Dear Search Committees

We realize that some search committees are full of sadistic bastards, but many people who make decisions about how to run searches are simply clueless. Some of them haven’t had to job-hunt for forty years. Some just keep doing the same thing over and over again because it’s the way things have been done forever, even though it no longer makes sense. Let’s put together a list of suggestions for the latter group. Maybe send the link to a couple of people you know who serve on search committees. Try to get them to think about alternatives to their usual way of conducting a search. Please, stay respectful and if you’re talking about specific experiences, don’t name names (you can put those on the ‘universities to fear’ page. Make this a useful set of suggestions rather than a critique.

Dear Search Committees,

Some of the job applicants who use this wiki have put together a list of respectful requests. It’s too late for this year, but we are hoping that future committees might be more conscious of the state of the job market as they make decisions about how to run their searches. There are a lot of things you can do to make the job hunt process a lot less painful for your applicants, which should not change the quality or the results of your search.


 * 1) Please think carefully about what materials you require for your initial application. Do you REALLY need syllabi? Teaching dossiers? (And nobody seems to have a clear idea of what these are--so if you require them, at least tell us what materials you expect.) Think of all of the ABD applicants who have plenty of TAing experience but have taught from established syllabi, or haven’t taught their own classes yet--and who might be fantastic, natural teachers. Think of the others who will be scouring your course pages to tweak their 'dossier' to fit what they think your needs are. In this market maybe you’ll get 150 applications for a single job. In some fields, rumor has it, they are getting closer to 300. But even at the lower estimate, if half of the people applying have to make up syllabi from scratch, and it takes at least 2-3 days to write up a reasonable, well-thought-out syllabus, you have just cost the academic world 150 to 225 work days. And most of the poor souls who have worked so hard on these bits of paper will not even make it to the interview stage. Please, only ask for additional materials from the people who make the first cut. Have mercy on the many people who put so much time into applications for your job but for one reason or another have no chance at getting it.
 * 2) Try to tell applicants EARLY if you intend to invite them for a conference interview. The longer you make us wait, the more expensive it will be. Many of us do not currently have jobs, i.e., we are paying our own way. So if we get word on December 15 that we need to show up for the MLA or AHA in just a few weeks--right in the middle of holiday travel season--it can get pretty pricey. (And all for a single interview, in many cases. Take a look at the wiki stats from the past few years: the majority of interviewees are invited only for one interview.) Remember, many of us have school loans to pay back, food to buy, children to raise. If you are going to conduct conference interviews, give us a break and tell us early enough to get reasonably priced tickets. Perhaps you should consider listing your job with an August deadline instead of October. You may not be able to make the first cut before the semester starts, but surely you will figure it out by fall break.
 * 3) Or abolish the conference interview altogether. It is worth considering interviewing by telephone or with a web cam. Think of the numbers. Let’s say you interview 12 applicants. And a flight plus a day or two in a hotel, plus the exorbitant conference fees, can add up to $1000-2000, depending on how far we are flying and how late have to buy tickets. So in effect @ $1500 per person your search could be costing applicants, some of whom are the people who can least afford to put an extra lump of debt on our credit cards, around $18000 total. (If you are from one of these insane places that interviews 20 candidates, that’s closer to $30000!!!) And that’s on top of what your school is spending for 3-5 of you to go. You could buy and FedEx every shortlisted candidate a Skype camera for significantly less than it will cost to send just one search committee member to a conference for 3 days. The conference interview just doesn’t make any sense in such a tight job market with so many applicants for every job, and in such a bad economy. It is a huge waste of personal and institutional resources, which nobody can afford these days.
 * 4) While it would certainly be impossible for you to respond to each application with a thoughtful, personalized letter, consider giving individual applicants (especially those you interviewed at a conference or on the phone...or those from whom you requested additional materials) a line of feedback in their rejection letter. This needn't be too onerous. A sentence explaining "we decided not to consider any ABD candidates this year" or "we did not interview applicants with less than two peer-reviewed articles" or "you do not currently have the teaching experience that we desire in a candidate" or "other candidates submitted stronger writing samples" or ANYTHING would be helpful. Many of us have no clue why we are not seen as competitive candidates, and we get absolutely no feedback from you to suggest what we could do to strengthen our applications in the future.
 * 5) Be humane (that applies at any number of stages). But this particularly applies when it comes to telling candidates that they have been rejected for a position.  Be as timely as possible with your notifications, particularly for short-listed candidates.  By seven weeks post-campus visit, we know we probably didn't get the job, but we'd like being told this rather than having to ask a search committee member at the major conference-- a conference that you knew we would be attending.  Also, don't leave a rejection voice mail on our cell phones- that is not classy.  Neither is sending a short listed candidate the generic rejection letter- as stated in comment #4, some type of personalized statement- even if just scribbed at the bottom of the form letter- would really be appreciated.


 * 'I agree with much of the above, although I know some SCs will give weak excuses about not having the administrative support to send 300 letters or whatever. The searches I like best are the ones that only ask for a letter and cv upfront. Ask for recommendations, writing samples, and syllabi AFTER you've made the first cut. If you need to ask for transcripts, only ask for them once you've reached the interview round. And although it seems cold, I appreciate the SCs who just state bluntly: if you haven't heard from us by X/XX/XX - you are out of the running. At least I know for sure where I stand. And for the love of GOD, put it IN YOUR AD whether you plan to interview at a particular conference. SURELY, SCs must know when they plan the search whether they'll be using a conference or phone interviews. Give the candidates a heads-up, would you?




