Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.

  1. David Wallace's avatar
  2. AG Tanyi's avatar
  3. Eamon Duede's avatar
  4. Michael Clune's avatar
  5. Rollo Burgess's avatar
  6. Nicholas Shepherd-Barron's avatar
  7. David Wallace's avatar

How Late Will Departments Schedule APA Interviews? (Leiter)

Brian Leiter

One issue being discussed at the philosophy job market wiki is how late in the day will schools still be scheduling interviews.  (May I urge philosophers from interviewing departments to note the status of their department’s interview decisions on that site as well?)  It is now Friday evening, and my guess would be almost all schools have in fact contacted interviewees by now, though there may well be a handful that will try to reach candidates at the APA to schedule interviews–either because someone cancelled on them, or because they were especially tardy in making their interview decisions.  My further guess is that yesterday (Thursday) or perhaps earlier today would have been the latest point at which the majority of departments would have contacted candidates.  I have the anecdotal impression that the top departments some times wait the longest, but my anecdotes may be misleading on this score.  (I have a dim recollection–this is 1992-93–of being contacted by UCLA for an interview in the evening just 3 or 4 days before Xmas.  Needless to say, it was a nice phone call to get!  And I’ve heard similar stories off-and-on over the years from friends from grad school and students here.) 

I’ve opened comments for others to weigh in; non-anonymous comments will be preferred.

Best of luck to all those interviewing next week!  As I have said to a number of our students, while this is undoubtedly a stressful time for job seekers, it also has one pleasant aspect for those being interviewed, namely, that other philosophers are taking your work seriously and want to talk to you about it.  In between the "smokers" and the stress, try to enjoy the philosophical discussion when you can!

UPDATE:  I’ve decided to allow more than the usual number of anonymous comments, given the understandable reasons folks would prefer not to post under their own names.  As with all threads on which I have comments, the comments may take awhile to appear and comments are approved based on relevance and content.  (All comments [five so far] have been approved on this thread, but that is higher than the norm.)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

14 responses to “How Late Will Departments Schedule APA Interviews? (Leiter)”

  1. Job Applicant

    To minimize applicant discomfort, perhaps the APA should strongly suggest that ads in JFP list a "Contact By" date and whether or not they are going to the APA. Most schools do neither of these things.

    I'm told as well that a larger number of schools this year than previous years are skipping the APA, either doing phone interviews or going straight to the campus visit stage. This includes schools that had announced they would be at the APA.

    Reply
  2. Another job applicant

    Perhaps many hiring committees do not know when they will finish selecting applicants for interviews at the time that they file their ad for the JFP. In that case, departments could simply add a job announcement page to their website indicating the status of their job search(es) – e.g., still accepting applications, all calls for current round of interviews already placed, etc. Adding this kind of page to department websites would greatly help job applicants at what seems to be a very minimal cost.

    Reply
  3. Yet a different Job Applicant

    Among other things, the "Contact By" date would alleviate considerable anxiety on the job seeker's end. It seems to me, however, that the APA should institute a string of guidelines with regard to hiring. I think one of the most frustrating aspects of the academic job market is follow-up. It is often the case, for instance, that those interviewed at the APA never hear a peep out of departments after their interview is complete. This is sometimes the case even for those who have had fly-outs.

    Seems to me that interviewing schools should subscribe roughly to journal submission and rejection practices: sending a letter, perhaps by e-mail, or perhaps even a telephone call, that notifies the applicant of rejection. It would be even nicer if the hiring institution were to give reasons for the selection of the other applicant. I can hardly imagine that every person hired is a stand-out candidate. It must be the case that there is considerable deliberation among faculty members about who is appropriate for a department and who is not. When applicants are not contacted with regard to their interviews or fly-outs, and particularly when they are not helped to understand where they might have done something differently, or where another applicant is a better fit, many are left with the impression that they did something terribly stupid.

    The hiring process could just as easily be a valuable learning experience for young job applicants. Moreover, I personally have had very pleasant interactions in interviews and at fly-outs with people who later didn't follow-up. I would have liked to have continued a professional relationship with some of these people. It's unfortunate for the job applicant and for the discipline as a whole that departments are not more responsible about notifying applicants of their standing after the interviews and fly-outs are complete.

    Brian, can you, with your broad-reaching influence in the profession, set the wheels in motion to change these practices?

    Reply
  4. Job Applicant (the first one again)

    I suspect that hiring departments do not have the organizational or administrative wherewithal to coordinate what we applicants would like. They are barely able to manage the hundreds of dossiers they receive, much less follow up with each of them.

