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Search committees moving to flyouts without notifying non-selected candidates?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks

It's now happened to me multiple times that I have a first round interview, the school moves on to fly outs, and I hear nothing about it. (I know there is a related, but distinct, issue of a school sending out rejections to some, interview invites to others, and nothing to a third group.)

If you've already interviewed me, I think I deserve your consideration! Also, if you've already interviewed me, it can't be the case that it would be *such* a burden to notify me that you've moved on with other candidates. Lastly, you wouldn't have to tell me that I have no chance to get the job; you could just do me the favor of telling me that you've invited others for a campus visit.

Am I missing something? Is it too much to think that those who have taken the time to interview with schools deserve some sort of timely notice, as opposed to months of silence and inferences?

Fair questions, and I remember how frustrating this was as a job candidate. A couple of readers submitted responses. One writes:

I think it is not an unreasonable expectation to have, but also one thats unlikely to be regularly met. I have had similar experiences and my sense is that programs do not want to close a door unnecessarily (by informing folks they're flying other candidates out) and so they just do not say anything rather than make it harder in the event they want to return to you as a candidate after all (if such dreams exist). That being said, there are places I applied to in the last two cycles (no interview) which never sent a PFO or boiler plate notice when the season was over. I get that admin stuff is tough with so many applicants and institutional requirements, and that often that falls to the college and not the department, but it kind of sucks to spend time customizing job docs and then never be told they've filled the post.

And another:

I am sorry for your experience, and glad that you vented it out. Maybe it's unhelpful, but: while I believe departments can do better, I also understand *why* they are doing that (e.g., logistic complexity, timeline problems, unwillingness for bearing bad news, overwhelmed by work etc). In the short term, I would recommend just getting used to taking silence as a No, or rather, paying no attention until a Yes. This applies not only to the interview case, but also to fly-outs, and heck even after a verbal offer (there could be weeks before a formal approval). It's a long uphill battle. Also, everyone feels different. For some people, it is mentally easier to have no news than bad news. I was one of these (and got quite annoyed by how one department phrased their rejection).

It would be great to hear from other readers, both job-candidates and search committee members. Should search committees do better, or are there good reasons for this kind of practice? Are search committees required at some places not to notify people they are out of the running until the search is complete?

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22 responses to “Search committees moving to flyouts without notifying non-selected candidates?”

  1. Communicate, please

    The only requirement I’ve run into involves sending out large boiler plate rejections to candidates not interviewed, saying “you are out of the running” or something to that effect.
    I cannot imagine a scenario in which individual search committee members are barred from writing to interviewees to inform them that they are moving forward with other candidates.
    I’ve been informed in the past when I was not selected (after a fly-out). The chair of the search committee wrote a short email indicating that they were moving forward with another candidate, and then spoke to me on the phone about the process. He let me know that I was a close second and that if things did not work out with the other candidate, they would be contacting me.
    I appreciated the honesty and respect and probably would have accepted the job if it had been offered later. Another time I was not flown out after being long-listed. They (again) let me know what was going on as it was happening, and later on flew me out and hired me. A short note to candidates: “Thank you for the opportunity to interview you. We are now moving forward with other candidates for flyouts, but there’s always a chance we will return to the long-list” etc. is really the least the search committee can do. It’s not closing a door, but rather keeping it open with honesty and professionalism.

    Reply
  2. Any other industry

    I am on the market now, but as someone who has worked in the non-academic world (in HR no less), it is astounding to me how out of step academic hiring practices are with the mainstream practices of practically every other industry.
    In a non-academic job, it would be considered remarkably unprofessional to carry out a first-round interview and then effectively cut off communication with that candidate. Candidates who get these interviews have usually cleared a high bar, being selected from among hundreds of other applicants. It is, at the very least, extremely uncourteous to reject them without a word. Candidates can easily be informed that they are not under active consideration.
    The reasons committees might give for not doing so (e.g. to avoid bearing bad news, overwork, possibility of returning to the candidate if fly-outs don’t go well, etc.) are not good reasons. If you are evaluating candidates, being the bearer of bad news is part of your job. The pool of first-round interviews has already been limited so much that the logistics and workload of sending emails is not substantial.
    Sorry for the long post, but sometimes it just strikes me as silly how much of a bubble academia is when it comes to what is/isn’t considered normal in administrative and HR practices.

