The load is back on my shoulders: we advertised for a tenure track job opening a while back, and this is the week we’re reviewing all the applications — that great mass of applications. That’s what I was doing yesterday, that’s what I’m doing today.
I just want to thank all those applicants who didn’t read the job description. We are a liberal arts university, and the ad emphasized teaching, because that’s what we do, and yet so many applicants wrote fantastic great treatises on their research, talking about all the fabulous high tech gear they use, and their letters of recommendation write glowingly of their amazing commitment to research, nothing but research. We can read them admiringly and appreciate the really cool stuff they’re doing, and place their application respectfully on the honorable pile of file folders that we never need to look at again. It’s a tall stack. Good luck at the R1 universities to which you’ve also sent applications!
There are also applicants that talk enthusiastically about their teaching and how their research can be carried out at an undergraduate university, and we reverently set those aside in a much smaller stack that will be opened repeatedly in the next few days, and that we’ll probably quickly narrow down to a dozen or so and we’ll moan in despair that we can’t hire them all right now, and then we’ll argue bitterly over which ones we’ll invite to a phone interview, and then we’ll agonize more over the few we’ll get to invite to campus, and then we’ll decide which one will be offered the position in a knife fight between their faculty advocates in the Ring Of Death out back, and then our first choice will probably turn us down and we’ll wallow in despond, drooling out rivers of tears that, given that this is Morris, will freeze into crystalline shards that will festoon the building to mock us until spring.
Aren’t job searches fun for both the applicant and the search committee?
Pfft, letter openers don’t count as “knives.”
I’m planning to snap the blade off that oversized papercutter in the office.
Whenever I post my resume online, describing my history of environmental work and monitoring of construction sites, the responses all consist of “You’re just the annuity/ insurance salesman we’re looking for”.
PZ:
I recently received a very nice machete for my birthday. I’d be happy to lend it to you, could be there in a day.
You have my sympathies. I chaired a search at UMNTC this time last year for two tenure-track positions in biology education research and teaching. Our piles broke down the same way as yours; there were lots of people who were doing very interesting wet-bench work, with no focus on teaching and teaching research. In the end, we did get two great new faculty members, and managed to avoid knife fights at dawn. I hope yours turns out equally well!
I am suddenly thankful that this is the first year since 2012 that I am not on the job market. Because I remember agonizing on exactly how to convince hiring committees that I was the person they wanted, while aware that they likely had a dozen or more pretty damn awesome candidates.
(I had secret terrors that I would do what the first people PZ mentioned did, but by accidentally mixing up all my application materials rather than not reading the job posting or school’s website. I did get the wrong school on a cover letter for a postdoc (everything else was fine, I just didn’t change the heading material when I Copy and Pasted the formatting in): thankfully, that was to a professor who I knew so I felt slightly less mortified.)
But if we don’t have the knife fight at dawn, how will we create new job openings that will create more opportunities for job searches?
Who says lefties don’t care about the economy?
Acute alcohol poisoning from long, boozy faculty lunches?
Easy, PZ. Trump wants to make America great again, so he’s bound to increase funding for tertiary education. ;¬)
which brings up a serious question…
Is there a better way to run the hiring process than there is currently?
It’s bone-numbingly harsh as it is, but given the circumstances (no money for higher ed, too many qualified applicants for the positions), are there actually alternatives to this process that might work? I can’t think of any :(
by hiring millionare contributors that think public education is a waste of money to run the department of education.
makin MURKA grate agin.
But if we don’t have the knife fight at dawn, how will we create new job openings that will create more opportunities for job searches?
That’s what committee service is for – create new committees, pack them wall-to-wall with your oldest faculty, give them an impossible charge, no money or resources to accomplish it, make sure that the committee must deal with upper administration on a regular basis, and just wait for the wave of retirements…
I’d rather have the knife fight.
I’d rather have the knife fight.
True, it’s probably more humane
I’m on a couple of search committees here at the moment, and we go the slightly less arduous route (for involved faculty) of doing a first cut on the application packages and only interviewing those who actually meet the criteria for the role.
I just went through applications for three positions in our institute and it was a similar thing for us. Candidates who actually read the application and tailored their stuff accordingly already had a pretty good chance to get our interest and then possibly an interview. On the other side, my “favourites” were one guy who wanted to work in marketing and help us making lots of money and another one who wanted to do research on child labour in Bangladesh.
The positions were for Ph.D. students in Marine Biology by the way…
I think the problem is, teaching is a catch-word for four part-time appointments at different community colleges, total of ten courses, no benefits.
I’m on two search committees as we speak, chairing one. But if you think the search process will lead to a knife/machete/letter opener fight, just wait until the tenure review process…
Forgive me if I have less sympathy for the people who are actually employed…
The problem is that we have the equivalent of an academic pyramid scheme going on right now. We hire graduate students and postdocs to do research, stringing them along with the eventual promise of an academic job.. but we hire academic jobs at a rate of about 10:1 to postdocs.
It hurts us professors, too: our wages are 50% or less of what we could demand in the private sector, because there are so many qualified candidates. We can’t quit and get new jobs (I’m trying right now – my school has problems) because of the huge influx of good people desperate for the job they’ve trained for all their lives.
It’s exhausting.
PZ, I raise to you the ghost of searches future: I am on a committee that is about to bring in applicants for a search that was a FAILED SEARCH FROM LAST YEAR. OOOOoooooOOOOOoooooOOOOO. (ghost noise)
I have always been distressed by the number of applicants who have apparently not actually read:
1) the job description,
or
2) the list of materials they should include with their applications
@strangerinastrangeland #17:
Someone is thinking ahead to the combination of conditions which will dominate in Bangladesh once climate change has had sufficient impact upon sea levels.
I don’t really get it. That sounds awesome! That means all the choices available are really good, right? (Sounds like you could just pick randomly or something at that point and save the bother)
If people somehow turn that perfect-sounding situation into misery…I don’t know what to say, I don’t understand o.O