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Farewell to the Eastern APA, Redux?

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY–A VALUABLE DISCUSSION, I HOPE OTHERS WILL CONTRIBUTE

After last year's weather fiasco, we had a vigorous discussion of whether departments, for their own benefit and the benefit of candidates, shouldn't eschew interviews at the Eastern APA in favor of Skype interviews.  Rebecca Kukla (Georgetown) recently e-mailed me suggesting now might be a good time to see if departments are changing their practices at all this year.  Comments are open, signed comments only.  If you are going to skip the Eastern APA, will you use Skype instead or simply invite candidates directly to campus based on reading their dossiers?  Please also indicate whether your practice this year represents a change from the past.  If your department is still debating how to proceed, it might be useful to indicate what the factors in the decision will be.

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50 responses to “Farewell to the Eastern APA, Redux?”

  1. David Reidy

    Last year Tennessee skipped the Eastern APA and instead Skyped its screening interviews for the first time. It went very well.
    This year Tennessee (hiring 2 TT positions) will do the same, and will endeavor to complete screening interviews by Dec. 1.

    Reply
  2. Jonathan Cohen

    My dept (UC San Diego) will skip the eastern APA and simply invite candidates on the basis of the dossier review. But this is not a new practice for us — it's what we've been doing for many years.

    Reply
  3. James Harold

    Our department (at a SLAC) has always conducted first-round interviews for TT jobs at the Eastern APA. Last spring, we voted to use Skype instead for this year's search. We have used Skype for one or two year searches before, but never for TT searches. The reasons are many, but two stand out. First, Skype interviews in early or mid December should allow us to move more quickly than we have in past years in inviting finalists to campus. Second, money: we expect to save a ton by not paying for suites, travel & rooms for each of us.

    Reply
  4. Ade Artis

    Our department ended up doing most of the interviews face to face, but also did 2 or 3 through skype. Certainly the skype interviews were effective, and I think might, on balance, be superior than having to deal with all of the problems associated with the traditional practice of the eastern meat market (not least of which are the prohibitive costs for many). However, I do think there are hard-to-quantify benefits to face to face meetings, somewhat analogous to the advantages that sometimes can be had in meeting in a space lit by candles as opposed to old-fashioned dead-white fluorescents. So if we do, as a discipline, move to something like the skype model, let us have a requiem for the face to face…

    Reply
  5. alex rosenberg

    We have an open rank position in phil of mind/psych/neuroscience or history of ancient or early modern, and we had intended to search via JFP and Eastern Division interviews. But if the JFP web site continues to remain inaccessible we will begin to make other plans. We are already using an on-line electronic application web site, and may move to further on-line steps in our search.

    Reply
  6. Rebecca Kukla

    Has anyone out there talked about just giving candidates a choice between APA and video chat interviews? I think that's the option I am going to be pushing for at Georgetown, but I am open to hearing arguments why that's a bad (or at least sub-ideal) plan.

    Reply
  7. John Gray

    @Professor Kukla: As a job candidate, I am opposed to your idea and would much rather departments either do one or the other but not give candidates the choice. What's the point of giving candidates the choice anyway? This really puzzles me. If a department has a preference, why not go with solely one or the other? Is it that, ideally, a department wants to interview at the APA, but is willing to interview candidates over skype because it realizes that getting to the APA is a burden? If that's the case, then it's clear that those who interview at the APA will have an advantage. Perhaps there are other reasons departments would want to do this, but that seems like the obvious one to me. (Or could it be the reverse? Would a department actually prefer the video chat since it does not want to travel to the APA, but feel obligated to offer the candidate the choice of the traditional APA option?)

    Also, for someone who has more than one first round interview, in all likelihood one of those interviews will be at the APA. So if this person gets the APA/video choice from some other department who wants to interview him, he will choose the APA since he will be going to it anyway.

    In any case, I believe that almost all candidates would choose the APA interview if presented with the choice between an APA and video-chat, for the same reason they would choose the APA if the alternative were a phone interview: they'll be worried that candidates interviewed in person will have an advantage over those not interviewed in person. (I know I for sure would choose the APA interview.) And in fact, I think those interviewed in person probably would have an advantage of some sort, even if interviewers wouldn't realize this or even deny it. Not to mention at the APA there is the additional chance to impress potential employers at the infamous smoker, a chance those interviewed over video-chat won't have (unless departments who offer candidates the choice vow not to attend the smoker?).

    One has to understand just how paranoid and worried we job-seekers are given the dearth of jobs out there. Perhaps I don't have my finger on the pulse of my job-seeking colleagues as well as I think I do, but I would bet that most of us are not going to settle for a video-chat while our competitors get to schmooze potential employers in person. But there will be some who will choose the video option, probably because they can't afford to go to the APA, and thus they will be marginalized. (It is an open question whether such marginalization would be unfair. I think it would be.)

