Talk:African/Middle East History 2015-16

Discussion re. informing/not informing candidates of rejections before contracts are signed
[Moved from University of Massachusetts, Lowell (USA:MA) AFII (talk) 09:21, February 8, 2016 (UTC)]


 * another classless place with no actual rejections, just rumors.
 * As someone who interviewed at AHA and did not get an invite to campus, I'd like to disagree with that last post.  The fact is that until somebody has signed a contract, the semifinalists' candidacies are technically still open, even if it's highly unlikely that all of the campus finalists won't pan out.  Generally, they will send out a rejection once the search is complete and the ink on the contract is dry, but not before.  It's not classless.  Good luck on the rest of your applications, and good luck to the finalists.  The two interviewers seemed very friendly!
 * ^thank you, poster. This was what I was thinking but couldn't express as well as you just did (I responded and then redacted my response). Best of luck to the finalists, from another interviewee.
 * Wait is there some reason they can't say - as some places do - we have invited other candidates to campus for interviews but will contact you if they don't pan out? Then in the off chance that happened i suspect it would be even less awkward if they'd been honest the whole time instead of leaving the candidate hanging.
 * Campus specific policies, UMass system wide hiring practice, union regulations... any other host of reasons why they can't do it some other way. Hiring procedures are idiosyncratic, but very rigid andd formulaic. Also to note: the update here re: campus visits came from UML's campus. Is there irony in that? I think so, given the first reaction it garnered.
 * When I was on the job market two years ago, I received an early rejection letter from a school, and then a month later, a phone call from them, saying that they had reconsidered the position and would now like to interview me.  While it was exciting to get that call--at that point, I was facing a jobless future possibly living in a cave somewhere, so any possibility for a salary sounded just AWESOME--I knew that, if I were hired, it would not be the best of circumstances, to say the least.  Why?  Because they had already decided I wasn't a fit and/or wasn't qualified, and no matter how they tried to spin it, there was no way to gloss over the fact that I was an eleventh choice, at best (part of the problem was that this school was not in the US).  This is not to say that they were unprofessional in any way (in fact, that particular search committee was the most professional and communicative I've ever seen), but being "unrejected" is awkward for everyone.  And now, having served on a committee at my present institution, I can add that we did not contact our semifinalists until after we had a contract signed.  This is because we really liked a lot of the people we couldn't invite to campus, and we weren't convinced that our finalists would pan out (either they would absolutely suck, or they would not accept the job offer).  We didn't want to shut down their candidacies while they were still actually under consideration, even if the odds were stacked against them.