My college roommate recently finished her Ph.D. in Renaissance studies. She and I met up today and, as we often do, ended up comparing and contrasting the academic life in the sciences versus the humanities.
In particular we discussed the new faculty hiring process. As many of you probably know, the annual Modern Language Association convention is a hotspot of hiring committees. Here's how it works.
1) Nearly-finished graduate students and postdocs send applications to programs that have announced interest in hiring junior faculty.
2) The faculty hiring committee selects perhaps 10-20 of these applicants for a first-round interview. "Meet us at the MLA. We'll be in Hotel X Suite Y!" they say.
3) First-round interviews give the committee a chance to weed out anyone who is less impressive in person than they were on paper. Perhaps 3 of the candidates survive this cut.
4) Those 3 candidates are then invited to the university on the standard expenses-paid two-day interview with a talk, faculty meetings, and perhaps a demonstration teaching opportunity.
5) Someone is hired (or not).
Compare to my department's setup, where the hiring committee labors long and hard to cut all of the applications down to 5-6 people, each of whom will be invited for a two day on-campus interview.
The advantages to the two-step hiring system are obvious.
a) The department only ends up flying 2-3 serious candidates out, as opposed to the 5-6 for our bio department positions. Costs cut in half.
b) Along with that, fewer schedules need to be coordinated for serious candidates--the usual "is all the hiring committee in town on a date that the candidate can visit?" bit is cut in half. The committee needs to be available for 2-3 days at the MLA, which they might well have attended anyhow, and then just a few on-campus dates.
c) The committee can also afford more risk-taking on the first round. Because people pay their own way to the MLA, there is no added cost (besides an hour or two for the interview) to interviewing a controversial or apparently borderline candidate.
d) In fact, the committee can also invite Europeans or Australians etc with no added cost, in marked contrast to the hiring process in my department. Again, this increases the opportunity to find a gem of a candidate who isn't from a Big Name lab, and whose application just looked a bit "risky."
Of course, I'm just a postdoc and I've only watched hiring committees in action, not served on one. What do you think? The two-step process offers many advantages and I can't think of any disadvantages, as long as your field holds an annual convention with significant attendance (as mine does). The initial costs of interviewing are borne by the candidate who flies to the conference, and the committee has a much better idea what they're getting before they invite people out to campus.
My roommate, incidentally, was one of two people invited to an on-campus interview at her target school, and she proceeded to knock the faculty's collective socks off. They voted unanimously to hire her. They said that even if she declined, they would not hire the other guy at all. (She found this all out after the department chair accidentally cc'ed her on an email to the Dean about the salary range they could offer this new hire. My friend, having seen the max they were willing to offer and the interest they had in hiring her, successfully negotiated the maximum salary. She is awesome.)
Anyhow, I am curious what the advantages are to our more expensive and arguably more conservative, "only Nature paper and BigShot recs need apply" approach.
15 years ago
18 comments:
weed out
Sounds good!
Well, it is the humanities people. I hear that in bio departments, Jameson is the assay of choice.
This also occurs in the arts and humanities. I was in the arts before I came to science and I know the hiring practices are just like the science practices.
Yes, GP, but my question is why not take advantage of your field's annual convention if you have one, and do the hiring as the humanities folks do? It just seems more sensible.
Modern technology can do us all one better. By holding an initial screening via skype or other videoconference, committees can have real-time conversations with as many qualified applicants as have applied, at their convenience and without foisting the expense on anyone.
One problem with the two-step interview process is for interdisciplinary fields, where there isn't one unified must-go-to conference. Very few of my colleagues regularly go to the mega umbrella conference for all of microbiology, and there are big divides among the subfields. For instance, I've decided to not go to the annual conference for [field I'm in] for the forseeable future, because the smaller, annual conference of molecular [field I'm in] is much more up my alley. Especially if the search committee is willing to entertain candidates from related disciplines, some of those 20-30 candidates wouldn't have planned on attending the chosen conference already.