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  8. Gilbert Harman

    Given what's known about the unreliability of interviews, why are any philosophy departments still using interviews of any sort?

    Reply
  9. Mitchell Aboulafia

    I am curious. What is it that Professor Harman knows about the unreliability of interviews? Of course there is no infallible feature of the hiring process but good interviewers can surely screen out poor candidates who often look strong on paper. And they can often discover strengths that don't appear in dossiers.

    BL COMMENT: Gil is, I assume, alluding to the empirical literature by psychologists on interviewing. Richard Holton expressed some doubts about this literature a couple of years ago, and we discussed it here:
    http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/09/do-job-interviews-for-philosophy-posts-serve-a-purpose.html#tp

    Reply
  10. Rebecca Kukla

    @John Gray – Thank you, that was very helpful. I was thinking of it as something to make candidates less stressed – it seems to me from reading blogs that some people find the video chat format awkward and stressful and others find the whole APA routine stressful and/or financially unmanageable. And someone who is, for instance, seeking to upgrade jobs might easily have only one or two interviews even if she is fantastic, and so might be able to avoid the APA. BUT I wasn't thinking of the meta-stress of being put in the position of second-guessing and strategizing, and you have convinced me that that's not fair to candidates, especially since those of fewer means will feel more coerced by the choice.

    @Gilbert Harman. I entirely agree. For a very long time now the whole first-round interview thing has seemed to me at best a colossally expensive and stressful waste of time. The various arguments in their favor seem half-hearted and unconvincing to me. But not everyone agrees and – sadly – I am not queen of the universe so compromises must be made 🙂

    Reply
  11. L. A. Paul

    I'm with Gil and Rebecca: get rid of the interviews. The best data I know of comes from Princeton itself. They don't do interviews, and they regularly hire fantastic philosophers. Small, teaching-oriented schools might want to bring a few candidates with excellent teaching references to campus to observe them in the classroom, but APA interviews are a waste of everyone's time and money.

    Reply
  12. L. A. Paul

    I just had an exchange with a friend that suggests I should clarify my point: I am arguing that APA interviews are not needed to determine which candidates are the best candidates. Recruitment of those candidates is another matter.

    Reply
  13. Fritz Warfield

    Laurie,
    I suspect that Princeton would still manage to hire pretty fantastic people even if Princeton did do interviews.

    There are,as we all know, departments that have done quite well with junior hiring using convention and/or campus interviews.

    In my experience, sometimes candidates who have looked the best on paper have lost out because of what has gone on in interviews and years later our not having tried to hire the candidate has seemed to turn out to be a mistake. In other cases, sometimes the same thing has happened and years later it seems that this turned out to be for the best.

    What the psychological literature on this issue shows is, so far as I can tell, not as clear cut as some critics of our interviewing practices make it out to be. The earlier discussion has some discussion of this.

    Reply
  14. Mark Collier

    I couldn't help but chuckle at L.A. Paul's post. Presumably the absence of interviews is not the cause of this type of event. This is clearly a case of overdetermination.

    Reply
  15. Steven Hales

    @L.A. Paul: I suspect that Princeton would hire fantastic philosophers if they randomly picked their candidates' names out of a hat. Applicants self-select against applying to jobs that are out of their league. The argument that "the best schools in the world do well with method x, therefore all schools would do well with method x" is implausible on its face.

    Reply
  16. Rebecca Kukla

    Though I knew about Princeton's no-interview-at-all tradition and now realize that's what Gil Harman meant, I remain in favor of on campus-interviews. I think Princeton can, for whatever reason, get away with the risk of hiring someone with no teaching skills whatsoever, someone who is really terrible (unclear, confrontational, etc.) at talking collegially about philosophy, whatever. But most schools can't, including most research schools, not just SLACs. Hiring 'fantastic philosophers', as LA Paul says above, just isn't the only goal – or maybe it is, but only on a rich, broadened conception of 'fantastic philosopher'.

    But none of this seems to me to be any argument at all for first round interviews, where the situation is totally unlike actual department life, the activity is unique and forced, everyone is exhausted and grumpy from the bad hotel air and the overpriced and horrible beer selection, implicit biases are especially likely to kick in because of the condensed time frame, etc. We all know the standard problems.

    Reply
  17. Eric Brown

    Washington University in St. Louis is searching for a specialist in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy this year, and we plan not to interview by Skype or at the APA but to invite a few finalists to campus, just as we did last year in our search in ethics. The APA's difficulties and the timing of the Eastern conference don't help, but even if the APA were flawless and the Eastern meeting perfectly convenient, we still would likely make campus invitations from dossiers, as many of us are skeptical of the value of interviews for acquiring good information about candidates.

