The Hiring Season

When I got my Ph.D. in 1971, the bottom had just fallen out of the academic job market. I sent out 650 letters that year, had 13 interviews, and got no offers. At the time I knew nothing about how jobs were created, and even less about how they were filled. All I knew was that I didn’t have a job. I’m not sure I could have handled any more bad news.

Thirty years later we are in a period again where there are few academic jobs in the humanities and many good candidates to fill them. As a department head I now oversee the faculty search process, and it occurs to me that explaining how this works from the point of view of the hirer -- at least how it works in one English department -- is not necessarily bad news. It might even be illuminating for today’s job seekers to have this information, regardless of what field they’re in.

So in this series of columns I will take the reader through one hiring season for my department -- a typical one rather than the present one, because for one thing, this hiring season seems far from typical. Applications for our advertised positions are down compared with previous years, and colleagues from other departments, not just English but history as well, report similar sluggishness in applications. This may be yet another result of the dismay and emotional trauma coming out of the September 11 attacks, the sense many of us feel so deeply that things will never be normal again.

I would like to think it’s the result of fewer people looking for academic work, but I’m assured by the Modern Language Association that it has the same number of subscribers to its job service this year as last. So perhaps September 11 is the culprit after all. But there’s another reason why I won’t write about the current job season: I want to assure those who might apply for one of our advertised positions, I won’t be talking about you in these columns.

This isn’t a guide on how to get a job. I won’t offer expert advice on what you should do to make your credentials more attractive or how to hone those interview skills. But I will try to make the mysteries of where jobs come from and how we fill them less opaque. I won’t tell you about the secret handshake we use to identify potential colleagues, because there isn’t one. I can reveal some of the dynamics of search committees, and give you a glimpse of what happens on the employer’s end so far as interviews and campus visits are concerned. I’ll talk about how we read applications, how we select candidates to interview, how we narrow the field of finalists, how we make offers. And I’ll add a few words on the rejection process, perhaps the most painful aspect of a search.

We all collect war stories of the job hunt, some of them funny, many of them not. Some of them we learn from. I will relate some of my own stories and keep them anonymous, although I will tell you upfront that many of them happened to me. Like the time I was being “interviewed” by the famous scholar from an institution north of the border who obviously hadn’t had time for lunch, and who had little interest in hearing what I might have to say. So as he reeled off facts about his glorious career and life in the tundra, I watched the tuna salad rolling around in his mouth for half an hour. I didn’t get that job.

Perhaps because of that experience, or just because we try to have better sense than the competition, our search committees do not eat during interviews, although we do offer candidates coffee, tea, or cold drinks (this is not a test to see what applicants like to drink, but an attempt to put them at ease). And we try not to dominate the conversation, but listen attentively to what they have to say.

The job search doesn’t always run smoothly for candidates, and it may not run smoothly for employers, either. For one thing, we make many mistakes along the way. And sometimes things happen that are beyond our control. I remember sitting in the then-department head’s office a dozen years ago, talking with a candidate for a senior position who had just arrived for his visit, when the dean called with the news that the campus had imposed a hiring freeze, effective immediately. It was January, and our mood suddenly matched the Illinois winter outside the office. We were embarrassed, and the candidate was understandably angry. A year or two later we filled that senior position, with someone else. The earlier candidate was no longer interested in us, and who could blame him?

Although things do go wrong, in the end our intentions are honorable, and we go out of our way to make the hiring process a fair one. In my view, it’s in the long-term interests of the department and the candidate to make sure we hire the right person, someone who is likely to succeed as a scholar, teacher, and department citizen, in the specific context of our institution. We want to be fair to those we don’t hire as well: Putting a candidate in the wrong job is asking the person to fail. Our judgment may be imperfect. We may reject someone who turns out later to be a star, or hire someone else whose career goes seriously off track. Omniscience isn’t one of our strengths. But we do try to structure the hiring process in a way that will ensure the best result, given what we are able to know at the time.

So much for general philosophy. Now for some nuts and bolts.

Our job cycle begins in the late spring, when I meet with my department’s advisory committee, a group of faculty members elected by their peers, to decide how many faculty lines to ask for, at what rank, and in which specific areas. We do this in anticipation of the annual call by the dean for hiring requests. Our requests are shaped by retirements and resignations, by new trends in the field, and by student demand for specific courses. They are shaped as well by competing interests within the department: cries that certain groups have been neglected over time, while others have been favored.

Sometimes the faculty asks, Why do we seem to hire Americanists year after year, when we haven’t searched in the field of (fill in the blank) for more than a decade? The simple answer is that we still don’t have enough Americanists to cover our courses, while there are few takers when we offer courses in (fill in the blank)!

Our requests are shaped as well by how previous searches have fared, and what we think the candidate pool is likely to be. We measure the candidate pool in terms of breadth and depth. Modern American literature, for example, is both broad -- it’s one of the more common areas of specialization in English graduate programs -- and deep: It has lots of really top-notch people working in it. An emerging field, say literature in English in postcolonial Hong Kong (I’m making this up, so as not to insult anyone, and I apologize in advance to those who write about literature in English in postcolonial Hong Kong), may be less broad, with few scholars working in the area, and less deep: Their work may be breaking new ground, but it may not be all that good in comparison to work being done in other subspecialties. A field that is becoming established -- like writing studies a few years ago (I like to think of it as well-established now) -- may be somewhere in between in terms of the number and quality of potential applicants.

The dean weighs our requests against those from other departments, together with his own sense of what he can afford. It is usually easier to find the money for a beginning assistant professor than a tenured position, but sometimes the university makes special dollars available for senior hires. The dean usually authorizes more searches at both the junior and senior levels than he can pay for, assuming that some of them will not result in a hire. Experience shows that senior searches take far more energy than junior ones, but they are successful only 50 percent of the time, or even less.

In any case, we usually get fewer searches than we ask for in any given year. Sometimes we are able to increase our hiring yield in creative ways; for example, if a single search turns up two top candidates, sometimes we can hire both. Once we had three searches but made five hires. Another time five searches yielded eight bodies. But some years we don’t even make our target. Plus, our authorized searches are all contingent on adequate financing. Hiring freezes do occur, and if a search runs late into the year, the dean may have spent all his money by the time we propose a candidate for hire.

We usually get our authorizations to search by early summer. By that point, the faculty has scattered. As soon as school starts up at the end of August, I appoint a chair and a committee for each search. Advertising deadlines are in mid-September, so the first thing each committee does is draft a job ad. This isn’t always a simple process. The committee must frame the ad to attract the kind of specialists we need. Should we simply say modern British literature, or should we narrow the field by adding that we are particularly interested in someone who can handle the period after World War II?

My own philosophy is to write the ads that will attract the broadest range of applicants: we hire people, not fields. People’s interests change over the course of a career, and many of our professors aren’t currently writing or teaching about the areas they specialized in when they were hired. But even so, sometimes we need ads with a fairly specific focus. Each of our ads must be approved in turn by the affirmative-action officers of the department, the college, and the university. This can take a week or two.

Sometimes a new affirmative action officer needs to learn about our department and the reason our ads read the way they do. This adds extra time to the process. Once they are approved, we submit our ads to the Modern Language Association’s Job Information List, the main vehicle for job ads in English and the modern languages, as well as to The Chronicle. Even here, glitches can occur. The MLA shifted to a Web-based system a couple of years ago, and it took some time to work out the bugs of electronic ad submission. We also send our ads to appropriate electronic discussion lists, and of course the university posts all available positions on its central employment service as well.

Finally, I encourage our faculty to send copies of the ads, or even better, personal letters, to friends around the country who may know someone who should apply for one of our positions, or who may themselves consider applying. It’s not clear whether such additional trolling for applicants actually works, but establishing a network is ultimately very important in the hiring process.

I once got an e-mail message from a colleague with a graduate student whose credentials didn’t really match our ad: She was well-qualified in the general field but didn’t have the spin to her work that we had stressed in our ad. Should she apply anyway? The application deadline had passed, but such deadlines are “soft” and we always consider applicants who miss the deadline. When I saw her credentials, I knew this candidate might turn out to be a winner. In the end, we hired her. The fact that she didn’t match the ad in terms of subspecialty was a problem for one committee member, but we hired her anyway, promising that committee member we’d come back later and find someone else with a specialization closer to what he had in mind. We did that a year or two later, and hired someone else who didn’t quite fit the profile, but who turns out to be about as close to perfect as you can get.

And that makes me feel even better about my claim that we hire people, not fields. All this brings us up to the present. We sit and wait for the mail to come in. The next step is to read the letters, look over the vitas, ask for writing samples from a select few, and start narrowing the field of finalists. But that’s something for the next column.