There’s an interesting thread right now in The Chronicle’s Forums on the issue of asking about rejection when you’re a finalist for a job you end up not getting. This is a painful topic and one that often gets rehashed here and elsewhere—I think because the job search process is so intense, difficult, and, once one reaches the finalist stage, inevitably personal.
I don’t want to rehash any specific points from that thread, but I do want to add some perspective from the hiring side of the table. In my years dealing with searches, there have been many times I have wanted to provide unsuccessful candidates with feedback, though I virtually never have felt enabled to do so. As chair, dean, and vice president for academic affairs, I have truly liked many of the candidates we were not able to offer jobs. In some instances, the reasons we didn’t extend an offer were small things from which the candidate is not likely to learn much. Many times, the candidate in question has been excellent, but someone else just turned out to look better for the institution during the course of the search.
The most poignant instances where feedback would be valuable, though, are those where the candidate is clearly bright, well prepared, well meaning, and potentially a tremendous contributor, but where one disastrous answer or similar incident derails the candidacy. These kinds of situations cry out for feedback because they are generally preventable, can be a truly educational moment for the candidate, and are not really personal.
A somewhat fictionalized anecdote may help explain what I mean. Say, for example, that a candidate for an English position has written a dissertation about the idea of homecomings in Western literature. The work is impressive, illuminating, and productively transhistorical. At an informal event, the departmental traditionalist approaches the candidate and wants to discuss how his ideas might be applied to The Odyssey, which is, somewhat troublingly, not mentioned in the dissertation. In the course of the discussion, it becomes clear that the candidate has not thought at all about Homer in the context of his work, and, in fact, is caught utterly flat-footed.
It can certainly be argued that such a moment should not be determinative in a search committee’s deliberations. At the same time, though, if you have two or three outstanding candidates to the campus, it is very often small moments like this one that end up being important to the fate of a candidacy. In this particular instance, at a small college in a small department, where wide-ranging teaching was expected and intellectual agility was one of the clear markers of potential success, it’s not terribly surprising that such a discussion ended up dooming the candidate.
The content of this incident may be particular to a specific institution. However, it’s also one from which a candidate can learn a valuable and important lesson, because it is, in fact, fairly typical of the casual conversations in an intellectually engaged small department. Thus, anyone desiring to deal with the candidate in a humane way is probably going to want to provide some feedback to help the candidate the next time around.
The crux of the problem, though, is that even after an intensive interview process, you don’t really know how a candidate will respond to any proffered advice. In this instance, the candidate involved may have thought that the whole thing was offensive and stupid, or he may have taken the advice to heart, gone back and revisited The Odyssey, and even incorporated that new thinking into the next interview opportunity. But on the hiring side, you just don’t know what kind of response you’re going to get—up to and including being sued—and as a result, standard practice has evolved in the way it has.
I think it’s unfortunate. Everyone, I propose, would be better off with a more transparent and occasionally formative system. But the current situation is the result of accumulated practices and incidents over many years, and it would take a huge and concerted effort, including a tremendous reduction in suspicion on both sides of the table, to change it substantially.
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11 Responses to Asking About Rejection
daddyprof - June 4, 2010 at 8:22 pm
“Wide ranging teaching,” my Aunt Fanny. Seriously? Geez.
jruiz - June 5, 2010 at 8:54 am
It’s been my observatio, especially over the last decade or so, that PhDs are so overspecialized in their field, that I bet your hypothetical example had never even read The Odyssey.
batchro - June 7, 2010 at 8:47 am
You’ve identified the real challenge, which is “standard practice” becoming that way because no one is willing to undertake the “huge and concerted effort” to make a change. From either a corporate/organizational or higher education administration position, this seems like a cop out. Acknowledging that mysterious forces dictate the actions in these situations and leaving it at that isn’t enough. Additionally, I would have to have real proof that disgruntled candidates are/have sued over not getting hired to believe that is a valid rationale. You’ve certainly outlined the current state in hiring decisions and I applaud you for your honesty. It’s good for people to get the insider perspective. We should expect more, though, in the transaction that takes place between the candidate and organization. The current situtation is unethical.
profe1 - June 7, 2010 at 9:18 am
Sadly, folks are also concerned about potential backlash from the candidate, whether through a law suit (and our university lawyers are ever cautious) or conference conversations that might have a negative impact on the dept. or instituion who did not hire the candidate. Or perhaps the dept. vote was 6 to 5 for example and the candidate was a close second. So much cannot be revealed.After chairing a session at a national conference, I wrote a note to one of the participants. Still ABD, he had not written a paper that could be delivered in the allowable 20 minutes. As a result, he read his essay at breakneck speed. I wrote to him, politely and in an effort to assist him on his career path, and I do not think my effort was appreciated.