While the idea of skype interviews send a shiver up my spine (does my living room look scholarly enough? How about I skype in from a lab bench...), preliminary phone interviews are a tried and true option. Both less useful than a in-person meeting at a conference, but could be used to test out the borderline candidates. And as scatterplot said, with minimal expense.
Yes, the skype would be very cheap but might also "feel" cheap, if you know what I mean. But I agree that any department strapped for cash ought to consider it.
Phagenista, certainly this proposal only works in fields with a major well-attended annual conference that it is reasonable to expect people to attend. My field has such a conference.
There is a mega-meeting in my field in the fall of every year. In addition to the normal drawn-out application process that you describe for science departments, quality faculty candidates in my field are put through the ringer during the annual conference.
There are many social events that faculty candidates are pressured into attending, where they are grilled, etc, etc. These candidates also have lots of hiring committee profs in the audience when they give their podium presentation(s). So there is a lot of 'screening' that goes on at this annual conference, IF the candidate is present. Based on this, the department will decide whether or not to make the candidate one of their 5-6 selections for further interview.
I suppose this is a good system for everyone except the candidate, who is literally put through a week of hell. It's not entirely fair, though, because if a candidate is not present for whatever reason, they don't have to endure the torture and may still get an interview slot.
This is also how economics does their hiring. I think it's much more sane, and blogged about it a couple years ago (but since I'm too lazy to find the post, I can't imagine you've seen it, either).
Candid's point about grilling candidates is an interesting one. My field is this way in a very unwritten, unofficial (yet very real) sense.
IF you get a podium presentation, you are then invited to hang with the faculty who might or might not have open slots in their departments.
If you do not make the abstract cut- which is very political and depends as much on what you did as on whose lab you did it in- you fade into the crowd of tens of thousands (literally) of meeting attendees.
Then it is not really worth your personal bucks to attend the meeting at all. But it takes a few times of submitting abstracts to figure this out. And if you say anything about it, everyone shushes you and says no, it's not that way.
... But if you give a podium talk at one of these meetings, the contrast in how you are suddenly treated as one of the In Crowd is quite spectacular. To me, the data speaks quite loudly.
Abstract --> Talk = CANDIDATE
Abstract --> Poster = (forget it)
Unfortunately, there's an added twist. The people picking who gets to give the talks are sort of random relative to the search committees whom you would want to see you as a serious candidate, so the two things are intertwined is this totally nonfunctional way.
And, as Phagenista pointed out, if you are in an interdisciplinary area, that usually means that you have a greatly reduced chance of fitting into the session topics at one of these big meetings, e.g. you're marginal to both Session A and B, so neither one picks you because they already have five other postdocs whose topics fit squarely into the Session Title.
The annual meeting that I attend generally has way too many concurrent sessions to be useful for that kind of process. But a smaller regional meeting might work.
I agree with Phagenista about interdisciplinary work, which in my field is the future. If collaborations are important then if all you see is what the candidate can do in their own area, it gives you no sense of how well they think outside their area.
One last point is there is something to be said for seeing how the candidates interact with faculty at the university. A candidate may only be average at giving a talk but get them one on one and all of a sudden they shine. You would weed out someone like that during the first round before you got a chance to see how they really perform. So I'm not sure I favour this approach.
Also I have a friend who was invited to do a panel interview at a University in the UK. She was offered the job but didn't take it. One of her feelings about this interview process was that the committee didn't make an effort to get to know her. She was just part of the larger cattle drive. And for her it was clear they wanted her publications and not her potential.
This is all very interesting! Ms PhD, if you happen to re-find your post I'd be interested to read it. At my annual meeting, platform presentations are not considered way more prestigious than posters (or if they are, no one has told me...hmmm....).
CandidE--huh, bizarre. Does the search committee explicitly tell candidates that it will be to their benefit to come to the meeting and schmooze? And for that matter, do you think it is to their benefit, or are they just as likely to get invited for an interview sans schmoozy time?
