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Hiring Departments: Please Use “Academic Jobs Online”

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT GIVEN IMPORTANCE OF DISCUSSION

Philosopher Elizabeth Harman (Princeton) writes with a timely message, which I hope all departments will heed:

Please take note that academicjobsonline.org is a great service that makes things *much* easier for job candidates and departments that are trying to place their students.  This service is free for job applicants and only requires applicants and letter-writers to upload all their materials once.  Then to apply to each of the hiring departments using the service, applicants merely need to tick a few boxes.  Several philosophy hiring departments did use the service last year (Duke, Tufts, Yale, Stanford, Tulane, Oregon, and Washington Tacoma), and hopefully more will this year.  (All mathematics hiring uses this service.  It is much more humane for job candidates.)

There's more here (we linked to this previously, but please read it again!).  The APA, to its credit, has waived the membership fee for Interfolio for APA members, but not (as I understand it) the cost per application, which can still add up to hundreds of dollars (more than a thousand even).  Faculty:  ask yourself how you would feel about having to spend 5-10% of your gross income in a given year on job applications?  And given the diminishing marginal utility of income to middle- and upper-class income earner, that percentage is not really adequate to describe the financial hardship for job seekers.

UPDATE:  Christopher Morris (Maryland) writes:  "It might be helpful were you to open your posting to comments and invite those who have used the new service to say something about its reliability. Like most depts we are setting up our placement system for the fall and have only a little time to reorganize it. Hearing something from Duke, et al. would be very helpful to most doctoral programs."

Comments are now open; faculty, please sign your comments; students who have used the service can simply include a valid e-mail address (which won't appear), but need not sign their full name.

 

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24 responses to “Hiring Departments: Please Use “Academic Jobs Online””

  1. Eddy Nahmias

    We just started using this site for our neuroethics positions, and so far it seems to work great. Easy to set up and use. Making it cheaper for applicants is a sufficient ethical reason for people to use academicjobsonline, but self-interest should motivate too: it makes the process much, much easier for the search committee, since all the information is online and easily accessible. And departmental staff don’t have to do anything. (And it saves paper.)

    Reply
  2. Bryan William Van Norden

    I think my institution is like many others, in that our department does not have a say over the mechanics of hiring. Job applicants are required to apply through my school's hiring website. It's certainly too late for us to make the case to the dean for an exception this year.

    Reply
  3. Past and Current Job Seeker

    I have applied for positions through Academic Jobs Online in the past, and found it wonderfully convenient, efficient, and easy to use. Everything except cover letters gets uploaded just once (including letters of reference), saving everyone on the applicant's end a lot of time. That it's free for applicants is another weighty reason for hiring departments to use it, and I do hope that many search committees choose to do so this hiring season. I can't speak to the merits of the system from the search committee's perspective, but from the applicant's point of view (and, imagine, from the POV of those providing letters of recommendation), there really is no downside, at least in my experience.

    Reply
  4. Tamar Gendler

    Yale Philosophy used Academic Jobs Online for our searches last year. It was an unqualified success, with good reviews from applicants, search committee members, departmental support staff, and university administrators. The program was out-of-the-box convenient, but also suitably customizable. We found it to be very useful both for our junior tenure-track Philosophy searches (which involved various subcommittees at various stages of the search process) and for our Semantics post-doc (which involved coordinating applicants, readers and staff across multiple departments.) For all of the reasons Eddy indicates, if you are in a position to recommend this program to your university, I highly recommend doing so.

    Reply
  5. Pro-AJO

    Last year, I submitted three applications through Academic Jobs Online and found the system super easy to use. It was great, of course, that AJO was free. But AJO also precluded the hassle of opening up three separate job application accounts on the individual departments' HR sites. (Best of all, though coincidentally, one of those AJO applications resulted in the job I have now.)

    Reply
  6. Brian Weatherson

    Michigan philosophy will be using AJO this year. It looks great so far, though I can't say as much as everyone else until we are further along. But I hope a lot of departments use it; there are coordination gains from settling on one dossier service.

    Reply
  7. Amy Ferrer

    Within two weeks, we will be making a formal announcement about the APA's partnership with Interfolio and providing details about how to take advantage of these services. In the meantime, I can provide some clarification, as the estimates of the cost to candidates for Interfolio's services that have been suggested here and elsewhere are likely high.