    This is unfortunate, but true. Frankly, I find this far less painful than the simple fact that there are more qualified applicants on the market than positions. In my case, I'm interviewing with a few top departments and a few very small teaching schools. But the large swath of good schools in the middle, which I thought would constitute my bread and butter, are uninterested. This counterintuitive result suggests to me that the choice among those qualified applicants may be somewhat arbitrary, in the sense that those chosen are not really better qualified than many of those who are not.

    If I may mention a slightly off-topic issue: I wonder whether applicants coming from a Goldilocks department — not too prestigious but still not unknown — face a peculiar quandary. Those students at these schools who focus on research may be shunned by the teaching schools for that focus, yet their dept is not so good as to land them any interviews with research focused schools. So those applicants at middling schools (say, the bottom half of the top 50) face a real danger: focus on research and fall between the cracks. I came (and may still come) dangerously close to this fate myself.

    Reply
  5. Another job applicant

    Do hiring departments not have the organizational or administrative wherewithal to update a job search status webpage with words like ("search complete, offer outstanding", "candidates already contacted for current round of interviews", "still accepting applications", "currently reviewing applications" etc.? The few seconds it would take (ten, thirty, sixty seconds?) to update such a job search status webpage would provide many hundreds of applicants with very helpful information.

    Reply
  6. Job Applicant (the first one again)

    Perhaps departments want to leave their options open. It is always possible that the two or three people they've chosen to bring to campus will not work out. So, if they do not announce that they have moved to that stage, they can go to their third or fourth choice if necessary.

    On the other hand, it may very well be that those on hiring committees either do not remember the pain of the job market or do not care about the distress they cause applicants.

    From where I stand, the job market process seems both capricious and cruel.

    Reply
  7. Another job applicant

    Sure, but notice that the proposals need not include deadlines or commitments or absolute statements. Notice words like "current round of interviews", for instance. Such words give applicants a very rough but still extremely helpful idea where, at that point and time, they happen to stand. Such words also leave departments all the freedom, options, and most of the privacy, they could reasonably want. So what's the problem with a simple job search status webpage?

    Reply
  8. a former hiring committee member

    If you're not at a top school, recruiting is hard — you're always worried that the candidate you want to hire will accept a position somewhere else, and there's always a real chance that you won't be able to hire any of the first round of candidates you bring out. If you end up going to a second round of candidates, you might not want to let them know that they're the second round, since this might make them less likely to accept. Posting information on the department webpage about how the search is going would effectively tell second round candidates that they are such. This might not be a good enough reason for departments not to post such information, but it is a reason — other than indifference or callousness — for departments not to do so.

    Reply
  9. search committee member

    I agree with the job applicants above that search committees should be more forthcomng about where searches stand, and most (although not all) of the suggestions above seem quite reasonable. I'd propose the following:

    (1) Once the list of APA interviewees has been set, e-mail everybody who has applied (and not been invited for an APA interview) letting them know. (With the volume of applicants, I think calling people at this stage would be asking too much, and most people just want the information anyway; the delivery mechanism isn't important).

    Departments can give themselves any 'wiggle room' they need by noting–truly, as it turns out–that applicants not on the initial APA interview list may still be invited for an interview at the last moment if there are any unexpected changes.

    (2) After the APA, as soon as the initial list of on-campus interviewees is set, e-mail everybody else who was interviewed at the APA letting them know that they're not on this list. But let them know that it's not at all unusual for additional people to be invited later on, depending on what happens with the initial batch of interviewees, and ask them to keep in touch in case they have any job offers from elsewhere.

    I should note that at our own department we've hired people who weren't among the initial set of on-campus interviewees (and were very happy with the hires), and we've been told that our openness about where people stood was much appreciated. People who are contacted in e.g., early March for a fly-back will figure out that they weren't on the initial list anyway, so I don't see any downside on letting people know about their standing as soon as the initial slate is drawn up.

    (3) As soon as an offer is made, accepted, and all of the other administrative hurdles are cleared so that things are final, all of the other on-campus interviewees should be called (in this case a call is appropriate) and informed, and an e-mail should be sent out to the other APA interviewees. (In our case, we've even let people know when an offer is pending but not yet accepted and finalized, but I realize that not all departments will be comfortable with this.)

    Reply
  10. search committee member

    "If you end up going to a second round of candidates, you might not want to let them know that they're the second round, since this might make them less likely to accept"

    I dunno–especially given the state of the job market today, it's hard for me to imagine that there are many people who would otherwise accept a position, but who decide to turn it down because they weren't included in the first round of interviewees. And anybody who *did* allow that sort of thing to tip their decision would thereby show (IMHO) that they have ego issues, and maybe we're better off not having them anyway.