    Reply
  18. Fritz Warfield

    Steven Hales writes: "I suspect that Princeton would hire fantastic philosophers if they randomly picked their candidates' names out of a hat. Applicants self-select against applying to jobs that are out of their league."

    I don't know what evidence he has for this claim about self-selection. Top departments doing open searches get hundreds (many hundreds!) of applications. I don't see much evidence of this sort of self-selection in the applicant pool at my department. And if a top 5 department does an open search, they will likely receive applications from 8 to 12 PhDs from my school despite the fact that all of the students know (in a typical year) that the position is clearly "out of their league".

    Reply
  19. Steven Hales

    @Fritz Warfield: I'm sure you're right. I suppose I was assuming minimal rationality (the chance of success is too low to justify the expense of applying) and lack of self-delusion among candidates. Unrealistic assumptions, I guess!

    Reply
  20. Steven Hales

    Oh, and I should add that not only top departments get "many hundreds" of applications. Even humble universities such as my own get that. I just figured that everybody thinks they have a shot with us.

    Reply
  21. Heidi Savage

    I would like to separate ethical issues from practical issues. The primary ethical issue concerns forcing candidates, simply at a preliminary stage, to shell out somewhere between $3500-$4500 to go to the APA, which isn't usually covered by departments, since those candidates typically have VAPs or are recent PhDs and have no departmental funding for such things. I tend to think that, purely for ethical reasons, departments should move to skype. Though I can see some thinking that this is the price you pay for wanting a job. I have done both kinds of interviews and for myself found not much difference between them. They both went well, we got to joke around, they got a sense of my personality from the skype interview, etc. I also attended the APA and it cost me so much that I had to go into debt over it.

    On the practical side regarding the advantages for hiring committees, I have no opinion. I also have no opinion about which issues should trump the other, but I thought it worth making the distinction in this thread, since thus far, it has mainly been focused on the perspective of committees.

    Reply
  22. L. A. Paul

    I'll try it one more time: I am arguing that APA interviews are not needed to determine which candidates are the best candidates. The most common argument for APA interviews is that they are needed in order to determine the short list of the best candidates for on-campus interviews. Princeton is a counterexample to those who hold that you must have APA interviews in order to determine the short list of the best candidates for the job.

    (In fairness, I suspect that some of you posted before my second remark was posted.)

    Reply
  23. Brian Weatherson

    Fritz Warfield writes: "I don't know what evidence he has for this claim about self-selection. Top departments doing open searches get hundreds (many hundreds!) of applications. I don't see much evidence of this sort of self-selection in the applicant pool at my department."

    I used to think this too, but now I'm not so sure. When I've been involved with open area entry level searches at Brown and Cornell, we got 200-300 applications. I've heard of similar searches at non-PhD granting departments getting 500-600 applications. These weren't apples-to-apples comparisons (for one thing they were different years), but my (limited, anecdotal) impression is that there is some self-selection.

    On the underlying question, I hope that we get a large variety of search types this year – eastern interviews, video interviews, fly-outs only, and dossier-based selection. I'd be very interested to see some evidence about which types of students do best in each. (E.g., male/female, high Leiter rank/low Leiter rank department, and if there's enough data, white/non-white and LGBT/non-LGBT.) My prior credence is that various groups are advantaged in different ways by these strategies, but I have no armchair access into what those ways might be.

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  24. doris

    Fritz wrote:

    "What the psychological literature on this issue shows is, so far as I can tell, not as clear cut as some critics of our interviewing practices make it out to be."

    I'm inclined to think that the evidence tells pretty strongly against the projective value of short interviews. But I'm happy to agree with Fritz that the evidence is equivocal, as it so often is in social science.

    The question is: should a practice that (1) enjoys only (at best) equivocal evidential support and (2) undeniably imposes considerable hardship on job candidates be continued?

    Reply
  25. Rebecca Kukla

    It seems to me there are weird prisoners-dilemma-like issues of collective responsibility and rationality here.

    I think virtually all departments that do APA interviews would certainly not be willing to force candidates to spend the money and time to fly to the convention for a first-round interview if they knew they were the only ones doing this – that the candidate had to fly out just for them! Departments justify the imposition on the grounds that candidates will have to go to the APA 'anyways' for their other interviews. And the result is that as doris says, candidates suffer undeniable, considerable hardship to do something with only at best equivocal evidential support. But what is the way out of this? At the moment each department's reasoning is correct. We all have to agree to stop simultaneously or something.