    Through the APA's partnership with Interfolio, APA members will have their first year's membership fee for Interfolio's Dossier service for job candidates waived. In addition, when applying to positions whose hiring committees are using Interfolio's ByCommittee service, the delivery fee is also waived. There is a $6 per application fee for candidates using Interfolio's Dossier service to apply to positions whose hiring committees are not using Interfolio's ByCommittee service.

    Note that Interfolio is also offering APA members and JFP advertisers a free trial of their ByCommittee service for one year and five hiring searches, and we strongly encourage hiring departments to take advantage of this promotion, not only because the ByCommittee service makes the application review process easier and more convenient, but also in order to reduce the financial burden on job candidates.

    Reply
  8. Elizabeth Harman

    Some members of hiring departments (and their staff) may believe that their schools will not allow them to use academicjobsonline.org; they may have been told this by Human Resources or their dean. I would encourage those people to investigate what other departments at their school do, particularly Math. My understanding is that almost all Math departments use mathjobs.org. (academicjobsonline.org was created by the people who first made mathjobs.org.)

    I believe you can check here for a listing of this year's math jobs at mathjobs.org; perhaps your school's math department has a listing:
    http://www.mathjobs.org/jobs?joblist—–40

    Reply
  9. Richard Yetter Chappell

    Has the APA considered endorsing AcademicJobsOnline, and officially urging all philosophy departments to make use of it? (Cheaper access to Interfolio services may help a bit in the meantime, but eventually we should surely want to cut out the commercial middle-man altogether.)

    Reply
  10. Exhausted Job Seeker

    I'll go one step further than Richard and ask: isn't it ethically dubious of the APA to partner up with a for-profit organization (Interfolio) when a suitable non-profit alternative is available? On top of this, if my understanding is correct, part of campaign by the APA here is to give departments the incentive to use Interfolio (for free, for a limited time) while candidates will still be paying for each application (which, it should be noted, is by far the more expensive element of using Interfolio; the one-year membership fee is around $20, which is the equivalent of three-and-a-third applications under the APA's proposal). In contrast, AJO is free for candidates, with the cost being taken on by departments, whose numbers are far smaller (and more able to bear the cost).

    Indeed, why did the APA partner up with Interfolio at all when AJO was available? Is it because if AJO takes off the JFP would become irrelevant, and with it, the APA?

    Reply
  11. Elizabeth Harman

    Amy Ferrer,
    Like "Exhausted Job Seeker" I am concerned about the long-term effects of the APA partnering with a for-profit company (is that what Interfolio is?) rather than encouraging use of academicjobsonline,org — which appears to be operating more as a service than a for-profit company (though they do charge a fee to hiring departments).
    Could you please tell us what Interfolio charges hiring departments for their ByCommittee service, compared to what Interfolio charges?
    And how much is the yearly fee for job applicants for Interfolio? (After the first year during which it is waived.)
    Thank you for your help in understanding these issues!

    Reply
  12. Heidi Savage

    A bit off topic, but having been on the market last year, I noticed, since the opening of new advertising venues, that the deadlines for job applications were earlier than normal, and were more varied. If this trend continues, it creates planning problems both for job seekers and letter writers. I wonder, then, if it would make sense for the APA to encourage, somehow, a particular time line for deadlines in general. This would certainly make my life, and I am sure the lives of my letter writers, much easier.

    Reply
  13. Amy Ferrer

    It's great to see such a thoughtful discussion of these options. While Interfolio itself is more suited to answering specific questions about their services, I can mention a few things here that have informed the APA's partnership with Interfolio. First of all, the APA used Interfolio for this year's executive director search, choosing Interfolio because it was more user-friendly and had a cleaner workflow than other options that were considered. The search committee was very pleased with the process (as was I as an applicant), and we're delighted that our partnership with Interfolio will give more of our members access to the service.

    Interfolio is indeed a for-profit business and not a non-profit organization. However, there is little reason to assume that a for-profit business is by definition less ethical or less concerned with providing a quality service than an non-profit organization. Interfolio, in our experience, provides great services and support for academics on both sides of the hiring process.

