One of the realities of being a job candidate in higher education is that from the moment you leave your home for a campus interview, you are under scrutiny. It’s physically and mentally tiring to stay in performance mode during a two-day visit. And the point at which candidates are most likely to let down their guard — and shouldn’t — is meal time.
As a visiting job candidate, you never know if someone you’re chatting with on the plane or at a local coffee shop is connected to the institution or even the search itself. Almost a decade ago, when I was seeking to become a dean, I checked into a hotel in a small Midwestern town and the front-desk clerk began to ask me some oddly probing questions. It turned out she was related to staff members at the college where I had an interview.
Those encounters are unpredictable. But the offhand moments that cause the most trouble during a campus visit are the ones that happen at breakfast, lunch, or dinner meetings with people who are either directly involved in the search or have some connection to the institution.
With a new hiring season underway, I have some advice on what to say and how to act during interview meals, based on three decades of observing job candidates and being one myself. Some of my suggestions will be most relevant to early-career academics but they could apply to anyone, including those seeking a deanship or a vice presidency. My purpose here is not to instill paranoia (well, just a bit) but rather to offer some cautions and to point out the opportunities for you to shine in front of your would-be colleagues.
Who’s coming to dinner (or lunch)? It’s time to muster your “read the room” skills. Various players in the job search — including people who aren’t on the official search committee — participate in meals during a candidate’s campus visit. You might have dinner with a group of faculty members, lunch with graduate students, and breakfast with the department chair and the dean. Finding out who will be at each meal can help you prepare.
And yes, you should do some research to prepare for informal meetups — albeit not as extensively as you would practice a teaching demo or a research presentation. But at least give some thought to what you might be asked by different stakeholders and how you might answer.
A department chair might be friendly and low-key during most of the meal, and then start asking you a few job interview-type questions, such as: “What courses in our curriculum do you see yourself teaching?” or “What do you project your research agenda will be in five years?” or “What federal grants are you going to target?” A doctoral student might want to know about your graduate training and how you see yourself in the role of mentor.
Use your own experience as a guide in shaping your answers. When you were a doctoral student, what did you want to know about job candidates? Meet with your peers or current colleagues to get their advice on what they were asked during interview meals and how they handled awkward questions. Make an appointment with your current department chair, and ask “What are you looking for in an assistant professor?”
The point is, however informal the meal, be prepared to respond to job-related questions. And answer as you would during a formal meeting with the search committee.
Prepare talking points. In the Academic Job Hunts From Hell series, I wrote about the importance of keeping on script. Other columnists have written about what to say (and not say) at lunch with future colleagues and about how search-committee members can “lower the stakes” at interview dinners.
If your campus interview includes a research talk, you have a set of key points for your audience to remember — that some aspect of your research is groundbreaking or that it fits within the vision of the hiring department. The way you convey that information is also important because it helps signal whether you would be a good colleague and fit into the departmental culture.
Likewise, during interview meals, your twin goals are to impress people with your CV and your personality. You need a checklist of key points in your head and a sense of how to deliver them in an effective, nuanced way. You can’t be too forced, shoving your talking points into light banter: “The chicken is good, but you know what else is good? The research findings of my dissertation!” Aim for a natural flow to the discussion.
Remember: You are going to have six or so meals with various parties to the search, so you don’t have to tick every rhetorical box at each one. Just approach each meal with a sense of what you hope to accomplish.
Finally, style matters. Yes, academia is a profession and a calling that allows many personality types to be successful, including shy introverts. But in job interviews, you want to express yourself with enough volubility that you sound excited about your own research, passionate about teaching, and actually attracted to this particular position. You don’t have to pound the table and burst into song, but you must come off like you really want to be a part of the place.
Go easy on the portions and the alcohol. That advice may seem pedantic, especially for a faculty search. After all, the main qualifications for a tenure-track position are your intellectual achievements and professional skills, not your manners and culinary tastes. But in any job-interview setting, little things can convey a lot.
Before you arrive on the campus, review the itinerary and Google the restaurants listed. A few etiquette rules to follow:
- Ask about the dress code. If your dinner companions told you “please be casual, we will,” then a pair of jeans is fine. A high-end restaurant means you should be dressed as you would for a formal interview.