cleverclogs - June 7, 2010 at 9:30 am
While this is good to know and I thank Mr. Evans for sharing his insider knowledge, it seems all a particular candidate can take away from it is, “There may be a single, somewhat capricious exchange that loses you a job, that you will never know the specifics of, and that therefore you can’t change.” If the process is going to be that close and that mercurial, then what we have on our hands is something more like looking for work as an actor than, say, an accountant, and we might consider instituting an “agent” of some kind, perhaps an advisor at the candidate’s school, who could find out why the candidate didn’t get the job and filter the information to the candidate.
cwinton - June 7, 2010 at 10:28 am
I’ve sat on many search committees, the membership of which is as diverse as the candidates interviewed. I’ve seen candidates filtered out for all kinds of reasons, but the most common is that they don’t fit the position description as seen by the various parties on the committee. If you chair such a committe, you learn in a hurry that trying to communicate a committee’s viewpoint to a candidate will net you a pointless argument, because candidates typically are sure they are a good fit. As noted by profe1, discussing reasons for rejection in all likelihood is not going to be appreciated and could actually cause problems (including legal action these days – most institutions place rather stringent procedural limits on search committees precisely to preclude behavior that might lead to grounds for lawsuit). Consequently, the only prudent course is to be extremely sparing with feedback. Cleverclogs may have a good idea, but its hard to see how it could work given the wide variance in how the multiple academic cultures across the country approach position searches.
cordelia - June 7, 2010 at 10:34 am
Here, the main reason no feedback is given at ANY stage of the hiring process is fear of lawsuits. The campus Social Equity director, who is the main link to the university lawyers, comes down heavily on anything that might have the slightest whiff of discrimination–even discriminating against persons obviously unqualified for the position. Even after cuts have been made for personal interviews, we can’t tell anyone in the rest of the pack that their application is no longer being considered; we have to leave everyone hanging until a contract has been signed and a “sorry, another candidate was hired” letter can go out. The standard line is that “You never know how far down the list you may need to go, so everyone remains a viable candidate until the process has been concluded.” Of course, most candidates have a good idea of where they stand; but there are always a few poor souls who badger the search committee chair and can only be told that the search is ongoing. And any post-search questions are generally met with the bland statement that another candidate was “a better fit.”
tgroleau - June 7, 2010 at 2:09 pm
I agree that the lawsuit issue (#7) is probably a significant factor in the lack of feedback but I’ve been involved in searches where feedback would be pointless at best. Consider these possibilities:1) “Technically you have an appropriate graduate credential and your presentation was OK, but the school you attended just isn’t acceptable to our administration.” 2) “In your presentation you made a mistake in one of your calculations (or examples, or references, etc.). A senior member of the department who teaches in a totally different specialty spotted the error and used it to sabotage your candidacy.” In my career both of these situations have happened more than once. Would there really be any value in telling the candidate? Worse yet, how about telling them “We just didn’t like you very much.” When a search has a very large number of viable candidates, the final decision will often depend on minor factors. Sometimes unfair factors, sometimes seemingly random factors.
11161452 - June 8, 2010 at 12:23 am
“Many times, the candidate in question has been excellent, but someone else just turned out to look better for the institution during the course of the search.”*****Yes, it IS valuable information to be told that “it’s not you, it’s us.” If nothing was “wrong” about my interview, it would help to have that reassurance, lest I obsess about the tiny details of why I might not have gotten the gig. Also, responder #8 raised an interesting one about the admin just not finding the applicant’s schools acceptable; the candidate would have no way of knowing this unless the committee revealed it, and being told that would be an eye-opening reality check, I would think.
jovanevery - June 10, 2010 at 11:40 am
I am still in the dark about why the Human Resources office is not involved in the process for this kind of thing.Certainly, they are capable of giving feedback, and indeed trained to do so and trained to know what the legal implications might be. Similarly, there should be a job description against which the hiring committee was comparing candidates. And feedback can be given in relation to the criteria that they were looking for, even if the evidence used to evaluate those criteria and weigh them varies and comes down to rather subjective decisions.It IS helpful to candidates to know that they were excellent but there was more than one excellent candidate and another was chosen. I have been given that feedback myself; once I was told that I was so close to another candidate that it “practically came down to a coin toss”. I was disappointed that I didn’t have the job, but I didn’t worry about my interview performance, CV, or whatever, nor wonder if I was in the wrong game.Similarly, if there was an area of weakness, you can clearly state what that was. For the example given, “we are a small department that values intellectual agility and wide-ranging teaching. Other candidates had stronger evidence of those qualities than you did”. No need to point to some minor discussion in an informal part of the process as being decisive (and I hope it wasn’t, that it was supported by other evidence that this candidate was weak in that area).In my experience on hiring committees in the UK where a representative from HR is present to take notes and will give initial feedback to candidates that ask, this person often prompts the committee to articulate their reasoning as they are making the decision so that this feedback process is easier.
godot - June 17, 2010 at 11:38 am
As a job canidate I typically knew why I did not get the job, and it often had little to do with where I earned my degree or my specialization. That said, if a department does not want me why should I spend one more second thinking about them or the job? Move on, focus on the next opportunity and my research.