    Interfolio's price point for hiring committee services is higher than AJO's, but departments that have used ByCommittee have found it to be an excellent value. Further, the APA is in discussions with Interfolio about what offerings will be available for our members and advertisers beyond this academic year in order to make the service as accessible as possible.

    For job seekers, the Dossier service is quite affordable; the current fee structure is available on Interfolio's website (http://www.interfolio.com/demo/pricing.cfm?product=dossier). And as I mentioned above, applying to jobs whose hiring committees use ByCommittee is free; for other positions, there is a $6 delivery fee per application. And with its comprehensive Dossier service, Interfolio is a great tool for candidates whether the positions they apply to use the ByCommittee service or not.

    I also want to emphasize that we are in experimental mode, as the APA has not been able to offer this kind of service before and we see this partnership with Interfolio as a way to do something important for our members. We will, of course, continue to evaluate these options based on members' experiences with Interfolio this year.

    I do want to state as well that the APA takes no issue with AJO–it is clearly a useful service and one that is valuable to our members and the profession. In regards to the JFP specifically, we at the APA believe strongly that, especially with the new version launching in October, there are many compelling reasons for departments to continue advertising positions in the JFP (as well as in other locations, as they so choose).

    Reply
  14. Anon

    As someone who has used Interfolio a few times, I think it's necessary to add that it is not so easy to stay anywhere near the $6 per application. Just a quick perusal of my electronic submissions (and some, oddly enough, were to AJO, by the way) has the average application at $13 and that's for an electronic application. On the positive side, by keeping the expenses this high we've accomplished what I've thought was impossible: we've found a way to make jaded job seekers even more miserable.

    Reply
  15. Elizabeth Harman

    Some more information / clarification about AcademicJobsOnline.org:

    This year they are willing to place ads from philosophy departments that have not used their service before for $75. (Refer to correspondence with me, or contact me, if you have any trouble getting this price.)

    AcademicJobsOnline.org is a service that hiring departments choose to use, and then it benefits applicants in that it's free for applicants and if several jobs use it, the applicant only has to upload materials once to provide those materials to all of those jobs.

    AcademicJobsOnline.org does not have any services to help applicants get their materials to jobs that are not using AcademicJobsOnline.org. Thus, it's not an adequate replacement for Interfolio for those applicants whose PhD departments do not provide the placement service of mailing out dossiers and uploading letters. Interfolio is still a crucial resource for these applicants, and I think it's wonderful that the APA has partnered with Interfolio to reduce costs for these students.

    One issue that may come up is that a school's administration may want to use their own online system to be sure to gather all EEO data. Interfolio offers Institutional memberships to assist in the collection of this data. (I don't know if Interfolio also assists with this, but they may well.)

    Regarding my earlier suggestion to search mathjobs.org to see whether your own school's math department uses it: of course that'll only tell you so much, as it just shows this year's ads. You might just ask a member of the math department if they use mathjobs.org when they do hire.

    Reply
  16. Anon Job Seeker

    Ms. Ferrer,
    First, I would like to commend you for all of your efforts to make many improvements at the APA within the short time you have been there. I haven't seen this much progress within the last 10 years. Like Anon, however, I do take issue with your claim that interfolio is "quite affordable." I imagine that you may not be aware that job seekers often face significant financial hardships. I am only guessing, but many job seekers may only bring in 15-20K per year, some more and some less of course. Considering this and considering that many applicants will apply for 80 plus jobs at a fee of $6 each, $480 for job applications alone (not to mention the cost of attending the Eastern APA) is not "quite affordable." I do appreciate the fact that you and the APA are in "experimental mode," and I am happy to see your efforts to ease some of the strain on applicants. I do hope, however, that the strain can be eased further in the future.

    Reply
  17. Dale Miller

    In response to Heidi Savage's comment about the variation in deadlines for job ads… I understand what would be attractive about a standard deadline, but sometimes exogenous factors can compel a school to search earlier (or of course later) than usual. In one of our recent searches we had one of the earliest deadlines in the country, I'm sure. This was because we had been advised that at some point in the year a hiring freeze was likely to be imposed, and we knew that there was a much smaller likelihood that the school would renege on a signed contract than that they would terminate or suspend a search that was still in progress. We made a hire in December, I think, and the hiring freeze was imposed in January or early February. Given what budgets have been like at state schools recently, we may not be the only ones who have had an early deadline for this reason.