- Good hosts will ask about your eating preferences — gluten-free, vegan, and the like. What do you do if they don’t? No need to bring it up at all if you search online for the venue and pick your entrée ahead of time. (If you have a severe food allergy or some other dietary need, don’t hesitate to ask the waiter some questions.)
- Don’t order anything that’s overly complicated or messy to eat. You’re not going to lose a job because you spill tomato sauce on your shirt, but it’s probably not the image you want to project.
- Avoid making a lot of special (non-health related) requests to a harried server. Not only does that imply that you’re fussy and hard to please in other areas of life (maybe you are but they can discover that after you’re hired), but it suggests the kind of impatience and rudeness that people aren’t looking for in a new colleague. Best to look at the menu beforehand and pick out something simple.
- Order something that will assuage your hunger. You’re probably going to be answering questions as you eat, which means you may not get to finish your plate (and you don’t want to talk with your mouth full).
- That said, a job meal is not the place to pig out, even when everyone else at the table is. The same goes for alcohol. It’s fine to have a glass of wine, especially if other people are. But in terms of food and drink, you should be the most temperate person at the table.
- A final aspect to consider is price. Moderation should guide you here, too. You don’t have to prove a point by ordering toast and lettuce, but neither should you order the seafood tower with extra Alaskan king crab. You want to be memorable for what you say, not for what you ate and how much it cost.
Be congenial but not intimate. The greatest threat for candidates at an interview meal is that you will forget that these people are not (yet) your friends. They are looking for a new colleague, and everyone from the dean to the graduate students will view the stakes as high. An ill-judged hire — in terms of poor performance, lost potential, or combative behavior — will do great damage and waste a lot of time and money.
You can’t change your personality and be funny or confident if you’re neither. Once again, this is a matter of nuance and balance. Be friendly but don’t let your hair down too much and start talking to everyone as if you’re all grad-school pals. Oversharing, and assuming intimacy where none has yet been established, will undermine your professional persona.
Also, culture matters. A colleague of mine who interviewed at an East Asian university described it as “an experience in extreme hierarchy, formality, and strict procedure.” Conversely, a graduate student told me about an interview he had at a regional college in the American South where, within 10 minutes of his arrival at the restaurant, everybody was laughing it up “with bibs and ribs.”
Always keep in mind that you don’t have the job locked up yet. At the farewell meal, someone may privately assure you, with complete sincerity, that “the job interview is over, you can relax.” But that doesn’t mean your off-color joke, vicious remark about your graduate adviser, or odd romantic reminiscence won’t count against you.
What’s in it for you (besides food)? Whoever you’re sharing a meal with, view it as a good opportunity — not just to make a positive impression, but to do some digging and learn things about your potential employer.
- You’re not the only one on display during a campus visit. It is just as much the duty of a hiring unit to show off that it is worthy of you as the reverse. A meal can help you decide that, yes, these are definitely the people you would like to spend perhaps the rest of your career working with. Or they might very well let slip facts, opinions, insights, or insults that drive you away.
- If you’re changing jobs, use the meal to demonstrate that you’re a good colleague. For example, find a respectful, yet accurate, way to explain why you’re leaving your old campus. Resist the urge to badmouth your department or take cheap shots at people (however tempting). You want to show that you are professional, and not bitter, vindictive, or desperate.
- Compared with other elements of a campus visit, meals have an informality that offers you the chance to bring up anecdotes that enhance your professional persona. For example, years ago, a candidate really impressed me by describing how economic circumstances had prevented her mother from becoming a professor; and now the candidate not only wanted to carry on her mother’s dream but hoped to work with others to achieve their educational ambitions. It gave me insights about the candidate that wouldn’t have fit in a formal research talk but made sense within the context of casual conversation over dinner.
- Meals are also a good time to emphasize and extend points that you made during the more formal meetings and presentations. When I was interviewing to become a department chair, I remember that at lunch, a faculty member asked me to elaborate on a comment I had made about tenure. He wasn’t being hostile; he just didn’t understand my point. Lunch gave me a chance, in a more relaxed atmosphere, to have a really thoughtful discussion about promotion and tenure standards.
The overall takeaway here: Interview meals are an equally important part of your candidacy and should be treated with the seriousness and planning that you devote to every other aspect of the campus visit.
