Writing the Ad

In my previous entry, I discussed some principles for honest advertising, the most important of which is not to advertise aspects of the job we don’t have any intention of meeting with the hire. If there are restrictions on rank, degree-completion status, or other factors, those should go in the ad. Increasing the size of the pool is not an excuse for a deceptive job description.

There’s a challenge, however, in applying this principle. When we draft an ad, in some instances the search is a fishing expedition to find the best possible person we can in a very broad area. Whether we can pursue a search configured this way depends on the qualifications and interests of extant faculty in the program, absolute versus contingent or desirable curricular issues, and our general sense of what’s going to be possible in a candidate pool we haven’t yet seen. So, as I’ve said here before, the trick is to define the “musts” in any job search, and make clear what they are in the ad. The “nice to haves” also need to be defined, but they must be clearly signaled as desirable but not mandatory characteristics for candidates.

As I’ve also said here before, we don’t normally get enormous applicant pools. So it’s extremely important for us to craft job ads that clearly define the expectations for the position, but that do not also inadvertently exclude potential candidates based on incidental qualities that they end up reading as “musts.” Thus the rhetoric of the ads requires considerable care to get right.

So how do we write them?

Generally, the deans of the schools work with the school faculty to define the position, what the teaching responsibilities will most likely be, and what other things the school wants or needs the new colleague to do. I then meet with the dean to discuss these aspects of the job description, and we edit the ad to reflect our consensus on what’s needed. Sometimes we will go back to the faculty to discuss the position further for clarification or reconsideration of some aspect of the description—I may go with the dean or I may not, depending on what the issues are. Once all those concerns are resolved, we merge the basic description with the institutional boilerplate that goes into a published ad, all of which is in a template that resides in the human-resources department and gets re-evaluated annually.

The final version of the ad goes back to the dean for review, and I look at it again, too. Once we agree that it’s ready to go, my office staff works with the dean to place the ad in appropriate disciplinary publications and e-mail lists, and with HR to place it in more general publications such as The Chronicle, as appropriate. Then it’s published, and the next phase of the search begins.