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  3. QED

    OP here:
    Thank you, @Any other industry. Unsurprisingly, I also worked for a long time in the non-academic world. Perhaps this is why I have basic expectations to be treated with consideration by jobs to which I apply (and for which I am selected for interviews!).

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  4. Random R1 Prof

    “I cannot imagine a scenario in which individual search committee members are barred from writing to interviewees to inform them that they are moving forward with other candidates.”
    I don’t have to imagine it; I can just recall it. As chair of a faculty search committee last year I was forbidden to do exactly that — such silence is standard practice in our large state university (and, as I understand it, in many other places, both public and private). It’s a stupid practice, and clearly inhumane, but university HR insists on it.

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  5. Bill Vanderburgh

    Random R1 Prof is right: HR strictly limits who can communicate with candidates and under what circumstances. In our case the search chair can reach out to candidates, but not any other committee or department members. We were not forbidden from telling the candidates we had zoomed with that they were not on the first list of campus visits, but there were LOTS of factors that delayed being able to do so. E.g., when we put forward the list of candidates to bring to campus, the list had to be vetted by the Dean and the DEI folks in the Provost’s office, then the offers and acceptances of visits have to be completed, etc. That can take a few weeks. Then the timeline is often short to arrange campus visits, and those urgent tasks can displace the “mere courtesies.” Add to that the added pressures of end of semester grading, or ramping up for a new semester, and it is unfortunately easy for these sorts of notices to get pushed down the to-do list.
    There’s also an issue with the search management software, which enables auto-emails to the rejected candidates but doesn’t have an option for those who are still “live” after initial interviews but not invited to the first round of campus interviews. If we want to leave those folks in the pool for later consideration if things don’t work out with the top three, we have to leave them in a kind of limbo status in the system. As search chair I tried to do the civil thing and send emails from outside the system to those who were still technically under consideration even though they were not selected for campus interviews (in the way that Communicate, please, suggests). But note the factors above.

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  6. no more ghosts

    I also experienced this regularly when I was on the job market, and I agree that this practice is rude and inhumane. For me, not receiving any follow-up from a department where I interviewed felt significantly worse than those cases where a search committee chair reached out and let me know they were going in a different direction. In those cases where I was ghosted, it made me feel like I had performed so badly on the interview that the committee did not even think I was worth a follow-up. I’d much rather get the bad news directly.
    If HR bans committees from communicating updates to their interviewees, as Random R1 Prof suggests above, perhaps the best practice would be to flag this in the job ad. “We expect to perform first-round interviews in early November. Please note that our HR policies bar us from contacting candidates outside of official interview invitations; we ask for your patience during this time.”

    Reply
  7. Michel

    I have only ever had two TT job interviews. I never heard back from either one–either to say that they had moved on, or even to say that they’d hired someone.
    In both cases, I was told when to expect to hear back from them one way or another. That I never did simply made it ruder.
    It’s a very small grudge, but I do hold it against those departments.

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  8. What goes around comes around

    I very much hold it against departments when they don’t let you know one way or the other. For one thing, I wouldn’t underestimate how much simple courtesy means to most people applying for jobs. I think a lot of people who have TT jobs have forgotten what it’s like to be at the bottom of the academic caste system. Just being treated like a human being of equal value (or really any value) by those further up the pecking order means so much, and not being treated that way is just awful. And a lot of times important life decisions hang on getting information like this. Some time back my partner was offered a job that required either a very long commute or a move. While they were still in the middle stages of their interviews, I applied for a job near their new workplace and made it to the final round of the process. I got the same nonsense about we’ll let you know very soon and then crickets. All while we’re waiting to hear so we can decide whether they can even take the job and how much money it would have to be make it worth it and how we’ll deal with things if they do take the job and I don’t get hired at the new place. Eventually I emailed the department secretary explaining the situation and pleading to know something and she was decent enough to tell me I didn’t get the job. But that’s also [nonsense]. I’m sure she’s getting paid a lot less than the jerks who interviewed me and yet she gets stuck relaying the bad news because they are too cowardly and lazy to write a slightly awkward email. I’ll also add that this whole thing is just incredibly corrosive to any sort of fellow feeling in academia. I remember reading a few years ago that a department that had given me the post interview silent treatment (including ignoring a few emails I sent)back before I landed a permanent position was being threatened with the axe from admin and the very person who made the promise to let me know soon that they never kept was quoted in the piece pleading for other philosophers to write, call, and take other various actions. And it probably doesn’t say great things about me but my response reading this was, well if you can’t be bothered to keep a very simple promise to me when doing so would have spared me a lot of stress and helped me plan my life I don’t think you merit me using one second of my time to try to help you.