    Reply
  26. Mike Otsuka

    Having just followed the earlier thread to which Brian Leiter links above all the way to the bottom, I've now read, and highly recommend, Antony Eagle's review of, and astute set of comments on, some empirical studies on the reliability of interviews. Here's the direct link:

    http://bit.ly/d0OtbN

    Although he notes that "I'm no psychologist, and certainly no expert; this reflects just my own exploration of the field", his paper appears to me to shed more light on this topic than the generalizations from anecdote and armchair speculation that is all that most of the rest of us have at our immediate disposal.

    Reply
  27. Unnamed Junior Professor

    My department (at a SLAC) may be hiring this year, and if we do then we will interview at the APA. (I disagree with this decision, hence my request for anonymity.) For what it's worth, the stated reasons are:

    1. We do a very professional job of it (no unmade beds, etc.), which impresses many candidates.
    2. We need to do this in order to whittle down the list of candidates, in particular to figure out who is really interested in us, and who is a good fit for the culture of the department and the mission of the institution.

    Of course it is reason (2) that is doing most of the work; no one would appeal to (1) alone as justification for interviewing at the APA. And my sense is that considerations like this play a role in many departments like mine: people think that interviews have some value (and are unmoved by studies that suggest otherwise), and insist that no matter how limited their value we *need* them if we are going to decide on a manageable number of candidates to invite to campus. These don't strike me as good enough reasons, but then again I've never had to sift through hundreds of applications trying to identify candidates with the right mix of research ability, desire to teach, support for the school's mission, and general pleasantness. Without a lot of funds on hand, doing a first round of interviews at the APA seems a better way to do this sifting than running the risk of bringing to campus multiple candidates who are simply non-starters (of course this happens anyway, albeit hopefully not as often).

    Though what makes it better than Skype? The only answers I can think of are that (i) that's the way we've always done it, and (ii) the candidates are going to be at APA anyway. (Plus of course the rather flimsy (1) above.) The lesson I draw from this is that it is highly unlikely that "we" are going to do anything about this situation simultaneously; weaning departments off the APA is going to be a slow process, especially when it comes to folks who are concerned most with relatively "intangible" factors that go beyond pedigree and research potential.

    Reply
  28. R. Clarke

    For what it's worth: At Florida State, for our last three tenure-track searches, we've made selections from dossiers and invited a few candidates for campus visits, then made our offers. In my view, the outcomes of all these searches have been excellent. I have no wish to go back to APA interviews, nor to add preliminary Skype interviews.

    I wouldn't want to cut out the campus interviews. I don't think that Princeton's practice provides a model for everyone. The department there might have access to information about its applicants–via networking–that other departments lack.

    Reply
  29. Fritz Warfield

    John Doris writes:
    "The question is: should a practice that (1) enjoys only (at best) equivocal evidential support and (2) undeniably imposes considerable hardship on job candidates be continued?"

    If that's John's question, I lean towards answering it "no". (There were a few different questions in play in this thread though.)

    Reply
  30. Eddy Nahmias

    We used skype interviews here at Georgia State last year, and it was relatively effective at gaining whatever information we might have gained with APA interviews. I suspect we will use skype again for our future hires. It's been a while since I read the empirical research on the (in)effectiveness of interviews. While I'm convinced interviews are not good predictors of future research success in the profession, I don't *think* the research directly addresses three possible benefits of interviews (possible, depending on one's goals and on whether the committee interviews in a way that effectively obtains the following information):

    1. obtaining more information about the candidates' fit for your department in terms of their teaching, research, and service interests (few people tailor cover letters sufficiently to garner some of this information), including whether they seem genuinely interested in your program, college, and students.

    2. obtaining more information about whether the candidates will be able to teach and interact effectively with your students.

    3. obtaining more information about whether the candidates will pass the "kindergarten test" (i.e., will they "play nicely with others" or be that canker sore of the department until tenure or death–note another body of empirical research that suggests people's happiness is influenced significantly by their co-workers!).

    Granted, it's quite possible that interviews provide little, or even misleading, information about 2-3, but does the research on interviews show that? If not, then I'll stick with my armchair intuition that I have gained some useful info about 1-3 with initial interviews (much more so with on-campus interviews, but getting from 12 incredibly impressive candidates to 3-4 superduper candidates is very hard to do).

    On that note, I'm sure the research does not undermine this purely pragmatic reason for initial round of interviews: at least in my experience (on 3 different department's interview committees), members of the department are motivated to read the candidates' work more closely if they are planning to interview them. So, scheduling 10-15 interviews forces people to focus more on those candidates to hone it down to 3-4 in a way that just shortening the list does not.

