interview, or maybe just a skype interview with the search committee. Thus, he/she gets to meet would-be colleagues in the new department; people the candidate will continue to run into at conferences (or as an anonymous referee), years into the future.

    And then somebody else is chosen for the job, or the candidate doesn't get the interview; instead just a perfunctory, impersonal email. So far, so good. Now, having this form email come from a university HR office is poor form. The decent thing to do here is for the SC chair (or the department head) to send it; after all, they've met the candidate. A small courtesy (or its absence) goes a long way, and will be remembered. We're talking five to fifteen people here, so it's not a lot of work.

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  22. I'm stunned by a few comments.

    Of course you send a thank you note or email. Anything else is rude. Seriously, am I being punk'd?

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    1. No punking, it was an honest question. It may be a disciplinary thing (I'm in history), but I had no idea it was a custom until after I was on the market and was told not to do send them when I asked about. To me it's tricky, as the comments above show some think it seems pushy and hurts, others that it is a polite necessity and helps. But given many people seem to view it as an unspoken rule one way or another, it seems a little arbitrary to me to give them weight in making decisions, as it is something the candidate has little control over, beyond sending one out or not and hoping he or she guessed correctly. Particularly the aspect of expanding on stuff, does this mean people are punished for answering questions completely in the interview? I realize the whole process is often pretty arbitrary, but this always sticks in my mind for some reason. Again, I'm not trying to pick a fight, this is just something that struck me as weird as a candidate and as a faculty member.

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    2. Personally I think a search committee who sees thank-you notes as important enough to sway a hiring decision needs to get its priorities straight; it really shouldn't matter one way or the other.

      But it's clear from this thread that this a discipline-cultural (or maybe generational) feeling not shared by all. So the prudent thing to do for someone starting out is to at least send a brief note to the chair of the search committee, on grounds that it's better to be seen as slightly odd than rude.

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  23. I've hired dozens of people over the years, and it's always been my own experience that these interviews are conversations, everything from the cover letter, to a phone interview, to a campus interview, and then after. And every committee I've ever been on has distributed the thank you notes, which in my experience have nearly always included additional thoughts and information about the position.

    I wonder if folks who think the thank you note is pushy also avoid sending them after a campus visit? Does one just go home and wait to hear?

    I'm in the camp, maybe it is generational, that would be stunned if someone who had applied for the job didn't followup any interview with a note. Of course back in the day these were letters, but over the last several years they've been nearly all email.

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  24. I definitely expect to receive thank you notes from the schools where I've interviewed. Anything less than a handwritten letter, signed by all members of the SC, and that school is dead to me.

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