The Virtues of Virtual Interviews

In my experience I have found telephone interviews farcial; they are simply a device to increase the number of candidates that a committee says it interviewed.  Skype is just a step up in technology. I would advise people never to accept telephone or Skype interviews.  Most Human Resources departments have a rule in place that they have to ask a candidate if they will accept a remote interview.  It is a trap. In most cases if you refuse they are obliged to transport you.  If they will not just tell them that you have lost interest.
Predictably enough for an american no mention of how you would deal with a candidate from overseas.  The possibility did not cross the author’s mind.  No good overseas candidate would take the offer of a remote interview seriously.  To them it is obviously a farce and they wasted their time applying for the job in the first place.
Increasingly in Australia academic appointments are by nomination.  Same goes for adminstrators. No advertisement, no tedious review of applications, no search committee, no referee’s reports, logistic costs or interviews and seminars. Streamlines the whole process.  Academic appointments are made by forces beyond the comprehension of mere mortals like myself in the dark recesses of an office of a Head-of-School, Dean or Vice-Chancellor. Whose mate you are determines if you are offered a job. ’Twas ever thus. 
In a way it is an acknowledgement of reality.  In my opinion over 80% of academic jobs are only advertised to fulfil a legal requirement: once a way is found to get around that the advertisments for jobs largely disappear.  The job was never really open to outsiders anyway.

I have written about this a couple times, and have twice done Skype interviews at the preliminary stage:  in both cases I became a finalist, and in the most recent I was offered a job, which I accepted.  I enjoyed the experience:  job hunting is a tedious, time-consuming occupation, whether you are a grad student scrambling to finish a diss and run two sections, or whether you are a senior prof with all the attendant responsibilities.  Skype interviews require no investment of time or money other than the kind of thorough preparation you would normally do in order to engage a search committee.  And David is correct:  in both cases, search committees that included students, administrators, faculty and alumnae/i reps cannot be easily assembled in the same place for days at a time. 

I can’t whose rules or laws *require* a school to transport candidates to a preliminary interview:  for conference interviews in the US, candidates pay their own way, often at great cost.  And in a job market like this one, any opportunity to be employed at what you have trained to do is surely welcome.  But as for the business of interviewing more candidates — I think that’s a good thing.  Am I the only one who has seen twelve candidates in a hotel room and been disappointed by folks who looked great on paper?  Or the only one who had to be talked into making someone a semi-finalist who turned out to be funny, engaging and smart?  Why duke it out over which of three candidates is going to take the last slot when you could give all of them a chance?

The money saved by such interviews is certainly an incentive to try them.

(1)  Critical question.  Did you appoint them?  I bet you did not otherwise you would have proudly said so.  How many academics have you met that got their jobs through a telephone interview?  I have never met one. My case rests. 
(2) My opinion of telephone interviews is based on my own experience.  None I ever had felt genuine.  Of course, if I had ever got a job through one my opinion would be dfferent.
(3) I have years and years of experience in an Australian G8 university.  Appointments by nomination are going on.  No ads, search committees, interviews, referees reports or presentations. My G8 university is old enough to have a charter that gives it the right to appoint by nomination – they do not have to advertise or use a competitive process to appoint people. Often it is through part-time and casual positions and contract lectureships being quietly turned into permanent academic positions and ARC post-doc fellows being appointed to permanent positions before the end of their fellowships. The net result is appointment to permanent positions without advertisement or competitive selection or much oversight.  I too thought appointments without advertisement and a competitive selection process were something that happened back in the 19th century. The change has happened quietly in the last 15 years or so.  I was an Australian Research Fellow post-doc in the 1990′s.  At the time the possibilty of being offered a permanent job as a result of holding an ARF never crossed my mind.  I knew that things like that did not happen. However, that is exactly what is happening now.  No-one seems to notice.