 * 'While I appreciate where the poster is coming from, I don't know if I can co-sign #4. a) The unexplained rejection is not limited to the academic job market; b) it's not really the SC's responsibility to serve as my job coach; c) there may be specific reasons why they didn't choose, me, but what if there aren't?  Would it really be satisfying or illuminating to get a letter saying "you weren't a good fit"?;  d) you could also get a lot of conflicting feedback this way--one committee says "your writing sample wasn't up to par," another says "we loved your writing sample but we wanted a more experienced instructor".
 * 'I do not agree with the above objection at all. The aim here is not simply to provide feedback to the candidate, but also to hold search committees accountable for their decisions.  If academia is to be a meritocracy, then hiring decisions should be transparent and justifiable.      


 * 'Sadly, this is a liability issue: a prospective employer can be sued if they list the reasons they did not hire a given candidate. While the vast majority of us would really appreciate honest feedback to help us improve future applications/interviews/campus visits, offering such feedback could potentially open up institutions to lawsuits and it is my impression that this is why so many of us receive the generic rejections.
 * 'Okay, fair enough. Then make that clear and forgo with the hollow phrases, such as "there were a number of outstanding candidates..." Is that unreasonable?   ' 
 * No, it's not unreasonable, and I agree that the hollow, passive-voice construction is extremely annoying.
 * 'Personally, I prefer face-to-face interviews over phone interviews (I perform much better for some reason), so I am not quite in agreement with getting rid of conference interviews although I can see where the poster is coming from.
 * 'Regarding campus visits, please try to make them humane. Reimburse candidates promptly, and double-check where they would like the reimbursements to be mailed. Reimburse candidates for other expenses related to travel, such as airport parking and meals while in transit. During the visit, consider candidates' needs regarding food and downtime. No one wants to be on a 48-hour audition but no one wants to be wandering a random campus for hours either. And please be precise about what you want candidates to prepare for the campus visit. It's also helpful to give a local magazine, newspaper, or real estate listings to the candidate.
 * 'In response to #1 above, although it is a time consuming activity I had no problem with syllabi and the teaching dossier. As researchers our jobs are to exhaustively search all sources for info on this topic.  I have to say that I found assembling the teaching dossier to be a stimulating and helpful excerise.  It did help that I have a good amount of teaching experience even though I'm only ABD, which leads to my final point.  We all have various strengths and weaknesses.  For some of us, teaching experience is a plus and for some of us it's a minus.  Some of us have more experience in foreign archives and some less.  Well rounded candidates who have taught 5+ of their own courses and conducted 18 months of well funded research(via presitigious awards) are few and far between and I am certainly not one of them.  You may think you're an excellent or natural teacher from years of TA experience, and perhaps you are, but experience without the benefit of someone else's syllabus counts.  I can confidently state that there is no comparison between TAing and teaching your own course.  Personally, I actually find the latter to be easier in most respects but for many it can be more difficult. My point here is that we need to tailor our applications to our strengths while at the same time trying to improve our weaknesses.
 * Have to interject with regard to the legal liability issue (have a law degree). There is a liability to disclosing to someone else why an employee was terminated, etc... There is no liability issue for disclosing to a candidate why his or her application was rejected unless, of course, you are admitting to discriminatory hiring practices.


 * The point here is that committees should be sensitive about wasting the time of so many people who ultimately have no chance at the job. A good search committee should be able to tell from a CV and letters of reference whether or not they will be interested in a candidate. If they don’t like the CV, ancillary documents like syllabi and teaching dossiers will not change their mind. Whatever document they use to make their first cut, that is the one that they should require. Secondary materials should be requested at later stages. With 300+ applicants it seems doubtful that committees who ask for lots of material even read all what they have required every candidate to compile...maybe that should be the rule of thumb: search committees should feel obliged to read every page of required material that every candidate has sent. (Lots of British searches ask only for a CV at the initial stage. Not even a cover letter or rec letters. IMHO, that seems more humane, and more sensible as well.) Furthermore, the above poster may not mind the time-consuming exercise, but some candidates do not have so much spare time. The bottom line is that a time-consuming application process privileges those people who have a lot of time to work on their applications: 1) ABDs or postdocs who have funding and lots of time on their hands (thus further privileging people from schools that give better funding to their grad students, e.g., the Ivies once again). 2) Anyone who does not need to work (thus further privileging the wealthy). 3) People who don’t have children. But what about the guy who just finished his PhD and is spending the Fall teaching six sections of Western Civ or World History just to pay his student loans? What about the ancient history grad student who has been teaching 20 Century US to pay the rent, and thus does not have appropriate syllabi to send? What about the folks who (sometimes accidentally) had children before getting a tenure-track position? These people might get weeded out just because they were not lucky enough to land their first jobs in their own specialty, and/or do not have copious amounts of available time to put into their applications. By default many searches continue to reward a certain career trajectory, and if your career has veered off for one reason or another, you lose.

6. Have something good to say about your school and its location in your ad. 7. Be clear about the position for which you are hiring prior to posting the ad. We understand that departments often are limited to one new hire when, in fact, they need might have a need for several new positions. And we know that it can be difficult to come to a consensus about which position to fill. However, you are pretty well guaranteed to get plenty of qualified applicants for any standard posting. If you probably aren't going to hire in a given subfield, including it in your posting only pulls in another 100+ applicants who all put a great deal of time and effort into a job that they never really had a shot at.