I exercised the better part of my free thought this weekend on how I could've written Friday's post more forcefully. Like others, I'm happy with the conversation it inspired—but the inspirational object had some real problems. (It annoyed Tomemos, a dubious achievement given how fair-minded and even-keeled he is.) So here's a more concrete example of the undeservedness of which I wrote:
Imagine a job advertised as follows:
Medium-sized state school seeks specialist in 19th Century American literature with an emphasis on post-Civil War authors. Candidate should be able to teach interdisciplinary American Studies courses in tandem with members of the History department. An emphasis on minoritarian literatures is welcome but not required. (I know that doesn't read like an actual advertisement, but I'm running a thought experiment here: verisimilitude's not required.)
I apply for this job and am frank about my qualifications: I can teach late 19th Century American literature; as an historicist, I know how American culture is understood and taught in American Studies, History and—because of my dissertation's emphasis on evolutionary theory—History of Science departments; I possess considerable expertise in African-American literature of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, but know little about the period's other minoritarian literatures.
The hiring committee reads my honest assessment of strengths and weaknesses and requests an interview. On the phone, they inform me that I'm not exactly what they're looking for, but that there are eight other equally quasi-qualified candidates, so I have a shot at landing the position. (For the moment, pretend that we're all unpublished and have comparably strong dissertations.)
During my interview at the MLA, one of the interviewers notices that I helped design the curriculum for the Literary Journalism department. He asks what my exact role was, and I answer him honestly: I helped refine and finalize the syllabi for the two introductory courses; I co-designed the upper-division course on the Ethics & Evolution of Literary Journalism; &c. Over the next fifteen minutes, it becomes clear to them that I could design and manage the undergraduate program in creative nonfiction they've been trying to establish, and before the interview concludes, they offer me the position, complete with pre-approved tenure and a 1-1 teaching load. (Shut it! This is my thought experiment.)
Were this to happen, would I deserve the position advertised? I'm as quasi-qualified as the other applicants, but none of them could've known that this department intended on starting a creative nonfiction program. I would've lucked into the position, then, because I'd be no more quasi-qualified than any of my competitors. I merely would've filled a void no one who applied knew needed filling.
Obviously, I'm not saying I haven't worked hard—I mean, I slacked a bit during chemo and while rehabbing, but I did keep teaching (although the dissertation ground to a painful halt)—but given the circumstances above, I can't claim I deserve the job in any meaningful sense. I'm no more qualified for the job as advertised than my competition, therefore I don't deserve it any more than they do.
Does this make more sense, or am I still missing something fundamental? (If I am, please don't hesitate to tell me. I'm not stubborn, merely dumb.)
I think the ire of the jobless is the belief that this frequently occurs: ... "a situation in which hypothetical Scott is clearly inferior to several of the other candidates on the stated qualifications, but gets the job anyway."
Absolutely. But this is problematic. People routinely overestimate their own accomplishments and self-worth -- there's considerable social psychology research on this -- and have a great deal of difficulty comparing it to the work of others with any reliability, consistency or fairness. Even if they know who the successful candidate is, unless there's an immense and obvious difference in quantifiable credentials (aka published work), many are going to see it as random, at best. But if hiring were a simple matter of weighing c.v.s, then interviews wouldn't be necessary at all, much less campus visits that cost thousands of dollars and hundreds of expensive academic-hours.
Posted by: Jonathan Dresner | Monday, 10 December 2007 at 01:46 PM
I've been thinking about this discussion a fair bit. I think I come down somewhere close to Jonathan, e.g., sympathetic to Scott's point but thinking he's making it a bit strongly. I think it's right that the people who get good tenure-track jobs should know better than to buy too much into a meritocratic story of how the right person won out. (Though a side point: when you yourself have good fortune of any kind, by definition, the right person won out. If I'm playing no limit hold'em, and I get AA for my hole cards, it's a righteous thing. If it's the guy across the table, the devil is at fault.)
But I think it's crucial first of all to make a distinction between all candidates with the minimum qualifications for a listing and the short list that results from a search process. Honestly, Scott, when you see a full applicant pool for a post, even after you exclude the people who simply don't meet the basic requirement of an ad, you've got a fairly significant number who are NOT the equals of the top 15-20% of the pool, and where there is broad consensus on the candidates who are weak. I'm talking people who have cover letters that are almost unreadable, people with really weak or boring scholarly work, people who can't describe a course they'd like to teach to save their lives, people who come off as frankly unbalanced. But on paper, they're "qualified": they have doctorates, they studied in the appropriate field of specialization.
When you press beyond that to the part of the applicant pool that are more equivalent on a basic level, there are still unannounced selection principles that aren't totally random or unfair. A department that was heavily oriented toward a particular methodological specialization might wish very much for someone who does a different kind of work, but not want to put that in the ad. Why? Because you don't want to preclude some really interesting person applying who is nevertheless doing similar kind of work to other people in that department. Why tie your hands that way?
