Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Not the Expert Anymore

By Claudia Hent

Mine is the sad tale of the professional who thinks she knows everything about how to get a job yet miserably botches her own search for a faculty position.

For 15 years, I've written books aimed at a general, nonacademic audience on job searching. I operated a résumé-writing service for five years. I still teach job-search skills and play a key role in a career Web site for nonacademics. But I myself have had marginal success applying for tenure-track positions in business schools and communication programs, and now find myself in my third season on the academic market.

Granted, the first season was more about testing the waters, gauging my marketability, and discovering my niche. That search yielded a handful of phone interviews and invitations for campus visits -- and lots of rejection letters.

In Season 1, certain types of programs had seemed more attracted to me than others, so in Season 2, I refined my search to focus on those types. Oddly, I had less success -- one interview at a conference and one telephone interview followed by an invitation for a campus visit, and, of course, lots more rejection letters.

At the end of Season 2, while attending a career institute for doctoral students during an academic conference in my field, I had a major epiphany. On the one hand, the horror stories I heard there about the quirks of the academic-hiring process (not to mention the terrifying whims of the tenure system) were almost enough to make me give up on the idea of pursuing a faculty position. On the other hand, I met caring people who seemed to know things I didn't about the academic market. I felt I might be able to call upon some of them to guide me through my search.

After my Ph.D. was conferred, I e-mailed six or seven of the senior professors I had met at the institute and asked a slew of questions about my situation and my approach. I also sent them my CV. Here's what I learned from those good folks, as well as from my cumulative experience on the market:

Your CV must be relevant and substantive. I've been giving that advice for years but do not seem to have absorbed it for my own job search.

My mentors were quick to zero in on the wretchedness of my CV. I had always been under the impression that the longer the CV, the more marketable the academic. At 13 pages, mine seemed positively skimpy. But what I had failed to realize was that my CV was padded with irrelevant information dating back to my adjunct days.

I had thrown in every tiny bit of data that might make me seem important and worthy of a teaching position. Unpublished undergraduate papers? Come on. Hardest to part with was my massive list of more than 100 nonacademic articles, but I figured I could turn the list into a CV supplement that might be appropriate to send in certain situations.

My mentors pointed out that my CV said almost nothing about my dissertation; I've corrected that deficiency. I now also have four versions of my CV, each directed at a different type of position, with plans to create even more versions as needed.

You must go where the hiring happens. Another major "duh" moment: One of my mentors asked me if I had been to, or had plans to go to, the major conference in my field where interviews took place.

Umm, no. Clearly, I am too dumb to deserve a Ph.D.

Since there is no real "meat market" equivalent of an academic conference in the nonacademic job search, that important step simply had not occurred to me. So I joined the organization and registered for the placement service.

You must fit in somewhere. As I listened to faculty members at the career institute explain how to succeed on the academic market, I began to take stock of all the strikes I might have against me.

My background is interdisciplinary and so is my Ph.D., which is in interdisciplinary studies with a concentration in organizational behavior. Thus my Ph.D. lacks not only the "purity" of a degree in organizational behavior but also the stamp of a business school, one approved by the national business-schools' accreditor, an increasingly important attribute. What's more, my low-residency university has sometimes been unjustly and wrongly perceived as a distance-learning institution -- or, worse, a diploma mill.

I have six years of teaching experience, but I no longer wish to teach in the area in which I have been teaching. To make matters worse, I have never taught organizational behavior and have very little experience teaching management.

I haven't been very strategic in my research and publishing. I've looked for good opportunities to publish articles based on the topics I am interested in and have paid little attention to the tiered hierarchy of academic journals.

My mentors agreed that those issues could be obstacles to landing a tenure-track job but said some management programs might embrace my quirky set of qualifications. Happily, they also assured me that two things I had perceived as obstacles -- that I lack a master's degree and that quite a bit of my research is focused on the scholarship of teaching and learning -- were not necessarily impediments.

You must get over your fear of phones and failure. Remember those invitations I had for campus visits from Seasons 1 and 2? I didn't actually go on any of them. I can sit here and offer multiple rationalizations -- the university's location was unattractive, the timing was bad -- but the simple truth was, I was scared.

I was still in graduate school at the time so I wasn't yet at the point where I had to get a job. It was easier just to bail. In one case, I backed out because the search committee asked me to teach a class on a topic in which I had no interest.

I even bailed once on a phone interview. Granted, that happened after I had just had a disastrous phone interview with another department in which I was inexplicably caught off guard by being on the phone with the entire search committee. Uncomfortable with phone interviews to begin with, I babbled my way through the committee's interrogation and never heard from it again.

Additional disastrous phone interviews have followed, but I'm learning some techniques to improve my performance. I've noticed that I do well, and can be myself, when talking on the phone with one other person, but talking with several seems to unhinge me. I've learned that it helps to do a little research in advance on all of the committee members so you can slip in references to their research or teaching interests. I am not there yet, but, with practice, I am incrementally less rattled when confronted with multiple interviewers in one sitting.

Initially, I figured I would be asked fairly general questions: "Why do you want to come here?" "Tell us about your research agenda." The kind of questions posed to all candidates. But after being asked much more specific questions about my Ph.D. program in one phone interrogation, I have learned to widen my expectations of what I might be asked.

The best piece of advice I have received about telephone interviews -- from my spouse, who is great at them -- is to stand up and move around during the call. His rationale is that he moves around in the classroom, so communicating while moving reflects his teaching style. I, too, move around the classroom when I teach, and doing so in a telephone interview is a great way to channel nervous energy.

You must be doing something right. Toward the end of the career institute, once the actual conference had begun, I got an e-mail message from the provost of a college to which I had applied. I strongly coveted the job, and had told the provost I would be in his state for the conference and could stop by. In his message, he invited me for an informal meeting, which would mean leaving the conference early and driving a significant distance. I decided to go for it.

When we met, he told me in the first few minutes of the meeting that of the 137 candidates, I was the only one who had been neither short-listed nor rejected.

Uh, OK, where did that leave me, I wondered, after my hasty conference departure and 450-mile drive?

The provost said the search committee preferred more-senior candidates with better publications than I had. But he said he was impressed with the way I presented myself in my application. He particularly cited what he called my "dossier," a snazzy coil-bound booklet I had sent with most of my applications describing "evidence of teaching excellence." He encouraged me to keep trying.

So, in the midst of Season 3, this "career expert" admits she has been humbled but nonetheless has renewed determination.

I have been marginally more successful this time out. I attended the annual conference of the premier professional organization in my field, participating in nine placement interviews. I seem to be very appealing to departments that want to hire in non-tenure-track positions with an administrative component, and I have had three campus invitations for those positions and have visited two of those campuses.

It's unlikely that I would accept a non-tenure-track position if one is offered, but I want to keep my options open and gain interview experience. I've been improving in phone interviews, too. In the last one I had, I walked around and was downright stellar in my delivery.

I continue to marvel at the differences between a traditional job search and one in the academic world -- how different cover letters are in academe, how follow-up techniques that would brand a job seeker as a go-getter in the corporate realm are seen as too pushy in academe, and how interviewing in academe usually means a 12-hour battery of meetings, meals, and presentations.

That it has taken me three years to begin to understand those differences suggests I'm a slow learner. But I am learning. And I remain hopeful that it will pay off by the end of this recruitment season.