I had a bit of a strange experience as a search committee member I'd like to share. As I will explain, I'm not entirely sure what to make of it–but the most plausible explanation seems to me to be a potentially dangerous assumption by job-candidates.
In brief, the experience was this. I served on a search committee for a TT job on back-to-back years, both of which were in the same AOS. We hired someone the first year, who then left to return to their previous job (for good personal/professional reasons). We then hired a different person the next year who is still with us and doing great. Here, though, was the strange thing. There weren't many jobs in the AOS in either year (I went back and counted a paltry 4 jobs in the AOS the first year, and 6 in the second year). As such, it seems highly probable that most of the people who applied for our position the first year went on the market again the second year. That's many dozens of people. The surprising thing, though, was that almost none of the people who applied the first time around seemed to apply again the second year. It was really striking. I had expected to see some familiar names pop up again (and was hoping some of them would), and yet…there were so very few repeat applicants.
Why? Sure, some people may leave the profession after a failed job search, and maybe our job isn't for everyone given that it is a teaching job (though we are in a great location and our teaching load isn't that heavy). But the only thing I can think is that many people must not have reapplied because they figured that applying again would be a waste of time–as in, "They didn't want to interview me the first time around. Why waste my time applying there again?" To be frank, I have no idea whether this is the right explanation. It would be great to hear from job candidates: do you avoid applying again for jobs you weren't interviewed for the previous year?
In any case, if this is what is going on, I have to say I think it is very much a mistake. To be sure, some candidates simply aren't competitive for the job–either because they don't have the right AOS, or enough relevant teaching experience, and so on. However, in many other cases, who the department chooses to interview is a very close call. If a department interviews 6 people, you may well have been the seventh or eighth person on the list. Moreover, you may have only missed out on the interview because there were some really good candidates that year that ranked above you. Finally, I've even seen search committee members have "buyer's remorse", wishing they had interviewed someone else (particularly if, as sometimes happens, some of the people interviewed perform very poorly). In any case, I would really caution applicants against assuming that just because a department didn't want to interview them one year, the result will be the same the next year. Apply again: you never know what might happen!
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