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  9. Old Prof

    I was going to sit this one out, given that I have a tenured position and have worked in two departments that routinely moved to flyouts without notifying all first-round candidates. I also recognize that the very existence of the job market reporting thread on this blog shows how most visitors seem to prize having the sort of information that the OP desires. But some of the posts above seem to call for a response. I’ll preface this by saying that I understand, in a visceral manner, how hard it is to be in a precarious employment situation, and I feel in my bones the ways in which professional philosophy can be unfair. Having said that, some of the comments above (as well as the original question), strike me as deeply misguided and troubling.
    My current and previous job are quite different from one another (one a small college, the other a large university), but both highly regulate the TT hiring process. In both cases, hiring departments are instructed to wait until a contract is signed before informing other candidates of their status. While not universal, I think this is a fairly common practice. Given that, this talk of holding grudges against particular departments and people for not providing you information they are specifically instructed by their employer not to give strikes me as rather problematic.
    But I’d like to take this a step further and challenge the idea that the silence in question is wronging people. Sure, many people (including myself!) hate sitting with uncertainty. But it doesn’t follow that being put in a position of uncertainty is to be wronged. In this context, no one is owed certainty, and hiring departments aren’t doing this at you.
    What Goes Around Comes Around suggests that they were wronged because this silence interfered with their spouse’s decision regarding whether or not to take another job. But why think that the world, or a hiring department, owes you a deliberation process untainted by uncertainty?
    Moreover, for those who cannot tolerate uncertainty, there is a way to rationally resolve these matters in one’s own mind: if you haven’t heard back regarding a first round interview in, say, two or three weeks (barring holidays and winter breaks), you are likely out of the running and can move forward with your life with that “certainty.”
    Many of the comments above seem to reveal a disturbing level of entitlement. And, in my experience, this attitude of entitlement has a tendency to leak out in small and big ways that are off putting; this type of hostile entitlement may be hurting people’s chances on the market. I would encourage those who start to feel this way to take a step back and try to overcome these entitled bitter feelings because, in most cases, they are inaccurate and self-destructive.

    Reply
  10. Communicate, please

    I’m not sure Old Prof warrants a response … Saying “please treat people with respect and communicate with them” is not entitlement.
    Also, I’ve been told not to communicate (with some nebulous “upper administration” named as the source of these instructions) and communicated anyway. It’s never come back to me, but if it did, I would just shrug and say “oops, sorry” … they aren’t going to fire me over it.
    And yes, job candidates are “owed” basic consideration and respect and a process without unnecessary uncertainty. Sheesh.

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  11. Don’t Deceive

    To be clear, I think that the “wrong” here is not the silence alone but the silence paired with the earlier “we’ll get back to you in a week.”
    Perhaps, at a bare minimum, NO department should do both of these! Maybe we can all agree that a department should not tell candidates that they will let candidates know their status “in a week” if there is some chance that they will not let them know for months (or ever). Instead, as suggested by @no more ghosts, the department should simply tell candidates that they will not be notified if they don’t get a fly out, but only when final decisions are made (if that).
    I cannot insist on this enough: honesty makes a HUGE difference! If committees told me that I should not be expecting news, then I would not expect news. No matter how Old of a Prof you are, you gotta accept that you shouldn’t actively mislead candidates about the selection process.

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  12. Assc prof

    I agree with Communicate, please. I understand there are often HR prohibitions against contacting candidates. But a) there are likely in many cases ways around this (such as by contacting all candidates to tell them that initial on-campus invites have gone out, etc.) and b) it seems very unlikely that violations of those prohibitions will be both caught and punished. After all, there’s a prohibition against jaywalking too.

