As a department chair opened an envelope with a faculty application inside, she was surprised to see several sticks of cinnamon chewing gum drop onto her desk. The application letter had a hand-written note at the bottom that said, “Please let the search committee have this gum as they review my application; I hope they will find it refreshing.”
The chair assumed that the applicant thought that the committee would view him as the “refreshing candidate.” She chuckled to herself and thought, “Perhaps it would have been more appropriate to have included a packet of nuts.”
From unsolicited phone calls to pop-in visits to emails from VIP’s in support of candidates, anyone who has served in the search process has experienced the “full court press,” where the applicant tries to find every conceivable angle to stand out from the other applicants. Recently I heard of an applicant who sent an e-mail message to an academic vice president that was titled something like, “10 Reasons to Hire Dr. Anxious in 2010!” What most folks don’t seem to understand is that such strategies serve to undermine an applicant’s position, making them look needy at best and a little unbalanced at worst.
What is the hardest sell you’ve ever seen a candidate offer?
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7 Responses to Full-Court Press
csuci_cio - February 1, 2010 at 3:51 pm
When I was an undergraduate at Pomona College, I went to a presentation by a candidate for the English Department. Not content to read his poetry himself, he brought the actor Ed Ames to do it for him. We were trying hard not to laugh, snickering under our breathes. He didn’t get the gig…
raincross - February 1, 2010 at 8:27 pm
I once received a homemade rectangular cake iced to look like one of my organization’s business cards, with the candidate’s name and desired position.
dougphd - February 2, 2010 at 6:49 am
As chair of a search committee seeking a chair for the Marketing Department, I received a series of plastic body parts (heart, thigh bone, . . . ) from a candidate who said that it demonstrated that he would give everything he had if he got the job. I had to call him and tell him that I got the idea, and to ask him to send no more body parts.
snwiedmann - February 2, 2010 at 7:38 am
I’m obviously teaching at the wrong institution. All we ever get are overly-long letters of application, or, even worse, applications from persons wholly unqualified (we once received an application for a tenure-track position in philosophy from a professional long-haul truck driver with only a high school diploma). Hey, a cake now and then would be nice — if it’s chocolate. Hhmmmm, anyone else wondering what might have been in that gum?
jffoster - February 3, 2010 at 7:15 am
Our experiences are similar to Herr Snwiedmann’s. I think Fant’s candidate was trying to gum up the works.
bengradson - February 4, 2010 at 3:08 pm
In the early ’90s I was hiring a design editor for our publications arm. One of the candidates’ resume included a full-length Photoshop assemblage of his head to the (anatomically correct, shall we say) lower body of a satyr. It ran the length of the page and was actually quite well done. That kind of detail editing was an impressive job in the era of Photoshop 2.0/3.0, but the fact that “Awards and Honors” was just left of a set of mythical reproductive organs didn’t really endear him to the committee.
josecarmona11 - February 4, 2010 at 9:55 pm
I had a candidate who said that even if he didn’t know anything about our department and our educational field, he was an administrator – and that is what he was good at and there to do. The president of the institution gave him the job.