Note: In the “Ask the Chair” series, the author of How to Chair a Department answers your questions about departmental leadership. Send your queries via Facebook or email. Read previous columns here.
Higher ed is in the midst of its annual hiring season. The faculty-recruitment calendar has long varied by discipline, but it used to be linked closely to each field’s Big Disciplinary Conference. That’s changed, owing to the pandemic’s disruptions to business-as-usual, the growing convenience of videoconferencing, and (I hope) the profession’s greater awareness of the financial challenges faced by academic-job seekers traveling to first-round interviews.
Today the faculty-hiring process still follows the same general calendar: application deadlines by November, interviews in January and February, offers in March and April. However, the schedule has loosened quite a bit in many fields, given that initial interviews are no longer tied so closely to annual conventions. There’s no longer a set time for a conversation about hiring protocols or etiquette, but it’s still an important discussion to have. So how about now? This month’s column responds not to one particular reader’s letter but rather to a cluster that touched on the topic.
For aspiring faculty members, it’s a jungle out there, in some fields more than others. At the department level, the chair is the person most closely identified with the hiring process (even when you don’t oversee a search directly, or perhaps even participate in it). What can a department head do to ensure a process that’s not merely just and equitable — crucial as those are — but humane?
Because our hiring processes have not always been kind to candidates. I remember when I was a graduate student on the market for the first time, one of my classmates was lucky enough to land an on-campus interview at an institution she would have been proud to join. She thought the visit had gone well; she continued to think so for a few days, even a week, after she returned. Four weeks later, however, having heard nothing from the chair or the search committee, she sheepishly called the department office. The administrative assistant curtly informed her that the position had been filled.
A chair can have a great deal of influence over the experience of job candidates.
To be sure, it’s a phone call no one wants to make: “I’m afraid we’ve offered the position to another candidate.” It’s especially awkward in those cases when the department has connected strongly with more than one candidate, or told someone “you are the favorite” only to shift its preference to someone else. However awkward, it’s a call that you as chair have to make. I’ve both made and received my share of “someone else got the job” phone calls. And yes, even in today’s technology-driven communication ecosystem, some situations just call for a phone call.
I was once on the shortlist for a deanship at a small college when the president called to say that another finalist had been selected for the job. As soon as he started to say “the search has gone in another direction,” I just wanted to get off the phone as fast as I could. An email would have been easier for me to process. But had the president shared the bad news electronically, I know I would have felt insulted and demeaned after all the time I’d spent in the interview process. Job candidates, especially finalists, expect and deserve to hear the news directly.
A chair can have a great deal of influence over the experience of job candidates. Here are some ways to use your “power” to humanize a process that can feel profoundly dehumanizing.
Endeavor to be the chair you wish had overseen your own hiring. Force yourself to sit for some time with memories of your faculty-job searches. In my own career, it’s mostly the kindness of department chairs that I remember. Over time, some of those chairs (and search-committee members) became important colleagues and interlocutors, even friends. I co-edited a book with one.
Once I had the opportunity to serve as chair myself, their good example of how to treat job candidates was a beacon for me. And if some, or most, of your memories of your own hiring are dark ones, use those as guides of what not to do, and be better.
Remember that you’re a suitor, no matter how competitive the job market. The dismal prospects for tenure-track job seekers in some fields can trick hiring committees into thinking they’re buyers — and on the macro level, that’s not wrong. But despite the scarcity of available positions in your field, the best candidates in any year are still the objects of many departments’ desire.
Which is to say that, even when it’s correct to describe the employment picture in your discipline as a buyer’s market, the very top candidates flip the odds in their favor. They have other options besides your department. As chair, it’s your job to shape their interview experience such that they’ll be able to imagine a future with you and your colleagues. You’re not just interviewing candidates: They are interviewing you, too. Pull out all the stops.