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  13. Old Prof

    @ Don’t Deceive. Sure, I agree with that! Search Committees shouldn’t tell a candidate that they will get back to them in a week and then ghost. But I think sometimes candidates hear, “we’ll be making a decision in a week” as “we’ll get back to you, specific candidate, in a week.”

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  14. What goes around comes around

    It’s incredibly shabby when you don’t let someone know even if you haven’t promised to do so. As Vanderburgh makes clear HR puts restrictions on communications but they don’t ban it. If hiring committees care they can I think work around it. The fact they don’t try shows that they don’t. Personally I do think this wrongs people. Uncertainty is an incredibly hard thing to deal with. There’s at least some evidence that it’s worse than getting bad news from a purely psychological perspective (See here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/03/29/study-worrying-you-might-get-hurt-is-worse-than-knowing-you-will/). More importantly it hinders you from planning and taking control of your situation. I do think all of that wrongs someone, though I’ll admit that here there’s room for disagreement.Let me just ask though: Do you want to be friends with someone who ghosts dates? I’d wager not and that’s more minor thing than the course of someone’s entire career.
    It’s worth noting again that in every field outside of academia they do let applicants know one way or the other in a timely fashion. One reason they do is that if they don’t people resent and your institution gets a bad name.
    Be that as it may, it clearly wrongs someone when those involved with hiring make promises that you don’t keep. There’s simply no room for debate on that.
    I also hate the term “entitlement.” It seems like a bit of name calling that is suppose to shut the other person up. But let’s suppose it has an actual meaning. I work very hard at my job, which I feel fortunate to have. I treat my students and colleagues with respect. I don’t think anywhere I apply owes me a job. In fact I think I’m incredibly lucky to have the one I have and I often feel guilty about the fact that a lot of other deserving people can’t find decent permanent jobs. However, I do expect to be treated with minimal human decency by other people whoever they may be. And when I’m not I tend to call the offending party out on it. I might not be nice (and how I loathe niceness as an ideal) but I don’t see any sensible definition of the term where I can be classed as “entitled.”

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  15. Michel

    I mentioned my small grudges first, so let me be clear: there are two particular unkindnesses that have left me with misgivings about these two departments.
    1.) Being given a timeline that was not respected (i.e. being told I’d hear from them soon either way, then never hearing from them), and
    2.) Never even being told that the position had been filled. As far as I know, I’m still in the running many years later.
    I don’t mind applying into a void, but if you tell me it won’t be a void, then it had better not be a void. As for the second, this seems like a pretty minimal courtesy to extend once the search has concluded to people you interviewed. I’ve yet to see anyone claim that HR prohibits this. Instead, I suspect it’s rather like refereeing: people set the task aside and then forget entirely. But that doesn’t make it any kinder.

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  16. Old Prof

    @ What Goes Around Comes Around:
    First off, while perhaps some institutions don’t ban the kind of communication you desire, mine explicitly does and the last institution I worked at also banned such communication. Before departmental hiring meetings, hiring chairs have a meeting with administrators, including a lawyer, to review our particular search policies. While I don’t know exactly how serious the sanctions might be, the policy is made very, very clear.
    By “entitled” I mean treating something as one’s right that isn’t, in fact, one’s right. I don’t think job seekers have a right to the kind of communication you are seeking.
    I agree with you that everyone should respect each other, but we differ in our ideas about what respect requires. You seem to believe that in virtue of setting up a first-round interview with a candidate, members of the hiring committee owe it to all interviewees to provide the kind of communication you are seeking, even if that means violating their institution’s search policies and dealing with potential sanctions for doing so. Candidates, on your view, have a right to demand this from hiring committees and complain and hold grudges if they don’t do this. My position is that candidates have no such right. While some committee members may provide this kind of communication (and perhaps doing so may be kind and generous), this is not behavior that can reasonably be demanded from all search members because job seekers don’t have a right to it.

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  17. Sunlight

    I think people should make it public when things like this happen to them. It lets others know what kind of institution they’re dealing with.
    If the institution thinks it’s a fine way to behave, then they shouldn’t mind it being publicly known that they do. At any rate they have no right to demand privacy in this regard.

