Advice for the Job Season: Interviewing

Heather Cox Richardson

My primary advice for interviewing is to tell candidates that THE SEARCH COMMITTEE MEMBERS WANT YOU TO DO WELL!!! Please, please hear that. It is excruciating to have candidates treat an interview like a comprehensive exam before hostile examiners.

I promise you, we did not just slog through hundreds of pages of recommendation letters and your prose, pick you out of hundreds of applicants, fly to some god-forsaken icy city, and swill cheap coffee and bagels in a cold hotel room waiting for you because we are eager to humiliate you. While it is possible that there is someone in that room who doesn’t like your work, the majority of the committee has gone to the mat to get you onto the interview list, and those search committee members are secretly praying that you will hit a home run. They are on your side.

You may well not know which members those are, though, so do not make any assumptions about who are your friends and who are potential enemies on a committee. Treat everyone as interested colleagues. Even the old jerk in the corner asking impossible questions might be on your side. And if not, the chances are good that everyone else in the room recognizes that s/he’s an old curmudgeon, and are hoping that you will handle her/him with aplomb.
The committee members want you to do well, so help them out. Almost certainly there will be faculty members from different fields in the room who only know your field generally. So explain immediately what you do, and why it is important to someone outside your specialty. Do not make them plead with you to articulate why what you do is significant. (Clearly, they think it is, or they would not have brought you in for an interview. They are trying to see how well you can articulate historical concepts.)

Then listen to their questions. They are trying to draw you out, to see what inspires you, to see what kind of a colleague you will be. If someone is trying to trip you up, others will be trying to toss you softballs. (If that fighting is obvious, you should have real reservations about joining the department, by the way.) Work with them collaboratively as a colleague to create a conversation, not as a student being examined. As they are interviewing you, you are interviewing them. Do they get along? Are they smart? Do they seem to have a sense of humor? Are they people you would like to see in the hallways for the next 20 years? Sometimes an interview tells you that you do not want the job no matter how badly you think you need it; listen to that intuition.

However the interview goes, do not overthink it afterward. So you forgot your coat and had to go back: no one cares. So you could have articulated something better: that happens. So you drew a blank when someone asked you something that should have been obvious: we may not even have noticed. We all recognize that the interview is a strange process and that it’s rare for it to go so brilliantly everyone in the room is blown away.

Finally, do not assume that because you did not get an on-campus interview that you interviewed badly or that your work is somehow less worthy than those who did. The academic pool right now is extraordinarily strong. It’s not uncommon for committees to receive 200-300 applications for an assistant-level post.  Search committees have to make choices by splitting hairs. When you have to cut a pool from a dozen or so candidates to 3, some of the ones who don’t make the cut could just have easily have made it.  The fact that you got an interview at all says that your work impressed enough members of a search committee for them to invest a significant amount of time and effort into it and into you. That’s itself a statement of support.

Roundup: The History and Academic Job Market

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Ryan Cordell, "Useful Resources for the Academic Job Market," Chronicle of Higher Ed, September 26, 2012

Last week on my personal research website I published a link roundup, “Useful Resources for the Academic Job Market.” I prepared this list for a job market workshop offered to graduate students in my department. The post was well received both at Notheastern and on Twitter, and I thought ProfHacker readers might also find it useful. While tailored to graduate students entering the market for the first time, I suspect these resources will be useful to others braving the market as well. This could be considered a “From the Archives” post, as I link to many of my ProfHacker colleague’s best posts on the job market.>>>

Gerry Canavan, "Going on the Job Market, ABD -- II," Inside Higher Ed, September 26, 2012

. . . . Don’t assume you can know in advance where you will be competitive. There are so many different factors at work in these things that you can’t possibly predict in advance which departments will be interested in you and which won’t. You just have to apply everywhere.>>>
Stacey Patton, "Stale Ph.D.'s Need Not Apply," Chronicle of Higher Ed, September 19, 2012

When Harvard University and Colorado State University recently posted job ads indicating that applicants should be very recent recipients of Ph.D.'s, many people saw the ads as confirmation of something they already suspected about the unspoken hiring preferences for entry-level positions in the humanities.>>>

Gwendolyn Beetham, "Recruitment in academia: is there no room for compassion?" Guardian, September 17, 2012

