next »

[paul_robeson]

I apologize in advance for the rant, but I'm really weary of Chronicle ads that lump together positions in a variety of disciplines and then provide a link to the institution's HR web site for further information.  At least half of the times I do this, the job in my discipline isn't actually listed on the HR site.  Is this just a basic lack of coordination between departments and HR?  (You'd think they would iron it out before spending money for the ad.)

[airball]

Chime, and yes.

A few years ago there was a posting in my field in a department where a friend from grad school worked. (Score!) I dropped a note to my friend and she (and her department chair) were surprised to hear of my interest because the position did not exist. It had been posted by HR without the department's knowledge or the approval of anyone in Administration.

airball

[seniorscholar]

I'd better check and make sure that's not the HR department at my university again this year. A few years back they did exactly that -- ran a big Chronicle ad listing jobs from all over the university, including the professional schools (law, dentistry, medicine, etc) as well as the rest of the colleges -- having gathered this information from some internal document, no doubt. And asked for materials to be sent to them, at HR. Only problem: they ran that ad in January (I'm in a MLA field; application deadline had been Oct. 15 and we'd already made our short list for campus invitations by the time the ad appeared); and they helpfully sent over all the applications they had received the same week that our #1 candidate had accepted our offer.

We couldn't find any academic administrator who took enough responsibility for it to be worth while explaining why this kind of ad doesn't work in a university with hundreds of separate departments and no central coordination. I suspect HR -- or maybe PR -- thought it would be good publicity for the university to advertise a couple of hundred jobs in one ad in the Chronicle.

[lorelei]

I've just seen another of these.

http://chronicle.com/jobs/0000614939-01/

The ad lists 12 departments which are supposedly hiring, but the linked page only shows 7 job ads.