On Academic Hiring

In which I attempt to thread a difficult needle

We’re coming to the tail end of academic hiring season, which usually kicks off with a bang back in the late Fall. Such as this ex-Twitter thread from Tyler Austin Harper that I flagged back in December (screenshotted because petulant billionaires):

This is pretty typical: lots of folks talking about how terrible the process is, and what would make it better, almost exclusively from the job candidate side because it’s wildly inappropriate for anyone who’s part of an ongoing search to say much of anything about it. It’s at least risky for anyone who’s on the hiring side to talk about this stuff even when they’re not actively running a search, but I will make an attempt to thread that needle as best I can, just for the sake of a little extra perspective.

(Of course, this is going to end up being the kind of thing that I spend hours carefully wording to avoid various minefields, and that consequently goes completely ignored the next time this conversation comes around…)

First up, some context: My department ran a double tenure-track faculty search this academic year, with a deadline in early October so we could get candidates in for interviews before the end of our Fall term (we’re out of session for all of December, and it doesn’t make sense to bring candidates to campus when there aren’t students around). We asked for a CV, three statements (teaching philosophy, research plan, and DEI), and three reference letters.

We ended up with around 110 applications for the two positions, did Zoom interviews with about 20 of those, and did seven campus interviews in the Fall. We made some offers after that, none of which were accepted, so we went back to the pool and brought another four candidates to campus, which led to one hire. The other position was declared a failed search, and we’ll try again next year (we were able to extend the contract of one of our current visiting faculty for another year to cover the courses we need).

This is not exactly typical for the (many, many) faculty searches I’ve been on— I haven’t been part of a search that failed at the offer stage before (we had a weird case some years back that failed after an offer was accepted, and I’m still annoyed about that). The numbers are actually a hair on the low side— 10-12 years ago an open specialization search would’ve brought in more like 150 applications. That may be a shift in the market, or it may just have been that our deadline was too early. Tough to say.

This context by itself should answer some of the common questions about the hiring process, starting with the late-stage “Why don’t you notify the candidates who didn’t get campus invites that you’ve moved on past them so they can shift to considering other opportunities?” That’s because it is not all that unusual for the first round of campus interviews to not produce an accepted offer, so we may very well have to go back to the pool. We don’t tell people “You’re not getting the job” until they’re really, truly out of contention for the job, and that only happens when we have a signed acceptance letter. It’s certainly not true at the start of the campus-interview stage.

The second question (which concerns earlier stages in the process) is the one asked by Harper above “Why do you ask for so much stuff?” That’s answered, at least in my field, by the numbers. We get a three-digit number of applications, and need a rational basis on which to select a single-digit number of them for campus interviews. If we’re going to make that determination on something more than vibes, we need a lot of pieces of evidence that can help us distinguish between large numbers of candidates with very similar qualifications.

To answer a closely related question: yes, this sucks for absolutely everyone involved, both the candidates who have to generate a lot of text, and the faculty on the search committee who have to sort through it. I remember the stress of putting together my application packet, and I’ve been on more search committees than I like to think about, so believe me when I say this is not fun for anyone.

But like the old Churchill joke, I think it’s the worst possible system except for any of the others. Could we ask for less material? Sure, if you’re willing to accept worse decisions. I mean, people complain that academic hiring is excessively biased toward candidates from Big Name Institutions now, when we’ve got a ton of information to go on. If we were to do the initial round based just on CVs (as I have heard some people ask for), that’d be much worse, because there’s not much to distinguish between those but institutional prestige and paper-counting. Statements and letters at least give candidates from less-prestigious programs a chance to stand out through something they have some control over.

There’s also a wide range of opinion regarding how useful the various bits of the application packet are. I know a lot of people say they don’t find the reference letters useful, but for me those are often the most useful bit. I personally tend to find the written statements kind of useless, because I have maybe-unrealistic standards for writing and as a result think that almost nobody in academia can write worth a damn. Most teaching and research statements are just buzzword-studded sludge to me, with very little that stands out. (The handful that do stand out really stand out, but there are rarely enough of those to fill out the campus interview list.)

The secret central premise of a lot of online #discourse around academic hiring is the same as the secret central premise around college admissions, namely “This would be trivially simple if you just selected the exact people I would’ve picked.” Which, you know, is not a premise that long survives contact with a virtual stack of 100-odd applications. Let alone the first meeting at which a group of colleague share their individual rankings of the same set of candidates. Again, I’ve done a lot of these, and from that experience it’s more common to have at least one candidate in the pool who’s at the very top of some lists and the very bottom of others than to have one who’s only at the top of lists.

The one radical reform I could almost get behind would be to make the process explicitly random: do a quick pass to identify people who meet some moderate threshold, and then do a lottery to see who gets invited for Zoom interviews (or maybe even the campus interview). I wouldn’t make the final selection random— the stakes are a bit too high for that when we’re bringing somebody in for multiple years, and potentially multiple decades— but there’s an intermediate stage involving a lot of folks who are all similar enough that a random selection would probably be fine, and require much less effort. That’s a pretty hard sell both to candidates and to the institution, though, because we’d all like to believe there’s a larger element of merit to the process.

So, while I agree that many aspects of the system are genuinely unpleasant, I’m not remotely convinced that most of the changes people tend to propose would be a net improvement. They’d make one stage of the process more convenient for one side or the other, but that almost inevitably comes at the cost of making things worse for somebody else. Probably somebody who isn’t in a position to talk about it in more detail.

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So, that’s a bit of venting done. If you think you might want to read more of this kind of thing, here’s a button:

And if you’re convinced that you have The One True System that will make all of this better, I don’t think the odds are in your favor, but the comments will be open: