I wrote before with some advice for job candidates on surviving the search process while preserving a modicum of sanity. Now that the work of my own search committee is underway, I've been thinking about what search committees can do to help job candidates in their quest for sanity. There's a lot about the search process that inevitably produces anxiety for candidates. When every job ad pulls in 100-250 applications (more for some 20th-century jobs), it's inevitable that good people will get cut even in the first round, many for reasons that have less to do with the quality of their work than with their ability to demonstrate that quality in the c.v. and/or in the language of the job letter. This isn't the fault of individual search committees: it's built in to the current structure of the academic job market. But, like so much else about academic labor, a large part of the suffering experienced by candidates on the market is a product of numerous small indignities inflicted on them, too often needlessly, by search committees. It's the death of a thousand cuts. Small changes in the way those of us on search committees interact with candidates could help those candidates a lot, just by making them feel like we view them as human beings.
Communicate with candidates. When you're searching for jobs, a million anxieties about procedure fill your mind. Did I send that letter to the right address? Did I address it to the right person? Did I send everything that the ad asked for? In the digital age, sometimes it's easier for candidates to double-check these things: you can also look through your email or check your interfolio receipt. But the digital age adds an additional fear: did the files I sent actually get there? At bare minimum, then, search committees should acknowledge all materials they receive. It's not hard to write up a quick, 2-3 sentence form letter that can be copied-and-pasted into response emails. In case anyone thinks this is too much work, I'll make it easy for you:
Dear [Candidate],
Thank you for your interest in our department's job opening in [name of field]. We have received all required materials for your application/In order for your application to be complete, we still require your [name of missing materials]. The search committee will be contacting candidates from whom we would like additional materials within [timeline].
Sincerely,
[Whoever's in charge of the emails]
Cut, paste, rinse, repeat. Similarly, if you know you are no longer interested in a candidate, let them know, so that they can stop hoping. While you know pretty well by the time March has rolled round with nary an email from a search committee that you probably won't be getting that job, there's always something particularly demoralizing about the flood of rejection letters that pours in after the campus visit window has closed. I know that some HR departments forbid search committees from sending out rejections until a candidate has accepted an offer, but I suspect that this isn't the majority of institutions. If your school doesn't have a rule against sending out rejections, then you can make it easier for job candidates to manage the emotional toll of rejections, and the terrible anxiety of not knowing, by sending a simple rejection email as soon as you know you will not be pursuing a person's candidacy.
For those of you who perhaps ask your department's administrative assistant to handle emails to candidates: make sure that you communicate frequently with that person to be sure that the emails are being sent out in a timely fashion. In fact, ask to be cc'd on the emails, so that you know that they are going out, and going out to everyone. Your administrative assistant likely has no first-hand experience of the horrors of being on the academic job market. This means that they might not understand the importance of those emails, and therefore might not make them the priority. More importantly, your administrative assistant is likely over-worked and under-paid. This is a good reason to do the work of sending out these emails yourself, but if you choose to ask your administrative assistant to do the work, it's still your job to make sure that the emails get sent. And if your administrative assistant helps you with this, make sure to bring them a bottle of wine or a gift card to thank them for doing the extra work--think of it as a gift from you and the candidates.
Be reasonable in your demands. This means a couple of different things. First, it means that you shouldn't ask for specialized materials at early stages of the process. The first cut in the search process is brutal: a committee wants to get a pool of 150-200 candidates down to 30-40 that they'll look at closely. A committee does not have time to read a job letter, c.v., teaching philosophy, 2 syllabi for job-specific courses, a research statement, a 25-page writing sample, and a teaching portfolio in the first round: thus, if you're on a search committee, you shouldn't ask for these things. I was once on a committee that asked for a lot of material upfront, with the reasoning that it would save the committee time after the first cut--they wouldn't have to ask for the materials. But in trying to save the committee the week or so it would take the candidates to send their additional materials (and usually it was a lot less than a week), the committee was creating more work for the candidates, both by asking them to have at the ready writing samples and recommendation letters (which always come in late) earlier in the process than is necessary, and by adding more materials that the candidates had to assemble (and thus worry about) in the early stages. In the search process, the committees have almost all the power, and the candidates almost none. For those of us who actually care about this power imbalance--which, in the humanities, probably should be all of us--here's a good rule of thumb: it's never okay to make less work for yourself by making more work for the candidates. It's just asshole-ish behavior. I don't think most search committees who ask for lots of materials necessarily think about the fact that they're creating more work for the candidates, but that's kind of the problem. If you're on a search committee, it's your responsibility to think about how your requests are going to affect the candidate. If nothing else, those of us on search committees should always ask ourselves: (1) why do I want this, (2) am I actually going to read it, (3) how much work does this create for the candidate, and, given (1) and (2), is it really necessary?