I also have to say that on occasion, you meet with someone who looks awesome on paper only to find that they're just awful in terms of communicating coherently in person. Knocking that person off the short list isn't random or arbitrary: they failed at some crucial competency that can't be represented well in the initial round of applications.
But yes, beyond that? Sure, people don't get posts for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with their quality as a candidate, and they get posts for the same reason. I applied for the job I hold twice; the first year, I got no interview at all, simply because I was a year away from finishing and the second time I had finished. I wasn't any different in between the two years as a person. I feel good about my equivalence to some people who were hired in good jobs in the years I was on the market. I also feel there are people with good jobs who are far smarter, more productive and more capable than I, and some people I know whose work I rate highly who have jobs not nearly so favorable as mine. And yes, a lot of that comes down to the randomness of many things: weird "slantings" of a post that are the product of 10 or 20 people trying to make decisions, the petty opinion of some important person, the history of a particular search, and so on.
Are you under the illusion that other professions function differently than this? In one sense, they do in that most are less a closed shop. There are more ways into good law firms, for example. But any process where there are many highly qualified applicants and few available postings, where merit is the supposed filter for selection, is going to come down to fractional, imaginary or arbitrary distinctions at the end of things.
Posted by: Timothy Burke | Monday, 10 December 2007 at 02:50 PM
Another way to come at it. Let's suppose Scott plants a bug in the room where ten faculty members come together to discuss the final three candidates who have given job talks, etc., in response to the ad above, and the resulting conversation goes like this:
Professor Plum: Well, all of the job talks were really excellent, I thought. Really exciting, but also, very different from each other. Makes it hard to pick a favorite!
Professor Scarlet: Yes. Though I did notice that the students didn't seem that interested in Mr. Jones.
Colonel Mustard: Really? The students in my seminar all liked his talk very much.
Professor Scarlet: Not mine! But the undergraduate major committee did give us a ranking, at any rate--though they also said they liked them all.
Professor Vermillion: Ahem. I did notice that the committee's attendance at the talks was somewhat spotty, and they did stand up Ms. Smith at the lunch we scheduled for them. I think we should take their recommendations with a grain of salt.
Professor Polka Dot: Well, I was also impressed at Ms. Smith's ability with information technology, and her ideas about using blogs and wikis. The other two candidates don't do any of that.
Colonel Mustard: I suppose. I'm not very excited by that kind of thing. Mr. Jones certainly has some great ideas for innovative courses, however.
Professor Vermillion: Yes, yes. But you know, Mr. Lopez was very thoughtful about our long-running problems with the American literature survey. I really feel he could revive that course nicely.
Professor Scarlet: I know I'm not really supposed to be this explicit about this issue, but I am the only woman in a ten-person department. It might be nice to try to move a little on that point.
Professor Vermillion: Yes, but our Latino students also made a very strong plea for Mr. Lopez on similar grounds.
Professor Grey: [wakes briefly] Did you notice none of them mentioned Hawthorne? And there was a lot of that fancy theory crap in all their talks. I think we should keep looking. Plus they've only got one book each so far. [nods off again]
[brief silence]
Professor Polka Dot: Also, by the way, I heard from some of the people in the History Department who came to the talks. They really felt that Mr. Jones could help plug some holes in their antebellum courses, and they all liked his work more than the other two."
--------
Ok, so aside from Professor Grey, are any of these people making value statements which are wholly arbitrary or transparently unfair? But none of that was in the advertisement, partly because none of these comparisons become meaningful or tangible until there are three specific people who are otherwise favorably comparable in talent, ability, knowledge, competency, potential. On the other hand, because there hasn't been a prior discussion of how to weight any of those considerations, it's all going to be very ad hoc: who speaks most persuasively in the meeting, who is more senior or less so, who is more respected by the majority or less so, who 'got their pick' in a previous search or less so, and so on: all of which amounts to an arbitrary or random weighting from the perspective of the candidate. But it doesn't mean that the specificities of the comparisons being drawn were arbitrary or without defensible meaning in the specific context of the institution doing the hiring.
Posted by: Timothy Burke | Monday, 10 December 2007 at 03:21 PM
From the top:
Rich,
You're writing about a single trial, which will look fairly random even if it isn't.
Sadly, actual job information is very difficult to come by ... even when it's about your own department. I wish someone whose grasp of statistics is better than mine would come along and do a study.
Sisyphus,
I've nothing to add to that. I simply wish I'd said it first.
Sur la carte,
None of us "deserve" jobs, which is to say, none of us are entitled to a position if the market doesn't demand someone with our particular job skills.