We all know the score: despite the continued growth in postgraduate degrees, full-time permanent positions in academia are increasingly rare. Certainly, to search for work in today's over-saturated academic market, in the depths of a recession, is no easy task – as a newly minted PhD, this is a fact I know all too well. In such a market, every position opening receives scores, if not hundreds, of applications. With so many qualified individuals for each post, the question arises: how can one ethically respond to unsuccessful applicants?>>>

Allen Mikaelian, "AHA and Employment: Recent Activities Concerning the Job Market and the History Student," AHA Today, September 12, 2012

There’s a possible bright spot emerging in the job market. The October issue of Perspective on History last year included 133 job ads, but this year’s issue will feature 189. This does not in itself constitute a breakthrough, and we should point out that what matters most is how many total ads are placed by the end of the season. Still, we hope that this increase over last year’s numbers is the start of a trend. Over the past year, the American Historical Association has been active in addressing the tough academic job market, the single most important issue faced by history students and recent graduates. These efforts have taken place on several fronts.>>>
 
Cathy, "Help wanted: Thoughts on the recent boom in academic public history jobs," History@Work, September 17, 2012

In recent years, the number of tenure track academic jobs in history has dropped to some of the lowest levels in 25 years. In response, Anthony Grafton, James Grossman and Jesse Lemisch have suggested that historians shift their attentions outside of the ivory tower, with Grafton and Grossman encouraging PhDs to get jobs in public history and Lemisch calling for historians to create new public history opportunities. Meanwhile, as they debated these issues, public history became a hot commodity in the academic job market. In 2008, the number of job announcements rose 27.9 percent and last year the number of postings rose significantly again.>>>

Advice for the Job Season: How to Think About Applying for a Job, Part 1

Heather Cox Richardson

The academic job market is in full swing. That’s the good news.

And as usual, there are way too few jobs. That’s the bad.

At this point, I’ve spent significant time on both sides of the hiring equation, and have a few suggestions for navigating the job search.

First of all, you almost certainly will not get your dream job. But please, please hear this: THIS IS NOT BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT A GOOD CANDIDATE!!! It is because there are too few jobs. The C.V.s that come in for a search these days are frighteningly impressive. Yours is one of them. When committees have to choose whom to interview, I promise you they do not look at your materials and say: “Gee, why did this loser apply?!” They say: “And yet another terrific scholar. Fortunately for us, his work doesn’t quite fit what we’re looking for.” And they put your application aside.

While this is incredibly depressing when you’re going through it—and many schools contribute to the darkness by ignoring you, announcing the interview schedule before informing you you’re not on it, and so on—there is one important light to remember. YOU DO NOT WANT A JOB THAT IS NOT A GOOD FIT FOR YOU. I know, I know, you want any job right now. But actually, you really don’t. Unlike many professions, it’s very hard for academics to change institutions. Try moving your family across the country for a job only to tell your partner six months later you hate your department and are going back on the job market to apply for a job on the other side of the country. Not a good idea. If a search committee doesn’t jump at the chance to interview you, you don’t want to interview them, either. The fit would have been a bad one.

Often, by the way, you won’t be able to tell whether or not your work is a good fit with a department. A scholar of the Taiping would seem, for example, to be a good candidate for an advertised job in nineteenth-century Asia. But that same (hypothetical) ad will not have mentioned that the department has a European scholar who is fiercely protective of his favorite course on world revolutions that highlights the Taiping. So even if you look at the description and think the fit should have been perfect, remember that there could have been a wide range of internal reasons you were not.

So if you’re almost certainly not going to get the job you want, or maybe any job, what’s the point in applying? You should consider jobs outside of the academy (more on that later), but you will have a better relationship with the academic job market if you reorient how you think about it.

If you can, try not to see applying for a position just as a job application. It is advertising. You are letting people who are in a position to appreciate the importance of your work know who you are and what you do. Until now, you have interacted primarily with just a handful of scholars, and most of them are at your own university. It’s the right time for you to take your scholarship to the world, and there is no better way to get an audience for it than to hand your materials to specialists around the country who are on search committees. They may not be able even to interview you because you do not fit the job at hand, but they may still be impressed with your materials. They might well remember you when someone asks for a recommendation for a conference panelist, or tell their editors that you have written an interesting manuscript and should be on their radar screens.

The only way to navigate such a bleak job market is to recognize that historians are a large community of scholars—to which you already belong—and that we are eager to hear what you’re bringing to the table.