GP, was your friend also invited for a serious 1-2 day on-campus visit before the offer was made? Because I agree that it would seem like a cattle call if not...but if it's just a "weed out" phase and then the top three are invited to campus, it shouldn't (one hopes) give off that aura.
Does the search committee explicitly tell candidates that it will be to their benefit to come to the meeting and schmooze?
No, these are some of the unwritten rules of the faculty application process in my engineering discipline. Conference attendees must submit abstracts by early summer and don't send out application packages until early fall, so there is no direct correlation between this conference and applications. However, the best candidates will have publication-quality material, and thus will be presenting (unless they have other commitments). If the search committee from School X is interested in conference attendee Y, Y is invited to all of the social gatherings for School X the week of the conference. Where s/he is grilled ad nauseum.
And for that matter, do you think it is to their benefit, or are they just as likely to get invited for an interview sans schmoozy time?
If the candidate is good, then yes, it is very much to their benefit. They will be more likely to get more first-round interviews, and perhaps even more importantly, all of the schools will start talking about that candidate, and a sense of competition comes into play. The best candidates shine at these things- they give superstar talks, they look good, and they schmooze and conjecture and smile the pants off of people. The schools are pretty much salivating over these people by the time the week is over.
I agree two-step has big pluses, but there is no one meeting in our field (our Department is much too broad). We have done the two step process in a Biology Department by using a web-based pre-interview. One can see 10-12 folks without anyone making a big trip or financial commitment. This worked quite well.
I am in a science department at a regional university with R1 aspirations. For us the annual meetings, of which there are two, do not mesh very well with the timing of searches to do the at-conference interviews. What we do now, is to determine the "best" 10-12 candidates and conduct phone interviews. This screens out the the non-competitive candidates, leading to 4-5 (or less) shortlisted candidates. We then interview on campus those that we perceive as the best candidates. This is not perfect, but anecdotally, we now have fewer on-campus interviews where you know after the first hour that the candidate is not a suitable match (note this can occur from either side).
Prior to this approach, we interviewed based on stellar CV's, candidates would visit campus, but with no intention of ever accepting the position,
Sorry, previous post got truncated.
What we noticed from our old system of just using CV's was that we would end up interviewing candidates that eventually would accept offers at top 10-20 departments, and were basically using our invitation/visit to pad their egos/resume. With our newer system, we can identify candidates who want to come to our institution, and as a consequence we have learned to look deeper than the CV.
Tex
Another point is that neither interviewers nor interviewees seem to get much out of the actual AHA/MLA/etc conference due to anxiety and hectic schedules. As exhausting as they are, I learn a lot at conferences, and I'd be sorry to miss out.
If you follow much of the ongoing discussion over the years in Chronicle of Higher Education columns about the MLA interviews, you will (or I did) form the opinion that the candidates nearly uniformly hate the process. The whole conference experience becomes just about the interview so they get nothing else out of it, it's extremely stressful, the interviews are like cattle calls and they feel they don't have enough time to really present themselves well or get to know the committee or make a good impression; yet it's incredibly easy to make a horrible impression very quickly if some little thing goes wrong. These are just a few of the complaints. Also the MLA is scheduled between Christmas and New Year's, I believe, and ruins everyone's holidays. From everything I've ever read about it, it sounds like an absolute nightmare. I've always thought the way scientists conduct searches was much more sensible.
Of course, the way academia does searches in general, and how they do interviews, is a nightmare. Here is where academia could really stand to learn some things from industry about how to successfully recruit and screen promising candidates in a reasonable time frame. IMHO.
The best thing about informal conference meet-ups with potential candidates is the interviewers get to ask all the legally-ambiguous questions like, are you married? what will your spouse do if you got a job offer? Do you plan on having a family? Without the pesky business of maybe getting sued, since it is not an official interview...
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