Last year, for the first time in more than a decade, I went on the academic job market. It's not that I don't like my current position—I do—but recent developments in my personal and professional life made this a good time to look at other opportunities. I felt I owed it to myself at least to see what was out there.
Moreover, as an advice columnist who has been writing for the past eight years about the academic job search—particularly at community colleges—I was beginning to feel a bit out of touch. Based on conversations with friends who had been job hunting, and e-mails from graduate students and other job seekers, I concluded that I was not fully conversant (to say the least) regarding new trends in the world of postsecondary hiring.
So in the fall of 2010 I began perusing the job ads regularly to see if there were any positions for which I wanted to apply. Of course, as a tenured faculty member, I was in a more comfortable position than most job seekers. I could afford to be choosy, and I was. Since I wasn't desperate to leave my current campus, and I wasn't going to uproot my family for anything less than a great job, I developed a list of four firm criteria. My hypothetical new job would have to be at a college with a great reputation, in an area where I would like to live, providing work that I would enjoy, and offering at least my current salary level or the equivalent adjusted for the local economy.
In the end, I applied for seven positions, mostly administrative ones with faculty rank. For those keeping score at home, the final tally was two telephone interviews, one Skype interview, one on-campus interview, and zero job offers.
I didn't mind that last part too much because, as I said, I like the job I have. (The best thing was, I didn't have to move.) And the search process itself was as enlightening as it was enjoyable. OK, at least it was enlightening. Here's what I learned:
Paper is passé. My last job search, in the late 1990s, involved reams of paper: forms, cover letters, CV's, recommendations, teaching statements, transcripts. I remember having to buy extra-large manila envelopes to hold everything so I could mail off an application.
This time around, I didn't mail a single piece of paper. Everything was done online. That made the process a bit more stressful for me, because I'm not as comfortable in the online environment as some of my younger colleagues, and also because—quite frankly—some of the institutions hadn't quite gotten the technology down, either.
One college's human-resources site was headed by a disclaimer that said, in essence: Our online application software is brand new; you might experience some glitches. Well, I experienced some glitches all right. In fact, even after several tries, I was unable to submit my materials through the site. I finally managed to save the application as a PDF, then I e-mailed the administrator in charge of the search, explained the problem, and offered to send everything to him as attachments. Nope, he said, I had to go through the site. I marked that institution off my list. I don't object to technology, but I don't want to work anyplace that rigid.
Something else I discovered about online applications is that some of my most cherished advice about cover letters often doesn't apply.
I've always told people to address a cover letter to an actual person—ideally, the person in charge of the search—and not to "Committee Members" or "To Whom It May Concern." But with an online application process, because mailing addresses are not part of the equation, it's often difficult to identify any particular human connected with the search. So I did end up, to my great consternation, addressing some of my letters to "Committee Members" or "Human Resources."
All in all, I suppose I managed to navigate the online environment without embarrassing myself too much—well enough, apparently, to land several interviews. And believe me, if I can do it, anybody can.
They can hear (and see) you now. Another aspect of the 21st-century job search that I must admit took me by surprise was the reliance on interviews via technology—specifically, by telephone and Skype.
I certainly understand the attraction. Given ever-shrinking budgets, most two-year colleges can't afford to fly in candidates for interviews. (Nor, I might add, can many job seekers afford to pay their own way.) Moreover, the sheer number of qualified applicants for any faculty or administrative opening makes it nearly impossible for a committee to bring in everyone they might like to talk to. What better (and cheaper) way to cull the herd, so to speak, than the tele-interview?
Still, for me as an applicant, the impersonality of the process was disconcerting. I'm usually at my best in front of people, where I can gauge their reactions and create a rapport. In particular, I've never been much of a telephone talker. My wife has to prod me to call my dad on his birthday—not because I don't love my dad, but because I don't like talking on the phone.
So I wasn't surprised when I bombed the telephone interviews. I say that I bombed them, although I actually don't have any idea how well I did in the eyes of the committee members—not well enough to rate an on-campus interview, in any case. But even if they thought I did OK, I felt like I bombed. Lacking any sense of how they were responding, I tended to give excessively long answers, rambling on well after I had sufficiently answered the question. Then again, who knew if I had answered it sufficiently or not? I certainly couldn't tell. My audience was on the other end of a phone line.
I did somewhat better in the Skype interview, probably because I could at least see the other people, although not very well. They were seated around a table in a conference room—just like a real interview—but the camera and screen were obviously mounted on the wall above them, so that they were always craning their necks to look at me. This arrangement also created a kind of fisheye effect, so that the room seemed rounded rather than rectangular and the people at the far end of the table seemed much farther away than the people closest to the camera.
For my part, I was deeply grateful for Stephen Winzenburg's column in The Chronicle last March, "How Skype Is Changing the Interview Process." His tips about camera angle, lighting, and background were all right on the money. I ended up sitting in a chair in my upstairs hallway—the only sizable expanse of unadorned wall I could find in our home—with my laptop on my, uh, lap.
Apparently that was a good choice. The committee members could see me just fine, and even if I couldn't see them as well as I might have liked, at least I was able to relate to them as people and not as disembodied voices. I could tell when they were engaged, when I was losing them, and when I had said enough. Not surprisingly, it was the Skype interview that led to my one campus visit.
Pheidippides had it easy. The last time I was a candidate for an administrative position—which I got, by the way—the interview process itself was relatively short and sweet. I believe I met for an hour with the search committee, followed by a 30-minute chat with the provost and a 20-minute tour of the campus. Then I was off to my hotel to watch the second round of March Madness. That was in 1999.
This time, my interview for a similar administrative position was actually a series of interviews, a true daylong marathon of meetings beginning at 8:30 a.m. and not ending until nearly 5 p.m. Even the noon hour—which turned out to be more like two hours—was commandeered by the provost, who invited me to join her in her office for a "working lunch," during which the chicken salad was not the only thing grilled.
Before that, I met with two different committees: one put together by the provost, one by the department. After lunch, I attended an open forum with the faculty, the majority of whom were very polite. Then I had a sit-down with the office staff, who were also very nice but of course had their own axes to grind.
At the end of the day, I was utterly exhausted, having answered the same questions, in some cases, four or five times for different audiences. I felt a little like the suspect who is asked the same things repeatedly in the hope that he might trip up. Fortunately, I don't believe they caught me in any double talk, dissembling, or circumlocution (actually, maybe that's why I didn't get the job; it was an administrative position, after all).
I'm not saying the interview marathon wasn't enjoyable. It actually was. I just wasn't expecting that the process would be so intense. To be fair, the college had e-mailed me an agenda before I came, so I did have some idea what to expect when I got there. But it was still more wearing than I anticipated.
No doubt the reasoning behind that intensive approach has something to do with the economy—in particular, the expense of administrative searches and, thus, the importance of hiring exactly the right person the first time.
I left the campus feeling that I had done pretty well. As it turned out, I hadn't done well enough to be offered the job, but that's OK. The successful candidate obviously did better than I did, and I wish him or her well.
In the meantime, the experience was invaluable. I have a much better idea of what to expect moving forward, from online applications to tele-interviews to daylong on-campus grillings.