    Reply
  18. Anon Job Seeker

    Ms. Ferrer:

    I understand you inherited a bit of mess in taking up your position with the APA and that you have a lot on your plate, but you need to understand that $6 per application is not even remotely affordable to the average graduate student. As has been noted above, the cost the applicant could easily run upwards of $500 for applications alone, and that's assuming the $6 figure is accurate – it has been questioned, and if the alternative estimate is correct, the cost could be as much as $1000 or more. When I was still on funding – it has since run out – that would have been a month's salary for me, and my funding package was relatively generous compared to some. Adding in the cost of the APA Eastern, a job search could cost as much as two month's salary, or roughly 15% of my annual income. If a junior professor making $45,000 a year had to spend upwards of $6,000 (the comparable expenditure for the higher salary) to make himself competitive in the job market in a given year, would you still think it a "quite affordable" expense? I doubt it very much.

    As for the APA partnering with Interfolio, I don't think the problem is that we assume a for-profit organization is automatically unethical. The problem is that by "partnering" with Interfolio, the APA is effectively endorsing it, "steering" business to the company. Why do this? Simply because the APA found Interfolio to be "more user-friendly?" Doesn't the fact that it is expensive (relatively speaking, for the people who are most vulnerable in this job market) weigh against its user-friendliness in the all-things-considered evaluation? Is AJO really so much less user-friendly that it is worth the extra $500-$1000 to use Interfolio? I doubt it very much, and I further wonder whether the APA has received any kind of compensation from this partnership. I think that's a fair question to pose, and one that is germane to deciding whether the APA's choice to recommend Interfolio is simply an innocent underestimation of the financial burdens that weigh on graduate students or a crass and cynical business decision made without adequate consideration of the consequences. Given that many in our field are questioning whether the APA should even continue to exist at all, this is information we deserve to know.

    Reply
  19. Andrew M. Bailey

    I went all-out on the job market last year (applying for 128 positions, including postdocs and temporary gigs), and thus got a chance to see just about every system in action. In my opinion, AcademicJobsOnline is clearly the best for candidates. It is free, efficient, easy to navigate, and convenient for letter writers.

    I eventually accepted a post at Yale-NUS College, which took applications through AcademicJobsOnline. Having learned a little more about the hiring end of things, I'm convinced that AcademicJobsOnline is best from that perspective too. It's probably worth noting in this connection that Yale-NUS College received over 2,500 applications across various disciplines last year; with that kind of volume, a scaleable and efficient system was a high priority, and AcademicJobsOnline fit the bill.

    Reply
  20. Heidi Savage

    Thanks Dale. That would explain it, but I sure hope it doesn't explain all of them or we're really in trouble. At any rate, it still might be worth it to have the APA encourage departments to save their advertisements until, oh I don't know, let's say Nov 15th, in order to make those departments not compelled to advertise early to stop and think about it. This year, for instance, there are already some advertisements for tenure track jobs and certainly neither I nor my letter writers have yet had a chance to respectively put the final touches on the dossier or update letters.

    On another note: I also hope that the APA's improvements will allow it to remain the main source of advertisements simply to make keeping track of advertisements a bit easier.

    And now to comment on the AJO, since I don't want to hi-jack the thread here. Perhaps all of this has been said already, but yes, clearly, it is more convenient to use a site that allows you to upload most of your documents only once and then simply use them repeatedly with a simple click to apply for jobs. That seems to be a no-brainer. However, using Interfolio is almost as convenient when departments have job materials sent to an email address also (putting cost considerations aside). So there are, then, two ways departments could make this process easier, but I assume it's likely that most departments that have HR sites for applying do not choose this method, but are rather forced to do so. And, though I may be wrong about this, changing such a system would require the University to make an exception for only one department or revamp their system entirely. So I don't really hold out much hope for a change in the near future. I suppose there's nothing wrong with trying however.

