Just after I was invited to a campus interview earlier this year, I asked the chair to share the names of the search-committee members — a standard request that placement counselors often recommend a candidate make. I was surprised to receive the following response: “We will introduce the committee during the interview.”
What, I wondered, was private about the names of people I would soon meet? For that matter, what is private about much of the information that is often withheld from applicants throughout the hiring process?
When I visited the campus of this unnamed committee, the members were kind and accommodating. I became convinced that they weren’t trying to be secretive, but other conditions (like busyness) affected their response. Which brings me to my point: Many well-meaning committees default to playing it close to the vest when it comes to the job-search process, seemingly unaware that they might alienate candidates. The tendency toward nondisclosure, moreover, can make the process more cumbersome and less pleasant for all involved.
In a recent article on Vitae, Karen Kelsly suggested that even applicants far along into a search process are kept in the dark. And she advised that they should not “be excessively litigious in seeking out details” for tenure qualifications for a position because they’ll “look neurotic” and hurt their candidacy.
Kelsky, author of the blog The Professor Is In, runs an academic consulting business based entirely on offering candidates information that many institutions fail to provide. Academics as a group, it seems, can be rather withholding. In the circumstance she describes, departments could inform candidates by simply distributing detailed tenure guidelines during the campus-interview stage. After all, departments want to tenure strong faculty members, so giving candidates a clear picture of that process early on would help institutional goals.
Yet candidates often lack key information not just about tenure guidelines but about search committees, teaching loads, and salaries. This information usually cannot be located through careful web research. Moreover, our inquiries are sometimes met with such resistance that it can scare candidates away from asking at all. We are making some of the most important choices of our academic careers. Departments are investing substantial time and money into a hiring process. The chances of placing the right person in the right job are challenging enough without going into the experience with false impressions and minimal information.
Even before the interview stage, the hiring process begins without key pieces of information. On the Modern Language Association’s Job Information List, the required teaching load and potential salary are usually — not just often, but usually — missing pieces of information. Those are perhaps the two most important aspects of a job, and they convey other significant information as well: the expectations for research, the grant possibilities for the department, the university’s investment in the program.
It’s true that a specific salary for a position may not be decided upon until later in the process, but the department could still provide information about the predictable or even mandated range. I’ve known several colleagues who turned down job offers because of money alone. Departments probably aren’t pleased to go through a lengthy process only to be rejected by their first choice. In this situation, a more explicit job announcement with a salary range could cut down on applicants who would avoid certain conditions from the beginning. If disclosing salary proves too difficult an administrative hurdle to overcome, then, at a minimum, departments should prominently display the expectations for teaching that go with the position. In the saturated humanities job market, applicants themselves might then gain more agency in culling the application piles.
Knowing more about the job and about the people doing the hiring could also help candidates envision themselves in a department and adapt their discussion accordingly. A simple list of committee members’ names, for instance, distributed when a candidate is invited for a first-round interview, could supply a large amount of information to help a candidate craft a message: Am I talking to a general audience or one with specialists in my research area? Will a scholar whom I critique or defend be in the room? How might I make my research areas overlap usefully with the scholarly interests of the interviewers? When I am crafting questions for the committee, will I be asking people qualified to answer them?
True, as a candidate, I can prepare myself for various situations, and I should be able to speak about my work to people who know less about it than I do. That’s the reality of academic specialization. But those general truisms don’t undercut the importance of crafting a message for a specific audience, the most basic principle of communication.
Knowing more information would also put candidates at ease in a situation where, oddly, you talk to strangers who already know a significant amount about you. The interviewing department would be better served by speaking with candidates prepared to talk specifics. It could better see how candidates fit themselves within this particular institution and for this particular job.
The “secrets” of the job market I have just described don’t even break the surface. I addressed others in a 2013 column for The Chronicle with Rebecca L. Harris (“Modest Requests From a Pair of Job Seekers”). For example, candidates are kept in the dark long after search committees have moved on. In our column, Harris and I called for departments to “kindly reply” and not leave applicants wondering too long at any point of the search. The information vacuum means many rely on the Academic Jobs Wiki as a practical but imperfect way for candidates to keep each other informed — a responsibility that should rest on departments.
We as candidates invest a tremendous amount of intellectual and emotional energy into prospective jobs. As departments end this year’s searches and look toward a new hiring season in 2015-16, I would hope they will consider disclosing more specifics about job openings.
Savvy candidates should want information, and departments should want to provide it — if not because disclosure is more ethical then at least because it would prove more practical for everyone.