The Philosophers' Cocoon

In the comments section of our "Ask a search-committee member" thread, Anon writes, "Should candidates send follow of thank you notes after Skype interviews?" Ah, the perennial question! I'm curious to hear how other people who have served on search committees answer. But here are a few quick thoughts…

While committee members might take mental notes of who sends thank-you notes and who doesn't, I sincerely doubt that sending or not sending a thank-you note will make any difference in a committee's deliberations. If the committee wants to invite you to campus, a lack of a thank-you note probably isn't going to change their mind; and conversely, if they don't want to invite you to campus, sending a note isn't going to change their minds. Still, it's a kind thing to do, so why not?

What is much more important than thank-you notes, at least in my experience, is a candidate's general behavior in communication. For example, if a search committee member sends you an email about something–say, about an on-campus–but you don't email back for several days, that might look bad. Indeed, I've known people who are real sticklers about these things: people who expect prompt email responses. Personally, I work with a 24-hour rule. If someone takes 24 hours to get back to me, that's fine–but more than that and I start to wonder. I've also known people who expect responses the same day. Personally, I think that time-sensitive issues aside, that is unreasonable. But, as a job-candidate, you can't expect everyone to be reasonable. Consequently, if you get an email from someone on a committee, I would really advise against being languid about replying. Get back as soon as you can.

Finally, although anon didn't raise the question, there is the common question of what to do if you totally bomb a Skype interview. I recall bombing an interview many years, and someone advising me to email the committee to indicate in some way that the interview was not reflective of my normal performance. I don't know how common this advice is, but I've known job-candidates who seemed to do something like it. Unfortunately, my sense is that there is probably little to no value in trying to do this. If your file is really good but you totally bomb an interview, chances are the committee has already speculated that it may have been an "off-day" for you. Alas, my general sense is that although everyone knows this–that everyone can have an off-day–committees still tend to weigh bad performances very heavily. It can simply be hard to vote to invite someone to campus who tanked the interview–particularly when there are other, otherwise equally-impressive candidates who fared much better. As readers may know, this is one of many reasons I am against screening interviews. Our empirical evidence on the whole strongly suggests that interviews are terrible predictors of job-performance, introducing all kinds of irrelevant noise into the hiring process (including a litany of job-irrelevant biases)–noise that more objective measures of performance better filter out. However, as long as committees do use interviews, the empirical literature also tells us that it is very difficult to overcome a bad interviews. Fwiw

But these are just my thoughts. What are the thoughts of others who have served on search committees?