    Reply
  11. another job applicant

    Hey, I'm all for trying out new things and seeing what does and does not work for various reasons. However, unless all applications go online, which is more likely to happen anytime soon – someone at each hiring department typing dozens or hundreds of email addresses into their computers, or someone at each hiring department adding two words to a job search status webpage that reads "Currently interviewing" or "Reviewing applications" or "Search on hold"? Also, I imagine that candidates who receive second or third round interviews can often or usually tell where they stand from the dates of their contacts. In addition, applicants who received conference interviews and are waiting for campus flyouts could benefit from a job search status webpage almost as much as applicants who are waiting on the possibility of a conference interview. Departments seem to me behind the internet times and to lack courtesy. If departments wanted to protect new hires and the philosophical community from inferring details of their searches, they might all wait until May or June before announcing any new hires. Various pieces of news often spread by talkative interviewees or search committee search members anyway. Unfortunately, not everyone is privy to such information regardless of sporadic leaks and spreads here and there. Why not cut down on cronyism or secrecy and make the status of searches a bit more helpfully public by adding a simple, short phrase to a job search status webpage?

    Reply
  12. a former hiring committee member

    I agree that second-round candidates are likely to be able to infer their second-round status from their campus visit being in March (say), and I agree that it betokens an unbecoming lack of humility to be offended at being a second-round candidate. But, if there's a slight chance that confirming a suspicion might make a difference, some schools — schools that might not have the luxury of ruling out otherwise viable candidates that happen to be a bit touchy ego-wise — might be hesistant.

    Being on the job market is hard. I've been on the job market in the last five years, and I haven't entirely forgotten what it was like. I have appreciated timely indications that I was no longer being considered for various positions. (I haven't minded email, so I'm not sure a phone call is necessary.)

    But I've also been on search committees in that time, and it's hard too. Looking at 100, or 200, or 250 files while teaching — and, at least at the schools I've been at, worrying that you won't be able to get anyone good anyway — isn't fun. It might not be obvious when you're a job candidate, since you'll likely be one of several candidates, but sometimes schools are as desperate to hire as you are to be hired.

    I think things should be changed to make things easier for job candidates. I just wanted to ask us not to forget the difficulties certain schools have in hiring.

    Reply
  13. Another anonymous reader

    I'd like to hear more from "a former hiring committee member" about two comments: first, about being worried you won't be able to get someone good out of 200 applicants. I know that there's a concern that a committee's top 2 or 3 candidates will accept positions elsewhere, but in principle (not in practice in every search) this could be avoided. Is the concern that some schools don't have the money/reputation to be able to hire anyone competent? Given that candidates think there is a surplus of qualified candidates, is it the case that qualified candidates will prefer to work at Starbucks than to take certain jobs? Or are there a lot of candidates who think they are qualified to teach at colleges, but colleges would rather hire no one than hire them?

    Second, I'd be interested in hearing about how much time it takes to go through applications while teaching. I'm gathering the poster teaches a 4-4 load (do any 4-year schools require more than that?). If going through applications is so time-consuming, and if a lot of candidates aren't plausible, why don't more schools go the route of requiring just a cover letter and CV initially (less time for candidates and committee members alike), then ask for recs and writing samples from maybe 20-30 candidates?

    Reply
  14. a former hiring committee member

    I would like to answer the two questions from Another Anonymous Reader, but I would also like to preserve my anonymity.

    First, about time. I don't remember exactly how long I spent looking at files, and I don't remember exactly how many files there were. I would guess I spent 20-40 hours. (I wasn't teaching 4-4. But adding 20 hours to your work week at the end of the semester is no joke.) I certainly didn't read all the writing samples. But the letters were hugely helpful in distinguishing candidates with otherwise comparable CVs: e.g. PhD from a good school, no publications, few real presentations.

    Second, about qualified candidates. Some candidates aren't competent to teach the courses you need taught. Some come from schools you've never heard of. Many come from schools you've heard of and are qualified to teach the courses you need, but it doesn't look like they'll have productive research careers, and — despite being at a non-top school — we wanted someone who would be philosophically active. It was hard. One year our top 6 candidates turned us down — and that's not counting the many, many candidates we passed over because we thought (correctly, in just about all cases) that they were bound for better schools. No one turned us down for Starbucks, but someone turned us down in favor of going again on the market later.

    I should add a(n anonymity-decreasing) caveat: I was at a non-US institution, and there were difficulties in hiring US citizens. So, although the pool was large, we were under additional constraints. Perhaps comparable US schools have an easier time.

    Reply

Designed with WordPress