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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

Reasons you didn’t get the job that have nothing to do with you or the quality of your application

Brian Leiter

Apt remarks by philosopher Paul Schofield (Bates) on Twitter; a couple of highlights:

The ad is written with a specific candidate in mind, who the department intends to hire. That candidate is not you.

The department thinks you're too much like, or not enough like, the other members of the department (somehow, both of these are reasons for throwing out a candidate and you never know which it is when you send an application off).

There's another candidate on the market exactly like you and departments are picking between you and that person, perhaps arbitrarily or perhaps on the basis of some leg up that that person has. You are otherwise perfect, but this person's existence ruins your year/career.

Everyone loves you except one member of the committee, and as unfair as maybe that person is being, it's easier to find a candidate that everyone likes than it is to fight with one's colleague. Nothing you could have done would have changed this asshole's mind.

The committee illegally discriminates against you.

A committee member totally misreads your application and eliminates you. No one protests because they all want to go to lunch. You receive the rejection and assume it's because Prof. X disagreed with the footnote on p. 27 of your writing sample.

A member of the committee has a preferred candidate and it's not you. You are serious competition, though. So the committee member tries to take you out early. Others see what's going on, but don't want to fight with this asshole and, again, want to go to lunch.

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8 responses to “Reasons you didn’t get the job that have nothing to do with you or the quality of your application”

  1. Mike

    To these I would add:

    The hiring committee can't distinguish good philosophy from bad. (Not an issue at the better departments, but those are the ones where your chances are slimmest for other, legitimate reasons.)

    The job is advertised as open AOS, but the department has undisclosed needs in areas that aren't yours.

    The hiring committee puts a lot of weight on pedigree, of which you have less than the competition.

    The hiring department thinks you'll get better offers elsewhere, and can't afford to waste a flyout on a lost cause.

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  2. DJL

    Well, I would add one that many people have assured me is commonplace in the UK: your PhD (and BA/MA) is not from the right place (ie, it is not from a top university; or worse, it is not from an English-speaking country).

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  3. Publishing Veteran

    I think in most US universities there is an an added dimension of cruelty and inauthenticity to the hiring charade. HR departments (peopled solely by the most humane and resourceful of professionals, as we all know), have stipulated that all job openings be posted publicly. This applies even — or, rather, especially — to positions for which it has already been decided that the successful candidate is an internal known quantity. In order to protect the university from charges of less than stellar commitment to DEI principles, positions are posted, a minimum of external applications are reviewed, and a much smaller number of actual interviewees have the their time wasted and their hopes raised so that the proper boxes can be ticked. Even publicly traded for-profit entities handle this kind of position-filling more ethically.

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  4. Karl Young

    Though I was in physics, I assume the general hiring system was similar. And I can say, somewhat embarrassingly, that I’ve experienced both sides of that coin. I applied for positions where the ads looked they were cribbed right from CV and was told in no uncertain terms to not even bother checking on the final decision. On the other hand, in a case where they wanted to hire me and did write the ad right from CV, some of the applicants were frighteningly good (far better than me I thought), and I felt bad that they didn’t even get a reply re. their application. As a retired geezer it’s pretty safe to complain about the inequities of that system but it’s hard to see what could be done to make it more transparent.

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  5. V. Alan White

    As long as a committee at least goes through the motions of fair hiring, I'm one anecdatum bit WRT the in-house hire. I and another candidate were flown in together–we met accidentally on the regional connection as we flew in for what turned out to be a 3 person same-day interview. (Yes, and we were not told this was the format; this was back in the 80s: we even had lunch together with committee members!) I only discovered years later that the third person was in-house, after receiving tenure, and that he was furious for being unexpectedly beat out by an outsider. So–just give it your best whatever the opportunity.

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  6. Karl Young

    Sorry about the grammar on that; thought I checked it, but…

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  7. Cora Diamond

    The Principal of one of the Scottish universities was traveling by train to the University. Interviews for a lectureship in Philosophy were to be held the next day, with the Principal as a member of the Committee. On the train, in the compartment with the Principal, was a young English philosopher who did not then have a position. The young philosopher and the Principal struck up a conversation. The Principal liked the young English philosopher and decided to give him the position. And he went ahead with interviews the following day, despite having decided that none of the finalists would get the position and that he would give it to the Englishman who was not even an applicant. ….Things are at least somewhat better now.

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  8. Allen Hazen

    The covert preference for one candidate does happen. Some years back, at a conference, I was chatting with the head of a (good) philosophy department — a person I like and respect as a philosopher — and he boasted about having written a job advertisement that his preferred candidate was the only person on earth who could meet.
    —
    Back a few decades… The head of a department that didn't hire me explained (at a conference reception, after interviewing me the day before, "You're too smart, and you'd make your colleagues uncomfortable." And (this is of course hearsay, and not admissible as evidence!) I was told that someone in the department where an unsuccessful candidate was a PhD candidate was told, by a member of the department to which the candidate had applied "Your candidate is just as good as the one we hired, but the one we hired is a woman and a member of a racial minority."

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