    Reply
  31. S. Bordner

    I take it there is fairly wide agreement that first-round face-to-face interviews are at best unhelpful, and at worst, flood the process with bad information. (I'm highly skeptical of this as a rule, but leave this aside for now.)

    If this is true, why have *any* face-to-face interactions in the hiring process? Why are the campus visits so highly valued if the interviews are (allegedly) worthless? From (admittedly, limited) experience on both sides of the hiring process, I see no important difference aside from the duration. My campus visits were no less stressful or demanding than my face-to-face interviews. One was no less "artificial" than the other; the campus visit is no more like day-to-day life in the position than an interview. I was no less "on" during one than the other. I learned a great deal—from candidates who we were considering hiring, and from departments considering hiring me—in both situations.

    I'd like to know, then, why those opposed to first-round, in-person interviews aren't also opposed to campus visits (if they aren't) and what they see as the important difference between the two.

    Reply
  32. Eric Wiland

    From an earlier comment: "The primary ethical issue concerns forcing candidates, simply at a preliminary stage, to shell out somewhere between $3500-$4500 to go to the APA…"

    I confess I haven't been to the Eastern in a while, but I believe this overstates things. If you are in the U.S., you should be able to find a flight for under $500, possibly half that. You are not forced to use the APA's hotel, so you should be able to lodge for under $500; if you are ambitious, you share a room, as I did then. You will need clothes for the APA, but you will need them in the rest of your career too, so it isn't fair to saddle the APA with that expense. No matter where you are, you need to eat. So unless your situation is unusual, I think you are 'forced' to spend at most 1/3 of that. The most significant costs are psychical, not financial, and I don't think we should overlook those.

    Top research departments can avoid first-round interviews without suffering much. But I imagine that departments who are unable to hire one of the top 5 candidates applying for the position really benefit from the opportunity to meet a dozen candidates early in the process, so that they can make informed decisions down the road. (I have no view about whether Skype replicates these benefits.)

    Reply
  33. graduate student

    Speaking as a graduate student on the market this year, I dread the prospect of being called for an APA interview. Whether I get one or ten such interviews, the outlay of money to attend the APA will be literally ruinous. At this juncture, I honestly don't know how I'll find the money for it, even factoring in begging various relations (who only dimly understand what I do) and taking out usurious short-term loans (assuming I can even get any). I have no fear of the interviews themselves – I do fairly well with people – but I have a positive dread of finding out that I will have to decline the interviews because I simply can't afford to go.

    Reply
  34. Daniel Levine

    I'm in a school of Public Policy, so a bit out of the main research sample, but thought I'd at least contribute how we do it, for what it's worth (and, as I demonstrate, we *do* occasionally hire philosophers).

    With the exception of very senior hires, which often have ad hoc elements of informal contact with the candidate (or even sometimes "person we would like to become a candidate"), the procedure is phone interviews (not even Skype, it's like the 20th century) for the first round and campus visits for the second. That's at least been my experience being hired, and on the hiring committees I've been on since. The only exception in my experience being when there are so few candidates on which we can get any sort of consensus on the committee that we just go straight to campus visits (when a committee has 8-10 members from different "home" disciplines, this happens more than you might think). As far as I know, this is also the practice for other hiring committees at the School.

    Two observations on the practice. First, whatever problems we've had hiring people or liking them after they've been hired, nothing seems traceable to having first-round interviews be over the phone. We would have trouble doing convention interviews because of the lack of a unique convention to interview at, but I don't even see a compelling reason for us to move to Skype (I don't think it would necessarily hurt either).

    Second, the campus interview – at least for us – serves purposes besides giving the committee or even the full faculty a better sense of the candidate. Mileage my vary elsewhere, but it is common for us to not simply accept the hiring committee's judgment. So the campus visit is an important opportunity for other faculty members to feel that they've been involved in the hiring process, build consensus on our side, etc. I'm not sure that that gets better hires, but it certainly helps integrate the people we do hire. All in my own judgment, of course.

    For what it's worth, I'd be very leery of Rebecca's suggestion to let candidates pick. I was in the odd position of working only down the hall from the folks interviewing me, and we still did a phone interview. At the time, it seemed a little silly – but whatever benefits or "noise" the interview brings to the process, it only seems right to have that apply equally to all the candidates. And I think John Gray is also right – it would invite unhelpful attempts at strategizing (and probably unpleasant "if onlys" in retrospect) from job candidates. The process is stressful enough already.

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  35. R. Clarke

    "Why are the campus visits so highly valued if the interviews are (allegedly) worthless?"

    What I think is most informative about the campus visits is the presentation of a paper. That IS what we often do in this profession; it's informative to see how a candidate fares at it.