How far you take that charge will depend on your personality and bandwidth. One small example: I always made it a point to pick up candidates for on-campus interviews at the airport. I want them to feel welcomed upon their arrival, rather than flustered by the logistics of transportation, food, and hotel. (And traffic: We’re in Southern California.) I’d greet them with an up-to-date version of their itinerary, get them a meal if they were in need of one, and stand at a discreet distance at the hotel check-in to make sure the billing went to the department. (On the trip back to the airport, after an intense set of interviews, some candidates are grateful for the “alone time” in a cab or rideshare. Ask their preference.)
Be as kind as you can, as deep into the applicant pool as you can afford to be. It’s not just your top candidate, or top three, who deserves your best effort. Even those applicants who don’t make it past the first round in your search aspire to the kind of job you have. Maybe foolishly, I still believe that empathy can change the world, or at least the profession.
I’ll never forget a kindness that was extended to me in my first long, crushing job search. I received a rejection letter from the department that I had most hoped to join — it was polite, but it was clearly a form letter. Yet a prominent scholar in my field, whose work I still admire, took the time to handwrite a short personal note on the letter, saying how much she admired my application and writing sample, and regretting that the department was looking for a scholar with a slightly different focus. Those words — that blue fountain-pen ink — meant the world to me as a very disappointed candidate. And don’t forget that the academy is (as the David Lodge title has it) a small world: That same scholar would, decades later, serve as the dissertation director for my youngest daughter.
Candidates we damage through thoughtlessness or callousness carry those wounds with them into our profession.
The new colleagues we hire are the future of our profession, and once we’ve identified them, most of us marshal our resources to treat them as such. What we too often forget is that many of the people we don’t hire are also the future of the profession and live out their careers at other institutions.
Candidates we damage through thoughtlessness or callousness carry those wounds with them into our profession. Some rise above that trauma and others perpetuate it. It’s a vicious cycle that we must take steps to break, and one way to do that is through simple courtesy in the hiring process.
Share as much information about the search as you’re able, in a timely fashion. As my opening anecdote suggests, this is difficult — because many of us are as unhappy about delivering disappointing news as we are receiving it, and because in many situations HR and legal guidelines constrain what we’re able to divulge to candidates.
Another wrinkle — and this one might be controversial — is that sometimes candor and kindness are at cross-purposes in hiring.
Case in point: Say your department has identified a top candidate and offered that person the position, but you’ve got another couple of finalists waiting by the phone. Transparency would dictate that you promptly call to let them know you’ve offered someone else the job. If one or both of those also-rans would be acceptable to the department, you might call them to say: “We’ve offered the job to another candidate, but the department was really excited by your candidacy too. Should our offer not be accepted, I might be back in touch. I’ll keep you posted, and in the meantime would be grateful if you’d let me know if anything changes in your situation.” That would be candor, and arguably the candidate deserves that information.
But what if your top choice declines the offer and you end up hiring your second choice? No. 2 will know they were your “fallback.” In a perfect world, that’s a burden the candidate should never have to bear. It can seriously shake the confidence of assistant professors to know that they weren’t the department’s top choice and leave them worrying that it will come back to haunt them in the tenure process. When I was hired into my current position, I know that there were two other finalists. I got the offer but I still don’t know whether one or both of them turned it down first. And maybe it’s just me, but I’m glad I don’t know.
That said, my greatest regret in more than three decades of faculty hiring is that once — in an attempt to make sure that No. 2 would think they were our No. 1 if it came to that — I told a white lie and said that the committee was still wrestling with the decision. But I got caught in a paradigm shift: The internet had just created the conditions for job wikis, where candidates could share information about their own applications, and No. 2 read online from No. 1 that the job had been filled. And No. 2 was furious with me and maybe still is. I thought I was operating out of kindness, to spare the No. 2 candidate from feeling second-rate. It certainly did not land that way.
My strategy was flawed, but I’ll stand by my goal. A wise woman I know often reminds me, “Kindness is never amiss.” Surely our profession could do with a good bit more. As chairs, let’s recommit ourselves, in these very trying times, to embodying the change that we want to see in our institutions.
