I was on an airplane home yesterday from vacation, and got to listening to some songs on iTunes that I hadn't listened to in a while–songs that took me back to my years on the academic job market. Long story short: I used to go on daily evening walks with my dog to listen to music and try to clear my head from the gauntlet that is the job market. And a gauntlet it is. Almost every year on the market was the same: fill out over a hundred online applications–applications that university human resource departments apparently like to make as time-consuming as possible; face a cruel waiting-game to see if I got any interviews; shell out well over a thousand dollars to attend a couple of interviews at the Eastern APA; prepare and practice like crazy for the Skype interviews; do well in some interviews, totally bomb others; get a fly-out or two, but no job-offers; etc. While I think I'm a fairly well-adjusted person, and finally got a job on my last year on the market, I will say that the near-continual stress had me losing sleep and, at a few points, at an emotional breaking-point. And I know I'm not alone: visits to other job-related blogs show, in stark terms, just how emotionally fraught the job-market is these days. There precious few academic jobs (fewer every year, it seems)
Which brings me, first, to a simple suggestion for search committees: try to remember what it is like to be a job-candidate, and treat candidates like flesh and blood human beings, not just "job candidates." Realize that, just perhaps, that job-candidate who looks awesome on paper but had a bad interview–that candidate whose research is excellent and well-written, and whose students rave about them–maybe just had a bad day. Realize that those 13 candidates you choose to Skype interview–when you have one or two of them in mind at the top of your list who you really want to hire–are people who are going to practice, and stress, for days or weeks for an interview for a job that they stand little chance of getting. Realize that that candidate you interviewed today might have had six other interviews the same week. When you have candidates to campus, be kind–be helpful. Raking them over the coals during their job-talk, or trying not to let on whether you like them, might seem like "just an interviewerly thing to do", as things necessary to "test them"–but are they really? Are they truly necessary to know whether the person is worth hiring?
Which brings me to a few questions: why must the academic job-market continue to be such a gauntlet? Maybe it made sense to have candidates jump through so many hoops a few decades ago, when academic jobs were aplenty and there was little established science on sound selection-methods. But now, given how terrible the market is–with more and more people on the market for years–and given known and emerging science on selection methods, what sound purposes do the various hurdles of the academic job-market serve? Aside from medicine (which is literally a matter of life and death), to the best of my knowledge few job-markets contain as many hurdles for candidates as academia. For many jobs, you drop off a resume or portfolio, interview in person, and you either get hired or you don't. Doesn't someone's publication list and writing sample tell you what you need to know about their research? What's the point of requiring candidates to summarize their research in person–in Skype and on-campus interviews–again and again, in highly contrived and stressful circumstances? (For my part, I've seen some of the most famous philosophers around give terrible talks. Our research capacities, at the end of the day, are displayed in what we publish!). Similarly, what's the point of a one-off teaching demo in an unfamiliar classroom with students a person has never met…when the person has years of students consistently raving about their performance (and they might simply submit a film to you of an actual course meeting they've taught, to convey their actual performance–much as professional football players are evaluated "on film")? What's the point of these hurdles when we know, empirically, from decades of research, that interviews are worse predictors of job-success than objective/algorithmic selection procedures, are more subject to biases on everything ranging from attractiveness, to weight, height, gender, race, speech style, personality traits, vocal tone, are unable to reliably distinguish honesty from deceptiveness in job-candidates, and privilege the appearance of mental "quickness" over actual intelligence and qualifications, than more objective measures of candidate quality?
What's the point indeed? Academia should not utilize cruel, empirically questionable selection methods. They should be based on sound science, and treat candidates less like cattle and more like human beings. Or so say I. What say you?
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