    Don't forget that a visit also provides the candidate with information about the department and university offering the job. I'd be interested to hear whether people think candidates get no useful information in this way.

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  36. David Sobel

    I like Doris's point. Also it should be kept in mind that time and money not spent at the convention and getting to it can be used to re-read papers or read more papers from more candidates or flying more candidates out. Going to the convention needs to not just be better than not going, it needs to be a better use of one's time than the alternatives.

    Reply
  37. anon recent grad

    I have recently finished my PhD; I was on the job market last year and will be again this year. I am aware of the various burdens, especially financial, that interviewing at the APA entails and I would like to make it clear that, with the following, I am not advocating APA interviews.

    The narrowness of the discussion here about the pros/cons of interviewing has suprised me. (I haven't looked through earlier discussions, so apologies if this is repeating something already noted.) Antony Eagle's paper (as linked by Mike Otsuka above) shows that there is little evidence that interviews are reliable indicators of candidates' future, call it, "philosophical performance". (Perhaps number of strong publications over 10 years? Presumably, something like that.) Other indicators are seeimgly better. (Antony Eagle does discuss how to go about interviewing to make it more reliable as an indicator of future performance.) But I think that misses what interviews are (ought to be?) for: interviews allow departments to choose between candidates each of whom can be expected to perform well in the future in the given sense. That is, departments (should?) use pre-interview information (such as candidates' grad school scores, recommendation letters and so forth) to long/short-list candidates who can, in virtue of that information, be expected to perform well in the future. The interview should provide the department with other kinds of information about the candidate, which may be important to the department. For example, whether or not the candidate is amiable, or presentable, or a confident public speaker, say. In short, what might be called a candidate's personality. I think that interviews may be reliable indicators of such things. (I didn't see anything in Antony Eagle's paper to suggest that interviews are unreliable indicators of these kinds of things.)

    I note the following: 1) perhaps many departments do not use interviews for such a purpose instead, and seemingly erroneously, using them as indicators of future philosophical performance; 2) it may be argued that the usefulness of such information does not warrant the aforementioned burdens; 3) it might be argued that departments ought not to care about anything but future philosophical performance, or, more reasonably, that departments ought to care about future philosophical performance way more than anything else.

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  38. Grad student

    I'm another grad student on the market this year. I am more fortunate than most in that I happen to have friends in DC with whom I can stay. If not for that, I probably would have had to take out a loan.

    (I would add: the previous discussions of this issue on Leiter's blog have convinced me that there's shockingly little to be said in favor of maintaining apa interviews and a host of reasons for abandoning them.)

    Reply
  39. Mitchell Aboulafia

    My initial response to Professor Harman was prompted by a desire not to see the baby thrown out with the bath water. Interviewing cannot just be dismissed. One might be tempted to do so if one elides differences in types of interviews and doesn’t pay sufficient attention to the requirements for handling them judiciously. Structured interviews–those that are marked, for example, by consistency and behavioral questions–have been shown to have validity. For what it’s worth, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management makes the following claims in its guide to structured interviews.

    “In comparison [to unstructured interviews], structured interviews have demonstrated a high degree of reliability, validity, and legal defensibility. Therefore, because interviews used to make employment decisions are subject to the same legal and psychometric requirements as any written employment test or other assessment method, agencies are encouraged to use structured interviews.” Structured Interviews: A Practical Guide. September 2008.

    Many of the tools that are available to corporations and government agencies, such as the administration of aptitude tests, are not applicable to hiring in philosophy. (And it is not clear how much we would learn from them since we can assume from GRE scores that a high percentage of philosophers would do very well on them.) Further, with the exception of a few institutes or institute like departments, we are typically looking at sets of different skills when we hire, e.g., those that make good researchers, teachers, and colleagues.

    None of this answers the question of where and when interviews should be done: at the APA, by Skype, or on the phone, etc. But I for one don’t want to see them dismissed. I have interviewed candidates for positions for over thirty years, for example, at Research I and II universities, and as director of Juilliard’s Liberal Arts program. And what I have learned is that at minimum a well conceived and executed interview, of reasonable length, conducted by several people, can avoid mismatches between candidates and departments, as well as produce surprises, both positive and negative. There is enough empirical data to suggest that my experience has not been not anomalous. Our goal should not be to throw up our hands and walk away from interviews but improve how we handle them.

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  40. Matty Silverstein

    I suspect many have doubts about the usefulness of interviews even for gleaning the sort of information (about amiability, collegiality, and so forth) mentioned by "anon recent grad." (I know I do.) How amiable or collegial someone is while undergoing the "artificial" and grueling APA interview process may tell you little or nothing about how amiable or collegial that person will be once he or she is a regular member of your department. Of course in some cases the interview process may very well be a good indicator of later collegiality, but how can you tell the signal from the noise?

