First Person

Phone Interviews: Like Phone Sex, Only Less Invigorating

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By Sara Davis

Over the past nine months I have applied for about 35 academic jobs, and it's striking how much of the whole process -- finding job announcements, applying, interviewing, and being turned down -- occurred without any face-to-face contact.

In fact, most of the process took place over e-mail, the Internet, and telephone, highlighting how a job search comes down to constructing an identity that will fit in with the group you imagine on the other end of the line.

When I started graduate school in 1993, I didn't own a computer. I typed my papers on an electric typewriter or occasionally in a campus computer lab. When I wanted to look something up, I went to the library. It wasn't until my second year in graduate school that I used my student loan to invest in a small Macintosh laptop, thus launching myself into the academic world of electronic discussion lists, catalogs, and e-mail messages. Upgrading to a new computer every four years, so that we can stay active in the virtual community of academics and students, is now an unstated part of every academic job description.

Surprisingly, the technological revolution hasn't made academe less personal. If anything, the effect has been the reverse. Most academics I know, especially those you never see in their campus offices, log on to read their e-mail several times a day. My own students send e-mail messages to me constantly, making in-person office hours almost superfluous.

Conference panels are planned, lunches arranged, and books accepted for publication, all over e-mail, with an occasional confirming phone message. Yet our relationships seem more intense the more we imagine them in virtual space. Our exchanges are more laden with fantasy and hidden meaning. On e-mail, major misunderstandings happen as often as profound new friendships, and most of the people I work with I know solely through the Web and the telephone. What does it mean to have all this fantasy, this "imagined community" and long-distance virtual communication, injected into the job search?

From the sacred (a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale) to the grim (four language courses each semester at a little-known public university), I learned about all but two of the job openings I applied for from an e-mail discussion list, H-ASIA. In the same way, I saw an announcement and applied for a fellowship to do research in Sri Lanka. By scouring nonprofit Web sites I turned up a few openings at foundations, and my university's Web site also listed an opening for a librarian to handle the Chinese book collection. I applied for all of those.

The applications involved furious imagination and lots of time on the computer and phone. Since my work is interdisciplinary, and jobs teaching East Asian folklore come up about once a millennium, I applied to teach all kinds of things -- global studies, premodern history, literature, anthropology, and even remedial English composition. The diversity of these jobs meant that rather than having one cover letter and C.V. to send out, I tailored my portfolio each time, and I chose my three recommendations for each job as carefully as a chemist mixing volatile ingredients. All of this had to be researched and organized over the Internet. After struggling to do this on the laptop for four months, I took a deep breath, cashed in my tiny I.R.A., and bought a blueberry iMac.

It seems appropriate that my first two interviews were phone interviews. These are the latest cost-cutting measures invented by university deans. Since most humanities and social-science openings routinely draw applicants in the hundreds, hiring committees use phone interviews to help them weed out applicants. The interviews are usually brief, and are conducted over a speaker phone with as many members of the hiring committee present as possible. Only after winnowing the list down to three or four likely types do they actually invite anyone to visit the university.

Sure, it's hard in an on-campus interview to keep a bright, competent expression on your face for hour after hour of tooling around campus. This is true whether you think the campus you're looking at is God's little acre, or the last pit stop before hell. Yet with on-campus interviews and even conference interviews, whatever fantasies you might have had about each other get mostly tossed out the window. You are left with the tangible impression of a potential colleague and his or her strengths and weaknesses, and the beginnings of a future working relationship.

Telephones, on the other hand, only exacerbate the fantasies. Anyone who has ever placed a personal ad in a newspaper, and then tried to choose life mates based on the ensuing phone messages, knows what I'm talking about. Inevitably, the studly sounding baritone who loves to read and sail turns out to be a weasely little creep who snivels at you all through dinner about his "psycho" ex-girlfriend. And who knows if all the whiny-sounding men whose messages you deleted weren't actually swell guys?

The same thing happens in academic interviews. It's impossible to impress someone over the telephone in any lasting, meaningful way. All you can really do is to give each other a few moments of fleeting sensual pleasure -- kind of like phone sex, only less invigorating.

The key problem with phone interviews is that as a candidate you speak to a group of people who hear you and talk to you over a speaker phone. Thus, you are never really sure who asked you which question, and how the group is reacting. Are they scribbling your every word intently? Doing the tango? Rolling their eyes in disgust? You don't know. You just keep talking on and on into empty space without so much as an "mmm" or an "I see" to guide you.

Lacking these little socio-linguistic cues, your imagination starts to run away with you. Before grad school, I worked for a while as a desktop publisher at a small marketing firm. Our dimwit boss liked to give the all-young-female marketing department instructions from his car phone. I think he probably imagined us hanging intently on his every word. In fact we were making grotesque faces at the phone while saying, "Yes, Roger", and laughing silently as Heidi, the head of the department, did an obscene little dance in front of the speaker phone. These are the memories that haunt you during phone interviews.

My first phone interview was for a job in global studies. More than 400 people had applied, and this was narrowed down (no doubt with a dartboard) to a list of 15 people to be interviewed by phone. I prepared with two hours of intensive debriefing by phone with a faculty adviser, as well as with the usual Web surfing. I also went to a job-interview seminar offered by my campus career-planning office, which mostly prepared me to answer the question, "Tell us about yourself," a question no one has asked me yet.

The main question I did get asked in my first phone interview was, "How does your research fit into Global Studies?" I answered this, I thought, brilliantly, and then another member of the committee asked it again: "Yes, but how do you see it relating to global studies?" I sweated a little bit, shuffled through my notes, and tried a different answer, and then a third member of the committee asked: "What do you think this contributes to global studies?" Are they sleeping or are they sadists, I wondered, and I came up with a desperate third answer, hoping that this might be the right one. After a longish pause, someone asked what courses I could teach for them.

In the five interviews (phone and otherwise) I have had since that first one, I have learned that these seem to be the two questions most interviewers want answered: First, how does what you do fit into our consensus version of our field (or of the world, or of reality)? Second, what can you teach that will boost undergraduate enrollment, raising our prestige and getting us more university dollars?

I didn't quite grasp that during the first phone interview. After scrambling to fit my imagined global-studies self into their imagined community for 20 minutes, I hung up the phone to find myself still in my apartment. The whole process seemed like a weird dream.

The time is probably not far off -- only a budget cut away -- when interviews will take place over instant messaging, and acceptance and rejection letters will come via e-mail. In fact, I'm not sure that's all bad. After all, most professors avoid their offices like the plague, so in the future the only intellectual community most universities will have will exist in virtual space. At that point, auditioning a colleague over e-mail will be nothing but common sense.

It is probably no coincidence that the job I finally got for next year, a postdoctoral fellowship that I'll describe in a future column, had no interview at all. To celebrate, I went out to dinner with some members of my dissertation committee at a Thai restaurant. We had a great time, and it wasn't until it was over that it dawned on me why. After years of daily e-mail messages, this was in fact the first time that I'd actually had met them all together, face to face.