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Choosing the Finalists

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By C.A. Wilcox

How do you take a "long shortlist" of 12 candidates for a tenure-track job in history and trim it to a truly short list of four finalists?

I've been describing for Career Network readers a search in progress in a history department at a major research university. In the first installment, I described the initial stage of the search, and in the second, the selection of 12 top semifinalists.

My committee met twice to discuss our long shortlist, with some time in between to allow for more in-depth reading of the candidates' files and the written materials they had submitted. Before the first meeting, our list grew to 13. Thinking that our first cut had perhaps been too deep, we agreed in informal conversations to move the person at the top of our "reserve" list over to our list of semifinalists.

Just as we had quite easily reached consensus on the list of 12 (now 13), we found ourselves essentially in agreement at our first meeting about the relative merits of the candidates. We had not made any mistakes in singling out the 13 applicants, we decided; they all seemed to be solid historians who wrote quite well. At this preliminary meeting, of course, we were still not yet ready to choose the few finalists.

Toward the bottom of our list were the three most junior candidates, and as I had anticipated, none of them seemed worth pursuing to the point of an on-campus interview. Diverse problems eliminated them from contention. One of them, after promising to send us two dissertation chapters, submitted only one, and it was sketchy and thin. That candidate, we concurred, was not competitive with others on the list who were more advanced in their careers. Another of the three sent two chapters, full of interesting information, but they were undigested and poorly organized. With the help of a prominent major adviser, that candidate could probably figure out how to develop a coherent argument, we concluded, but the dissertation was at least a year from completion. We wanted someone who would have a degree by September.

The third of the junior scholars submitted three polished chapters but still had a large chunk of the dissertation to write. Moreover, the chapters did not clearly establish the significance of the project, which studied a relatively small group of people. So that candidate too we eliminated.

At the other end of the scale, one applicant, whom I'll call Jim, immediately jumped out at all of us. He was a recent Ph.D. in a tenure-track assistant professorship, with a postdoctoral fellowship under his belt. Having made good use of the fellowship, he had nearly completed a substantial revision of his dissertation for publication. Jim also had several published or forthcoming articles. We were uniformly impressed by the prodigious amount of research he had completed, by the subtlety and originality of his analyses, and by the ingenuity of some of his arguments. Even though we had not planned to choose a finalist at this meeting, we tentatively agreed that Jim would be on our list of invitees.

The rest of the semifinalists fell between these two poles. All had completed their Ph.D.'s. Six were in tenure-track jobs; of those, four had already published books, while the other two had articles in print and dissertation revisions in progress. Two currently held postdocs, and one, a temporary job.

To my surprise, we liked only one of the four books, by a woman I'll call Susan. And although her volume was promising, it was not without flaws. Superficially, there was nothing wrong with the other three books, but they were obviously revised dissertations rushed into print without sufficient rethinking. They were solid but uninspired. Susan and two other members of this group of four applicants had already embarked on second projects and sent us preliminary information about their plans -- for example, conference talks and drafts of articles, or, in one case, page proofs of a forthcoming publication.

We decided that only Susan should be retained in the pool; the second projects of the other applicants with published books uniformly failed to excite us.

Of the two people on postdocs, one ("Alice") was making major revisions on her dissertation; we were impressed by the reconceptualization of that project in the submitted chapters, although it was very much a work in progress. The other postdoc, we decided, had taken an overly narrow approach to an important topic and showed no sign of broadening that vision of the subject.

The remaining two assistant professors ("Joe" and "Bob") working on revisions to their dissertations and the man in a one-year job ("Sam") all seemed sufficiently attractive to scrutinize further.

That left us with a group of six whom we discussed in depth at our second meeting, after we all had had a chance to review their materials further: Susan, who had recently published a book and moved on to another project; Jim, Joe, and Bob, tenure-track assistant professors with dissertations in various stages of revision; and two people currently in temporary positions (Alice and Sam).

Two of our shortlist of six -- obviously -- were female, and one -- not so obviously -- was a member of a minority group. We were pleased with the diversity of this set of candidates.

At the beginning of the second meeting we reaffirmed our support for Jim's candidacy. We then moved on to the others. Alice, we decided, showed promise, but the promise was not yet realized, and her dissertation was a long way from being satisfactorily revised. By contrast, we concluded that Joe's revised chapters stood up very well on a second reading, and we added him to the list of invitees. We also found his course syllabuses very impressive. Since he was our remaining minority candidate, we were especially pleased that we still liked his work after a more careful reading.

Most of the meeting we devoted to considering the other three candidates (Susan, Bob, and Sam), each of whom had some strengths and some weaknesses. The syllabuses that Sam had submitted were weak and unimaginative; in addition, his approach to his subject seemed less innovative than that of our other candidates. At the same time, his research was impressive and he wrote well. Bob's research skills continued to impress us, and he had been more active than Sam in producing articles based on his work, yet we were concerned about his ability to generalize from his findings. As for Susan, one of the committee members had questions about her book and doubts about her new project, yet she was obviously a very accomplished historian with a wonderful track record of teaching and service in her department. The initial reviews of her book were very strong. We had to weigh those against the doubts expressed by our committee member.

In the end we concurred on adding two of the three -- Susan and Bob -- to our list of four finalists. We concluded that both impressed us more than Sam did. If we had not had the option of inviting four candidates, though, our meeting would have been longer and more contentious, because we were sharply divided over whether Susan or Bob was preferable, and for reasons that were not comparable.

Susan was senior to Bob. Her work appeared more creative than his, yet it also seemed thinner. Bob's research approached Jim's in its range and thoroughness, but we had lingering doubts about whether he could see the forest for the trees. One committee member, moreover, felt strongly that at least one woman should be on our list of finalists. How to choose between the two? Fortunately, we did not have to -- yet.

My next task is contacting the finalists, writing rejection letters to the other semifinalists, and setting up the interviews. We all think that we have a strong field of candidates and that one on them is sure to appeal to the department.