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  18. November, September, whatever

    Michel
    I do recall, one November day, when I was a PhD student, standing in the mailroom with a post-doc who opened a letter of rejection for a job that was supposed to start in September …

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  19. What goes around comes around

    @ OldProf, You seem to have a pretty odd conception of rights. I don’t think that I have a right to communication. That would be silly. But it’s even sillier to think that violating someone’s rights is a necessary condition for wronging them in a way that merits resentment. I’m very much agnostic whether there’s any sort of right to rescue. Nonetheless it’s quite clear to me that anyone who could easily and safely save another person but chooses to watch them die or suffer great harm has wronged them. Or to take another example, I don’t think my dad has a right to a father’s day gift or call. But on the other hand I think he’d have every reason to be angry and hurt if I just completely ignored him on father’s day. I don’t think anyone has a right to an awkward call or conversation after dating someone for a couple months. And yet I think the person who’s go to way of breaking up is ghosting has done something that very much merits resentment from the people they treat like that. I don’t think anyone has a right to be told “good morning” and yet if I greeted the chirpy hello from the receptionist at my kids’ daycare every morning with a glare and stony silence I think she have every right to dislike me and call me an [jerk] behind my back.
    I don’t think that candidates are owed communication about their application status if HR bans it (though I’m incredibly dubious that they outright ban it rather than simply restrict it in some ways in most cases). I do think they’re owed honesty so interviewers shouldn’t lie to them and say they will be contacted shortly with news one way or the other when they won’t be. And if HR does ban communication then applicants should be told this in the interview. What’s so hard about “We plan to make a decision by… But unfortunately HR bans all post interview communication so…” If people say that then applicants will draw their own conclusions.
    @Sunlight, I really wish we could, but the sorry truth is that academia is such a buyers market that interview committees know they can treat applicants horribly and never suffer any consequences and so they do. I hate to admit it but on more than one occasion I applied for a job in a department that had ghosted me in another round of hiring. The sad fact of the matter is that anyone who engaged in this sort of quite justified name and shame you suggest would get classed as “unprofessional” or yes “entitled” and pay a price for it while the people they called out wouldn’t. I suspect that the difference in the relative power of applicants versus the people doing the hiring in academia and outside of it is why in the real world businesses and other institutions do make some effort to treat applicants decently. They know there’s a good chance they will pay costs if they don’t. They’ll get a bad rap and have trouble hiring in the future or pay a price when they have to deal with the people they’ve mistreated when those people have or get jobs at other places they do business with. In academia though the people know that they can act in a way that any sane person would class as unprofessional and grossly entitled when dealing with job applicants and almost certainly never pay a price for it. Unfortunately we do have to put up with it. What we don’t have to do is let anyone convince us that we’re being unreasonable when we resent it. Most people starting out in academia have to eat a lot of garbage, but what they don’t have to do is let anyone convince them they should love the taste of it.

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  20. Sunlight

    @What goes around
    I was thinking this could be done anonymously. Sometimes that’s not really possible and so may be imprudent. And I agree it probably won’t typically be a good enough reason not to apply. But getting the information out there when possible can help others know what to expect (and so not be too surprised when ghosted) and might ultimately be helpful for putting some pressure on the HR/admin types who departments usually blame for this behavior.

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  21. Michel

    It’s perhaps worth noting/adding that ghosting is a huge problem across the board. Editor’s, for example, are constantly ghosted by the potential referees they contact. I know some people who have been ghosted by their supervisors, especially when asking for letters of recommendation–not because the supervisor wants to deny them a letter, but because the request comes at an inconvenient time (and rather than declining or bucking up, they just don’t reply–or wait until very close to the deadline to reply). And I’ve sent any number of emails into the void myself.
    I understand how this sort of thing happens. It’s hard to keep on track of our email, for example. And sometimes you just forget. But it’s a widespread pattern, and it’s not good for the profession.

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  22. stay friends

    I agree that it is awful to hear nothing after being promised to come back to, which I have experienced a few times. But I deeply agree with Michel that ghosting is common across the board. I would say that perhaps the majority of my emails to fellow philosophers are ghosted, minus those that are directly related to their duties. So I have got used to accepting silence (as I commented in response to OP). I do not feel any resentment towards specific persons who ghosted. I do feel embarrassed by our field. Somehow scientists are much, much better in replying to emails.

    Reply

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