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Is This a Dream?

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By Michael Dalton

"We would like to talk to you about an accounting position at our university." That was the substance of a plethora of messages I received in my placement-center mailbox at this year's national meeting of the American Accounting Association in Atlanta. I had contacted just four colleges prior to the convention about meeting with me to discuss their faculty openings. When Monday morning came, the first day of the convention, I had more than 20 requests for interviews.

This all started a little over a month earlier when I sent in my one-page résumé to the association's Web site. After an applicant registered for the convention, the association posted his or her résumé. At about the same time, colleges and universities were publishing their job listings on the site. So employers could look at the pool of candidates and the candidates could check out the employers, and everybody could assess the competition.

When I checked the Web site before heading to the conference, it showed 115 position announcements and 54 candidate résumés. We all know from basic economics that when the demand is twice the amount of supply it drives up salaries to compete for the small number of available candidates. A colleague at the convention remarked to me, "The salaries they are paying new hires in accounting are insane." Let me just say that it is great to be on the right side of an "insane" job market.

Before the convention started, I firmed up about four interviews. Then I started to receive e-mail messages and phone calls from different colleges asking me to check out their Web sites and to interview with them in Atlanta. By the time I reached Atlanta, I thought the eight interviews I lined up for the three-day meeting would be plenty. Nothing would have prepared me for what I was about to experience.

In the placement center at the hotel convention, candidates and employers communicated via more than 200 portable mailboxes. A dozen tables were set up, each with a binder of résumés and a binder of position vacancies. Employers could review the résumés and request interviews, while candidates could look up position announcements before responding to a request for an interview.

I had anticipated an "air drop" of my résumé at the conference. And my eyes lit up when I saw the more than 100 employer mailboxes set up as receptacles for my dynamite résumé. But my zeal faded when I realized I already had more interview requests than time would permit. It was, after all, only a three-day convention, so I settled for interviewing with 15 institutions.

For the most part, these interviews were preliminary or screening interviews to see if a candidate's résumé would be placed in a smaller pile of applicants who would be given serious consideration. For a few colleges, the interview time was really just an informational session.

But what a great feeling to be treated as a "hot commodity." Being in the trenches, teaching for 19 years at the same college, you rarely get the sense that you have made a valuable contribution. Yes there are the positive student evaluations. But my experience in academe has been that it is rare for administrators or colleagues to tell you that what you are doing is valuable or is having a positive impact on students. Perhaps we all assume that. When applying for a recent promotion in academic rank at my current job, I wrote to thank my colleagues who had provided me a letter of recommendation, to tell them that for me, the promotion would be secondary to all the kind and generous comments they had made about me. We sometimes hear the global, yet hollow, "Thanks for all you do." I think many of us could benefit from a sincere, kind word on a regular basis.

There were plenty of kind words from the professors and department heads who acted as campus recruiters. Their collective desire to have me teach at their institution was exhilarating. OK, OK, it was a sterile supply-and-demand thing of having too few candidates for too many position vacancies. Nevertheless, the event energized me. It wound up that I had four interviews on Monday, 10 interviews on Tuesday, and one interview on Wednesday morning.

So what was it like to do that many interviews? Like teaching, during an interview you are on stage. With the right attitude it can be a great deal of fun. My mission with each interviewer was simple. I had three to five things I wanted them to know about me. I had three questions prepared to ask them. The rest was just personality. It turned out to be fun talking to colleagues about their colleges and universities and about other things that were going on in the profession.

With that many interviews, I knew it would difficult to keep track of who said what. Since there was little time between interview sessions, I developed a system of writing short comments and key words about each college after the interview. Typically, I wrote down information concerning the three questions I had asked each interviewer: what my teaching load would be, what the expectations were in terms of the quality and quantity of research publications for tenure, and what their general philosophy of accounting education was. In the evening, I would go back and fill in what else I could remember and prepare a separate file for each employer.

It took me a month after the convention to get my formal application packets sent to the different colleges. Now the real search begins.