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  41. Heidi Savage

    Perhaps I slightly overstated the cost. I wasn't deducting the amount it cost me to send my materials out from a foreign locale either, and to have them copied. My bad. But everything in, it did cost me more or less the previous amount quoted (I have the credit card debt to prove it).

    So the APA itself cost more along the lines of let's see…about $1800-2000 more or less (worst case scenario). This is assuming that the candidate already has some clothes to wear.

    But Eric's comment raises some interesting questions about what departments should be assuming about the costs for an interviewee. For instance, should departments assume that interviewees will be lucky enough to have friends at the APA with whom they can share a room? Should we assume that they will be staying at the cheapest hotels? Should we assume they are American? How much does it cost a candidate to eat everyday? Even $1800 is a lot of money for anyone who does not have a tenure track job. One of the potential interviewees on this thread worried about getting approved for short term loan in order to go.

    Is this really what we want to demand of our potential colleagues in order to hire them? The job market is terrible right now. Candidates would probably get a cardboard box to stay in to go to the APA these days. Departments, if they want, can take advantage of this and not worry at all about the cost to their potential colleagues, but isn't this a bad way to start the possible "beginning of a beautiful friendship?"

    Also, I was not saying that we should do away with preliminary interviews. We should replace them with skype interviews, which as far as I could tell, didn't really differ that much in tone as any face to face interviews I've ever had: a good time was had by all. You do indeed get a sense of people's personalities in that forum, if indeed that's what preliminaries are about.

    ps: while we're on the topic, postage is killer, as is copying dossiers. This is especially true if you are sending from a foreign country. Can I just throw in a vote for Interfolio as well?

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  42. Jonathan Livengood

    @ anon recent grad,

    "I didn't see anything in Antony Eagle's paper to suggest that interviews are unreliable indicators of these kinds of things."

    Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how small sample bias, anchoring and adjustment, undue weight to one's own evaluations, and the interview illusion are exclusively problems for evaluating *ability* as opposed to *personality* or whatever else one might care about.

    And some of this is built-in to interviews. Is the candidate likely to be presentable in the future? I don't know, he or she is wearing a suit/dress/whatever *now* and looks pretty good …

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  43. em

    I have always been a bit confused about the anti-interview stance. No doubt, interviews give, at best, noisy information. But the relevant contrast class is the other pieces of information in the candidate's dossier, which are also quite noisy. For example, we have reason to believe that letters of recommendation are just as noisy–in fact, there is good social psychological research on this that almost never gets mentioned (it's a form of the anchoring and adjustment bias–people anchor to the valence of the letter, how glowing it is, and discount it's source–how much weight it should provide. The vividness of the letter trumps the credibility [or lack thereof] of the writer). Presumably lots of the other pieces in one's dossier are also not wonderfully informative (I've heard of philosophers who are distrustful of dossier papers because they get looked over from departments much more than any of the candidates future work will be). The interview at least gives you some fairly clean information about whether the candidate passes what Nahmias called 'the kindergarten test', which although it won't tell you about the quality of the candidates work, will tell you something about what department life might be like if the candidate got the job.

    No doubt, stereotype-based biases are activated in interviews–but they are also activated from merely reading one's CVs and letters (unless of course, the CVs and letters are blinded in regards to the candidates name). It's instructive to look closely at Eagle's (interesting) review and see how many of the problems he cites have an analog in the other pieces of information in one's dossier (though the 'interview bias' from Kunda is probably not arising elsewhere in the dossier, but will presumably arise in a job talk). What would be really helpful is a comparison between the sizes of the effects of, say, stereotypes activated from CVs vs. interviews. I know of no such study (though surely this could be a consequence of ignorance). Regardless, since there is good reason to believe that almost all the parts of one's dossier contains noisy information, might it be better to have more pieces of noisy information rather than less?

    Perhaps the bad evidence we get isn't noise per se; maybe it's all biasing in the same direction (as it probably would be if stereotype-based information structured the majority of the biasing), in which case doing away with interviews wouldn't be a bad idea (especially if the effect size of biasing in interviews is bigger than in the other parts of one's dossier–an empirical question no doubt). But it's at least worth noting that doing away with the interviews will, presumably, not do away with introducing the biases that we'd like to keep at bay and probably will do away with taking away some information that we think is important and has not yet been specifically impugned: whether the candidate is extremely difficult to deal with. Though this datum won't arise in the majority of cases, I would think it is still quite important.