I’ve been on search committees. The Director of the School eventually made the decision. We just offered two candidates jobs based on Skype interviews. OTOH both had previously visited our university 1-2 years ago. Those were the two candidates that I thought were the best in the pool. The truth is that we didn’t interview anyone else. But we certainly reviewed all the other applications. I think we should be doing more of these Skype interviews for each search. I haven’t noticed appointments without advertising in my school but don’t know exactly what happens elsewhere in the university. This might apply to Future Fellow positions as applications explicitly have to state how the FF will be integrated into the university at the end of the FF. Of course, no-one has completed an FF yet. Also the vast majority of our FFs were already working at this university before getting the FF.

Raymond, you’ve misread or misunderstood my point here, which may be because you don’t know how American hiring practices work.  I am talking about PRELIMINARY interviews only–the kind of interviews we routinely do at a conference, a “neutral site” (i.e., the “airport interview,” generally only for senior administrative positions), or via phone.  For these, using Skype is decidedly better than the phone, and only marginally less effective, if at all, than the conference or airport process.  If it’s true that the effect is nearly equally good, and the cost savings are significant, that changes the equation considerably.

In fact, contrary to your first point, using Skype in our VPSA search OPENED the pool more to international candidates (though, due to the nature of a student affairs job, it’s not terribly likely that an international candidate would have the qualifications and interest for the job, though an American abroad certainly might), as we take literally days off the time necessary to do the process.

As an example, I am going to Asia on business in January.  It will take me 24 hours of air travel to get there, and 24 hours to get back, in addition to the travel time to and from the airports, etc.  In addition, due to the 15-hour time difference, to be effective at all in an interview situation I’d need at least a day of downtime prior to the interview itself.

Most preliminary interviews, even VP-level interviews, are at most an hour or 90 minutes long.  In effect, It would take a absolute minimum of four days for an international candidate from a long distance (Asia, Australia, etc.) to get here for an hour-long interview.  This is a tremendous investment of time and energy, particularly because, if such a candidate were chosen as a finalist, she or he would in a few days have to turn around and do it again, this time spending a day and a half or so on campus.  So we’d be asking a 9-DAY investment to interview for a job, and almost half of that would be for the purpose of a brief preliminary interview.

We would never hire someone for a senior administrative or tenure-track position without bringing that person for a full interview on campus.  But the preliminary interview is a different story, and we can in fact substantially broaden, rather than narrowing, the pool by doing the preliminary interviews via virtual conferencing.

I suspect, though, that you were so interested in accusing me and my fellow Americans of provincialism, and in riding your thesis about the injustices and bad practices of the Australian academic market, that you didn’t actually read what I said, but responded, instead, to what you wanted me to have said.

It seems to me a key is layering and interpretation. Skype interviews are becoming the norm throughout the business world. A middle level manager for a professional baseball team recently told me that his very traditional management team has recently started Skype interviews for staff positions throughout their farm system. The layering is that Skype interviews are but one part of the process. As phone interviews, references, pre screening profiles and skill assessments, etc. give a “picture” of the candidate [pun intended] you create a richer communication medium with Skype interviews allowing you to see reactions. You can gain greater confidence in culling the field to who comes to campus with webcam interviews.
At issue, however, is the interpretation of the visuals. The camera reveals but it also lies. Video interview presentation capabilities are not something that many seasoned, upper management types have developed. The camera exaggerates movements and exemplifies facial expressions that can easily be misinterpreted. Something as simple as the misplacement of a camera that appears to “violate” personal space dictums or a lighting issue can be read negatively. I coached an interviewee before a Skype interview for a professional job she applied for. The practice session revealed her animated movements in the camera’s field made her appear as if she suffered from an untreated hyperactivity. The savvy communicators on the hiring committee need to use the technology for its positive input without over reacting or over interpreting what is gleaned from the new technology. You don’t want to hire someone who is good on camera but not in person.  

My only complaint re multi-year grants is that I think colleges should be required to provide them rather than simply allowed. If a student athlete gets injured and can no longer play, the college should have some obligation to the athlete who gave up his/her health for the college!