    Reply
  21. Dale Miller

    I'd submit that for Interfolio to charge $6 per application is really quite reasonable. I doubt that many current applications cost less, between postage and duplication. If graduate students would be hurt by the move to Interfolio, it's not because the real costs of applications would be higher but because Ph.D. programs will use this as an opportunity to shift more of the costs of preparing applications to students. I know of one Ph.D. program that was apparently doing this even before Ms. Ferrer's announcement. Maybe we need to see the move toward making applicants pay costs that were traditionally borne by their Ph.D. programs as the problem, rather than the APA's arrangement with Interfolio per se, and apply what pressure we can to programs not to go in this direction. In other words, maybe Ph.D. programs should be subsidizing their students' use of Interfolio in lieu of providing more traditional sorts of placement services. When I think about the expenses that my Ph.D. program shouldered to support students on the job market, including not just duplication and postage but the salary of a 9-month full-time clerical person to assemble and mail dossiers, I'm pretty sure that they would have jumped at the chance to pay our Interfolio bills instead.

    Reply
  22. David Reidy

    Philosophy at U. Tennessee is in its second year with Interfolio. Terms are negotiated annually. Cost to the department is very reasonable. Cost to applicants is zero. The system is quite customizable, user friendly, and reliable. It easily generates various data sets sought by administrators, OED officers, etc. And there's always Interfolio staff if issues arise. None of this is to comment on AJO, which may, on all the relevant service criteria, match or exceed Interfolio. Philosophy at U. Tennessee will definitely take a look at AJO and any other competitive options. Finally, the Tennessee system is moving, as many systems already have, to hosting its own fully online application system for all positions — staff, administrative, professional, academic, etc., across all campuses. There are institutional/HR reasons that favor this sort of centralization; of course, when such a service is realized it will be free to all applicants…though not in terms of time, since applicants will have to upload everything directly to the Tennessee site. Of course, this is true already at many state systems.

    Reply
  23. Sally Haslanger

    I know this thread has mostly died, but I think it is worth noting that if departments choose to use Interfolio's ByCommittee, which is the institutional side of the service, then job applicants submit their applications FOR FREE, not for $6. The $6 is for applications to departments that are NOT using ByCommittee. The APA is trying to get Interfolio to make a deal so that many departments can use ByCommittee at a discount, thus placing a not-too-onerous financial burden on departments and relieving the job seeker of the costs. As was already noted, it isn't free to submit a job application anyway, so departments that don't use either AJO or Interfolio are the ones that are placing the burden on the job seekers.

    Reply
  24. David J. Buller

    With the new JFP website about to launch on Monday, I want to second Sally Haslanger's remarks. My department is doing a search this year, and I followed this thread with great interest, appreciating all the posts. I investigated both academicjobsonline.org and Interfolio. While academicjobsonline.org looks perfectly good, I made the decision to run our search through Interfolio. I think it's a better service, and Interfolio is able to provide users with tech support in a way that academicjobsonline.org is not equipped to. But what really clinched it for me was the fact that applying to our position using Interfolio WILL BE FREE FOR ALL APPLICANTS. This was noted by Amy Ferrer, and noted again by Sally Haslanger. And, before I opened our search in ByCommittee, I made Frank Fessenden, who works in accounts acquisition at Interfolio, say three times on the phone that applicants don't have to pay to open an account and apply for a position posted using Interfolio's ByCommittee. He put it in writing as well: "There is never a fee for your applicants." So, even though I was on this blog one year ago saying that the APA should get out of the job market, I'm now here to applaud Amy Ferrer for doing one of the best things the APA has ever done for the philosophy job market. (If she keeps this up, I may actually renew my long-lapsed APA membership.)

    I fully understand that job seekers are concerned about costs. But, if you're applying to jobs, bear in mind that you won't pay anything to apply to positions that are using Interfolio's ByCommittee service. You will have to pay to have Interfolio send your dossier to departments that are not using the service. But some of those departments may be using academicjobsonline.org, so just set up your dossier on that site for those positions, at no cost. (Opening accounts on both sites will still be less time consuming and less costly than preparing individual application packages for each department you're applying to.) For those departments using neither service, you don't have to use Interfolio's dossier service to apply to their positions. You can send your application materials by some other method, rather than paying Interfolio to send it. The APA's agreement with Interfolio isn't actually forcing anyone to pay Interfolio to send dossiers to departments that want hard copies. But I think the cost of making paper copies of application materials and then sending them by post is probably close to Interfolio's fee. As Sally Haslanger said, it's the departments who aren't getting on board with either service who are making you pay.

    Reply

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