Second, being reasonable also means looking at the materials you do request with a certain sympathy for the candidate's situation. By this I don't mean that, because searching for jobs sucks, we should keep every candidate alive out of pity--that obviously won't work. But it does mean that we should be careful about the kind of criteria we use to bounce candidates out of the pool. I have known people to throw out applications for things like incorrectly addressed job letters (i.e., job letters accidentally addressed to a different school) and other typos. I've also known people to throw out applications for not sufficiently "responding" to the language of the job ad. Here's the reason I disagree with this kind of practice: in a good year, a search candidate is sending out 20-30 job applications (my biggest year was 42), all due between October 15th and November 1st. In the process of customizing each letter for each job, mistakes are bound to happen. If a person otherwise looks like a viable candidate, I'm just not too worried if they accidentally addressed the letter to a school that precedes mine in the alphabet. It's not a sign that, as one person told me, the candidate "is not serious about the job"; it's just a sign that they're applying to a lot of jobs. I'm generally going to start from the assumption that everyone who submits themselves to the tortures of the job market is serious about every (any) job. As far as the demand that candidates respond to the job ad specifically, this runs afoul of the rule of thumb above--it's asking the candidate to do a lot of extra work (given the number of letters they have to send out in any given 1-month period) to make the job of the search committee easier. This demand also creates a pressure for candidates to misrepresent themselves in order to show that they "fit." Recently, Rebecca Schuman devised an excellent plan for taking some of the time out of the search process for the candidates by moving to a "common dossier clearinghouse" in which candidates could simply upload their materials, and departments could access the materials of those who fit their criteria. This would do away with job letters that responded to specific job ads; it would also make the whole process a lot more straightforward for everyone involved.
Drop the "best person for the job" bullshit. Academics in the humanities are experts at exposing faulty assumptions, subjecting "common sense" to critique, and demystifying ideologies. (This is why we're so much fun at parties.) And yet, somehow, that critical mind flies out the window once we're on search committees, and suddenly we accept as truth the vague, ideologically-freighted assumption that we're looking for "the best person for the job." (For the record, I'm not innocent of this: I've used this phrase more than once, though I'm learning to hate myself a little bit every time it escapes my lips.) We would not accept a first-year paper that argued that people should watch hockey simply because it's "the best sport," without a carefully articulated explanation of what "best" means in this context. Yet somehow we don't hold ourselves to the same standard. The fact is that, if we actually knew what we meant when we said we wanted the "best" candidate, we wouldn't say that we wanted the "best" candidate: we'd say we wanted the candidate who fulfilled a specific set of criteria. Of course, I doubt any search committee could actually agree on those criteria, since we all tend to have very different ideas about what constitutes good scholarship and good pedagogy, so instead we resort to the language of "the best candidate" to hide that fact that we really mean a candidate who makes the most number of people on the committee/in the department happy while pissing the least number of people off. To be less cynical about it, there's an inevitably subjective component of the job search that is a product of the fact that a search committee is made up of people with specific perspectives, biases, preferences, and aversions. Even the best-intentioned of us can't remove all personal bias from a search, no matter how mindful we try to be of them. I've been on two committees in subsequent years searching in the same field for two different hires. We had a lot of repeat applications, and in some cases candidates who were cut in the first round in the first search made it significantly further in the second. The work didn't magically get better from one year to the other; the composition of the committee changed. So the language of "the best person for the job" really doesn't make a lot of sense.
We can argue that this is "just semantics," but I think this attitude actually has a negative impact on the search process and on the psyches of job seekers, because it allows us on search committees to justify our cuts by saying that candidates aren't "good enough": I find it hard to believe that this attitude doesn't affect the way we treat eliminated candidates in a variety of intangible ways. So I think we can do a service to job seekers by adjusting our perspective on the situation. In any given job pool, probably 1/4 - 1/3 of the candidates would be perfectly suitable to the job; and maybe half of those would be great at it. We might be able to make fine distinctions between them--it's in fact the work of the search committee to do so--but that doesn't change the fact that a lot of candidates have done the work and have the skill to do a great job in the position. The sad part of being on a search committee (and in part why, I think, we desperately try to convince ourselves that the search is a straight-forward meritocracy) is that we can only give one job when there are so many deserving candidates. This is what we should focus on when we are searching. We're not trying to find the "best" candidate: we're trying to make sure that the one job we have to give goes to one of the many people who will do a great job at it. When we reject people, it's not because they aren't the best; it's because the realities of the situation require us to, and so for a variety of reasons that have less to do with outright merit and more to do with the particularities of our situation, we've decided that we prefer one very qualified candidate over another.
Being on a search committee is hard--not anywhere near as hard as applying for jobs, of course, but hard because otherwise well-meaning people are put in a position where we have to say "no" to people who don't deserve to be rejected, and because we have to put people through a process that (if we got our jobs in the last decade and a half) we know to be dehumanizing and cruel. And because we're generally pretty smart people, we're very good at coming up with rationalizations for the process to protect us from the fact that we're participating in this cruelty, that we're inflicting suffering on others. Within the context of the search committee itself, there's only so much we can do about the structural evil. But the one thing we can do in that context is to be critical of our own rationalizations, assumptions, and process, in order to treat our candidates as humanely as the situation permits. We need to recognize that the people whose materials we look at are not initiates beneath us, only the best of whom will ascend to our ranks: they are colleagues, many of whom as skilled (some more so) in their fields as we are in ours, distinct from us only by virtue of one search committee's decision. Ultimately, then, when we look at candidates we need to have our own search-committee-version of the golden rule in mind: do unto candidates as you wish search committees had done unto you.
