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.