Standing Out on the Job Search

In last week’s open thread, JES left a comment asking for advice about what to do to stand out well when there are dozens or even hundreds of applicants, and the finalists all end up seeming just as qualified as the others.  This is partly in response to the Prof. Hacker post from last January where a search committee member commented on how Twitter had hurt a job candidate.  At that time, I asked what committees were supposed to base decisions on when the final ten, twelve, or twenty are equally outstanding.  My question did not lead to much discussion, and I will admit that this post does not offer a lot of concrete advice on that front.  I do think, though, that this posts offers some advice that job candidates might use to alleviate some of the job search stress.  At the very least, this is what worked for me, and I’d like to hear what worked for others, too.

In my second year of my doctoral program, a few of the graduate students who had received job offers on that year’s job search held a workshop on their experiences.  There, I received the one piece of advice that has followed me ever since and has carried me through several difficult moments not just on the job market but on the tenure track as well.

• Listen to every piece of advice everyone offers to give you, and take every single bit of it with a grain of salt.

There are a lot of articles out there on ways to handle the job market (we have offered some pretty good pieces of advice here on Prof. Hacker, if I do say so, including how to approach campus visits and handle the academic interview).  I’m sure, though, that each of us could think of people who broke each of the “rules” offered by such articles and succeeded anyway.  That contributes to making the job search so stressful.  What works for one person does not always work for another, and those who succeed do not always follow the rules.

I say all of this because I worry that some people get too hung up on the rules, meaning that some people become too focused on making other people happy, which leads to the one point that become something of a mantra for me when I was on the market a few years ago.

• Shift focus away from thinking about what will please search committees to thinking about how you can present yourself as fully and honestly as possible.

Oh, I know that this is a very difficult piece of advice to follow.  You want a job.  You need a job.  You are willing to do almost anything to make a search committee pick you over everyone else, but it really can’t be about them.  You have strengths, and you want committees to notice them.  The problem is that your strengths may not align with their needs, so they may love you but not offer you a job.  Still, focusing on you and representing yourself as clearly and completely as possible seems to be a much better use of your focus and energy than trying to figure out how to make other people happy.

This is where I want to get back to arguments about how your online presence can affect your job search.  When you post something on Twitter or your blog, you should make sure that the tone, style, and content reflect your personality and identity as honestly as possible.  If you feel your sarcasm works to your advantage as a teacher and scholar, then use it.  If you are more introspective and thoughtful, then use that.  The difficulty is that you have to accept that the personal characteristics that make you a vibrant scholar and teacher to some people will annoy other people to no end.

Going offline entirely does not solve the problem.  Some people will not care that you do not engage professionally with social media, but others will label you more negatively for not embracing the pedagogical and intellectual possibilities that such technologies offer.  Again, you have to think about how you want to be “read” and use the tools available to portray yourself in that way.

I have a friend who was a member of a search committee in the humanities that had 365 applications for one position.  When it came time to choose whom to interview, they found that about ten percent of the applications (just over thirty) were equally outstanding.  They struggled with narrowing the pool further through each subsequent stage of the process.  When I asked her how they did it, she said that they grappled with minutia and just went with what “felt right” until they found the one person with whom “everything clicked.”  That “everything” cannot be controlled.  It includes all of the facets the job applicant offers as well as the entirety of what the department and university needs and can provide the candidate.  This is why I state that your focus should rest on the ways you present yourself rather than on the ways you can make the search committee happy or unhappy.

One final point meant for graduate students who have not started their doctoral work.  In numerous articles lamenting how difficult it is to find a tenure-track job in the humanities, I have seen several comments from graduate students saying that they had no idea that it would be so difficult, and they wish someone had warned them.  My final piece of advice:

• Ask about the job placement rates of any doctoral program before you accept a slot in it.

This is a piece of advice I received in the early 1990s, and I thought it was a typical question for anyone entering a graduate program, but I see from comments that run across several articles that this is not always the case.  I knew what the job placement rates were for my doctoral program before I entered it, and those rates were pretty consistent with what happened to my cohort five years later.  Sure, things fluctuate, but relative consistency seems to be more typical.  Knowing the rates for people in your program may alleviate some of surprises when you enter the market yourself.

At the start of this post, I said to take every piece of advice with a grain of salt, and that applies to all I’ve written, too.  In the comments, I hope we can hear from more people who have been on the committee side of the search process.  How do you narrow the pool down further once you reach the point where everyone is equally outstanding?  What are your experiences with one person loving characteristics of one candidate that someone else questions?  In the end, what makes one person get the job when dozens or hundreds of others do not?

(Photo from Flickr user Cameron Cassan and licensed through Creative Commons)