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Interviewing in Britain

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By Nathan Abrams

With the U.S. dollar so weak against the pound, British academic salaries seem to have become more attractive to American Ph.D.'s. At a job interview I had earlier this year, for a lectureship at a prestigious institution in the southeast of England, four of the six finalists were Americans.

As a British citizen with a Ph.D. in history, I've spent more than my fair share of time interviewing for faculty positions here in England. I'd like to offer some tips for Americans who are thinking about applying for a faculty job in this corner of the world.

From the moment a job is advertised, the interview process in Britain is very different from the American version. The application deadlines are often much shorter, sometimes as little as two to three weeks from when the ad first appeared. You won't be asked to provide your dossier, teaching evaluations, transcripts, or references up front. Some people over here might not even know what those terms mean; I certainly didn't, at first.

Instead, you are usually asked to complete an application form and/or a short details form, and to provide a cover letter and a CV. Sometimes an ad will request a sample of your research, preferably published.

After the deadline, the department compiles a shortlist of candidates to be interviewed. It is at this stage that those candidates are asked to provide references, and those references are contacted. If you haven't provided a piece of research, you'll be asked to provide it now.

At British universities, all of the candidates on the shortlist are invited to be interviewed over the course of a single day. Candidates are expected to make their own travel plans, but universities will usually provide some accommodation near the campus, if requested. You'll probably want to arrive a day or two early, to give yourself time to recover from jet lag and do some sightseeing, especially if you have the good fortune to get an interview in London.

The day itself is divided into two parts. During the first portion, which usually takes place at some ungodly hour in the morning, the candidate is expected to give an oral presentation to the members of the relevant department. Sometimes graduate students, and even undergraduates, will be present.

The presentation will be on your current research and your future plans. It will last 20 minutes, usually followed by 10 minutes of questions. Sometimes, though, departments will be creative and forgo that familiar routine. At one interview, I was asked to give a presentation as if I were lecturing to an undergraduate second-year class; some of the department members even took the part of role-playing seriously.

It is difficult to say what the best procedure for the applicant is at this point, but I've been informed not to read a paper out loud, as if at an academic conference. Only give a lecture if you've been asked to do so. I was told that it is best to take a more informal, extemporaneous approach to talking through your research and its importance.

You will then be herded into a room with all the other candidates and required to wait. With any luck, refreshments will be provided, and you will get to gossip with the other candidates and find out who landed the jobs that you failed to get.

Some people find this mingling awkward, but I rather like meeting the other candidates. It gives you an idea of whom you are competing against and what the department is looking for. It's also an opportunity to learn what's going on in your field. You may at this point also be given a tour of the campus, including the library, or simply given a map and pushed in the right direction.

In between the two parts of the interview process is usually a luncheon or buffet, which can range from an elaborate spread to a small tray of dull sandwiches, depending upon the generosity of the institution. That small, seemingly trivial detail, though, can tell you a great deal about the department.

At the luncheon, members of the department are again encouraged to attend (or perhaps they are lured by the free lunch) and mingle with the candidates. On the surface, it seems like a nice idea: They can get to know us informally and we can get to know them. But how much is what you say here part of the formal interview? Are we really, as many department members will tell you, not being judged and evaluated during the lunch? What if I ate with my mouth open, or ate too much (because I was starving after having to get up so early for the presentation), or burped: Will that count against me? I have learned from bitter experience that no matter what they say, you have to be on your guard at all times.

After lunch comes round two, the formal interview in which four or five members of the university give the candidate a grilling. That part of the interview can last from 30 to 45 minutes. Don't be put off if your interview is shorter than that; a colleague of mine landed a job after an interview that lasted only 15 minutes. However, I have also heard some horror stories about applicants who were called back to undergo a second formal interview.

In my interviews, I have discovered three distinct approaches, which I will call friendly, tough, and aggressive. Both the friendly and the tough approaches are rigorous but fair; what distinguishes the two is that during the former the environment is more relaxed and comfortable. The purpose of the aggressive method, on the other hand, seems to be to create a deliberately unfriendly, hostile atmosphere to interrogate the candidate on his or her very worth. The torture scene from the 1999 film Three Kings comes to mind here.

During this part of the interview you're likely to hear about something called the Research Assessment Exercise. It's a process that takes place every four or five years by which officials evaluate the quality of research at colleges and universities in the United Kingdom, and distribute public funds based on that quality.

Be warned: Some interviews focus almost exclusively on research. The next Research Assessment Exercise is due to take place in 2008, so be aware that during the interview, a prestigious research-led institution will want to know your research plans in great detail. Typically, such an institution is looking for an already published monograph or one under contract.

Although a large part of an academic's job is to teach, that is not considered a primary issue during the interview process. Unlike the common practice in the United States, you will very rarely, if ever, be asked to teach an actual undergraduate class. The only time that students will be given a chance to express their views is during the first half of the daylong process, if they are even invited to the presentations.

After the formal interview, you will be politely ushered out and asked to leave contact details. Since the interview process takes place over a single day, the faculty members will usually have a decision by the end of it and will start contacting the applicants immediately.

Only in extraordinary circumstances, when the committee can't make up its mind, or is awaiting a decision from a candidate, will this take longer. So you will be spared the long agonizing wait that is common at American institutions, and be put out of your misery fairly rapidly.