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  44. anon recent grad

    @ Jonathan Livengood (and this overlaps with @ Matty Silverstein )

    I think you make a fair point but I don't think it's a simple matter. In reply: 1) the effects of interview illusion etc were, it seems, calculated specifically apropos something like "future performance". At least some of the things that might fall under *personality* are hard to measure in a different way, and, as such, it would be hard to even gauge interview biases for them. Indeed, 2) the salient issue is whether non-interview indicators are more reliable for such things. In some cases they might be: for example, a letter of recommendation might speak to the candidate's personality and that might be more reliable. But now consider how good the candidate is at public speaking. It seems this aptitude might be reasonably judged at a high pressure interview. Or consider presentability again. Maybe all candidates do come dressed appropriately and in such a case the interview might not help. My experience watching from the sidelines, as it were, has been that many candidates are not presentable (even?) at an interview.

    Again, I stress that these may be things to which little weight is, or ought to be, given. In any case, I'm in favor of doing away with first round interviews at APA because the costs seem to outweigh the benefits. But it is important not to overstate the case against interviewing. In short, it seems to me that interviewing is not a reliable way of assessing future philosophical performance, but it may be a way of reliably judging personality (broadly and loosely construed), and, indeed, may be the only way to do so for certain aspects of it.

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  45. James Harold

    (I am only talking about first-round interviews here, assuming that there are other reasons for flybacks, such as recruiting.)

    There seems to be broad agreement that unstructured interviews are a bad idea. There is not clear agreement (Eagle reads the literature differently than Holton does — I am not in a position to adjudicate between their views) on whether no interviews is better than highly structured interviews, following guidelines to make them as fair and consistent as possible. There is, however, broad agreement that these kinds of highly structured interviews are certainly better than unstructured interviews. So, one question to ask is: should we have no interviews, or highly structured interviews? About this, reasonable people can disagree. The second question is, if a department does have interviews, should they be face to face at the APA, or on Skype? On this second question I think that the weight of reasons clearly favors using Skype.

    So, departments should either (1) skip the first-round interviews altogether; or (2) reform the interview process using the research that Eagle and others refer to, and hold first round interviews via phone or Skype.

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  46. Richard Samuels

    I too have concerns about the efficacy of interviews. But for what it's worth the OSU Philosophy Department have voted to replace a trip to the Eastern with Skype interviews this year. This decision was in large measure motivated by financial considerations. But Skyping also permits a degree of flexibility –both with respect to scheduling and interview personnel– that cannot be had in the normal conference context.

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  47. Iain Thomson

    UNM will be doing two t-t hires by bringing finalists right to campus from dossiers, as we've done for at least the last dozen years. (Many of us hate the oppressive atmosphere of the Eastern APA, but I think we're open to the idea of using Skype if we had trouble selecting finalists, especially as the technology improves and/or we get more used to it.)

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  48. Carolyn Suchy-Dicey

    On the Eastern: I suppose this might be off-topic, but I like the idea of the Eastern APA being more talk-centered. I very much enjoyed my first experience at the Eastern this last winter in Boston, but I think this was because I was excited about all of the great talks and surrounding discussions. If there had been the normal number of job-hunters (there was a blizzard that prevented this last year), and if I had been on the market, then it might have been a much less positive experience. Perhaps it would be worthwhile considering the loss of what could otherwise be a stimulating inter-topic conference on the east coast a reason to drop interviews. I think the APA is conducting a survey now to that effect.

    On Skype: Separately, I find one-on-one Skype to feel pretty natural/comfortable (I have to do this to talk about experiments sometimes). On the other hand, I once tried to engage my four sisters in a Skype session (2 on one side, 3 on the other) and it was utter chaos. This might work better if each question-asker had a "turn," but I found it difficult to tell which person was talking. Also, the sound sometimes does strange things if two people talk at once. These issues might be solved with a practice session by the interview committee with one of their own.

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  49. Harry Brighouse

    The well known problems with interviews in general may be compounded by the tendency of academics, who make human resources judgments very infrequently, to think that they know what they are doing when they interview (which they have very little evidence for) and the worse tendency of academics who are fully aware of the literature on bounded rationality to think that because they know that literature they are immune to the phenomenon in such settings as interviews. Interviews at the Eastern APA (and MLA and the like) may be even worse because the cattle market setting is an experience which affects different applicants in very different ways (and has is an experience going through which is entirely unlike anything one actually does as part of the job one is being considered for).

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  50. 2011 Job Candidate

    In discussing the merits of APA interviews, it may be worth distinguishing between 1) suite interviews and 2) grand ballroom interviews. I've recently had both and think the latter are vulnerable to a number of distractions which can aggravate an already problematic interview setting. If grand ballroom interviews are both more problematic and more typical (because of what most departments can afford), then perhaps discussion of "APA interviews" should be framed explicitly in terms of those in the ballroom.

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