(Comments open now!)
In our November "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes:
I have a question related to applying for jobs this year. It's my first time on the market. I've read a lot of articles and blog posts about the unspoken rules of academic searches and their timelines, one of them being: you often don't get informed about having been rejected until much, much later. I find myself wondering: How much time, on average, does it take the search committee to come up with a list of first-round interviewees after the job posting deadline? I'm asking about TT jobs especially. In other words, when can I reasonably assume that I'm no longer in the running? I've read here and there that it's about 2-6 weeks, but that guess wasn't specific to our field. (And could this timeline be altered during the pandemic?)
One search committee member submitted the following response:
This is in response to job-seeker. 2-6 weeks strikes me as quite fast. I'm on a search committee this year, and we're not intending to contact shortlisted applicants until 7-8 weeks after the deadline. It takes a long time to read applications! Perhaps it makes a difference that we'll go straight to (zoom) talks, rather than doing first-round (zoom) interviews.
I think these two comments are a bit telling. On the one hand, on the search committees that I've served on, we've tried to move fast, meeting just a week or two after the application deadline. However, as the above search committee member notes, they move quite a bit more slowly: 7-8 weeks is close to two months after the application deadline. When I was a job-candidate, I got a first-round interview for a job over two months after the deadline. So, sadly, I think the answer to the OP is: you never really know. Search committees can make decisions quickly, or they can take their time. The best thing to do in order to know whether interview decisions have been made, I think, is for candidates who have received them to report them on our job-market reporting thread (which has been oddly quiet so far this season).
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