Absolutely true, and I think what Rich was getting at earlier (later?) by alluding to the scarcity of positions even in a socialist economy. No one "deserves" anything in economic terms -- they make what the market will bear. But we usually only think of the job market in loose, baggy terms, i.e. we call it a "market" but we really don't believe it is, because it's haunted by our longstanding belief in its meritocratic nature.
Conversely, there does not exist a single job out there that the hypothetical you gets and the real you doesn't.
This is what I mean about these conversations being haunted by market logic -- as Sisyphus notes above, there's a chance that hypothetical me doesn't land a position if it's in a department rife with discord about literary journalism/creative nonfiction, especially if some of the English players in that drama are on the committee. Or maybe one of the members simply has a very low opinion of literary journalism, and thus an equally low opinion of people who would teach it, &c.
It can never be concluded definitively that being more or less qualified was the reason for getting or not getting any particular job.
How can this and #2 both be true?
SB,
While, as a past member of search committees in history, I would tend to agree that at the short list level and sight unseen, the candidates tend to be equally qualified, getting to a short list usually involves the sifting through of a dozens of writing samples to find the best ones.
While there certainly are some unqualified people out there -- as Jonathan discusses below, and which I'll get to shortly -- I think the lack of disciplinary standards even makes this difficult to determine. What counts as "poor" and to whom? For example, were I to have read this essay in someone's file, I'd have dismissed it as tendentious work of someone without much promise. Obviously, the editors of PMLA disagree. Who's correct?
That said, this sounds right to me:
I would argue that the people my department puts on its short list are more qualified for our position than the others in the pool, usually through a combination of meeting the qualifications listed in the ad and through the quality of their research and writing.
Jonathan and Timothy, more shortly.
Posted by: SEK | Monday, 10 December 2007 at 06:19 PM
Really - I continue to be frightened. The unknowable factors are what haunt me. And, I do wonder how often SCs interview someone who is different from the other candidate but then is not hired b/c s/he isn't what the SC wanted. Maybe I'm paranoid, but I can't help but think of what happened to a friend of mine. "B" does very cutting-edge, interdisciplinary work, is a dynamic teacher and speaker, and is just flat out wonderful. "B" had almost no slots left open for MLA interviews. "B" had over 10 on-campus interviews. "B" wasn't offered a job at one of these institutions and was told that his/her work is too different from what they do. "B" ended up with a great post-doc, but was left wondering if the campus visit happened b/c SCs were curious but not as interested in what "B" does.
I'm probably paranoid. I do interdisciplinary work, too, and I wonder how it looks in my materials. Will I get looked at b/c I do something different even though I'm not exactly what the advertisement asked for? Possibly, if I consider where I have interviews and what those advertisements looked like. And I have to wonder, if I'm the person who was meant for that job. Or, if it is just happy coincidence. Or, if maybe the SC is just curious about me b/c I'm interdisciplinary in a way that is not the norm for my area (comp/rhet). I don't know. I probably can't really speculate. I just want a job.
Posted by: k8 | Monday, 10 December 2007 at 07:06 PM
"This is what I mean about these conversations being haunted by market logic"
But it's not really market logic. Calling it that brings up left/right political issues that just confuse things more, because people don't want to be perceived as saying something like "Hey, I earned my tenure track job! And if you didn't then work harder you slacker, while I go sign up for Republican Party membership." I still think that something from Rawls offers the best chance of working this out. These conversations are haunted by economic logic, but that economic logic might operate just as forcefully in a socialist economy.
Imagine that you are a socialist expediter of some sort, the kind of person who anarchists would spit on just as much as they do capitalist big shots now but hey, it's the work you want to do. So a just-graduated Ph.D. -- let's call him or her "SEK" for some reason -- comes to you and says they want a job and don't want to sit around for years competing with all the other people who want the same jobs. What can you do?
Well, you can offer a bribe, out of SEK's share of the society's extra resources, for SEK to do something else. Such a bribe can't be the creation of a new job for SEK, of course, because then you would truly be in post-scarcity conditions -- productivity is so high that each person essentially can be supported no matter what they want to do. But you can offer a large one-time cash payment for SEK to take a boring programming job or something. But SEK says no, they want to be an English professor. So SEK has moved ahead of the line past everyone willing to take the bribe, at the cost of getting that cash. (By the way, in the real world, this is how activist nonprofit groups manage to pay their employees a fairly consistent 2/3 of what they'd get elsewhere -- because they want to do the work.)
But SEK still is waiting around for a job with all the other people who've refused the bribe, because so many people want to spend their lives reading Jack London or something. And SEK complains that they really deserve the job. (This is how we know it isn't the real SEK.) SEK has talent that would make them do this job better than the other applicants.
So now we find out what kind of socialism it is, in part. Let's say you can detect that SEK really does seem more talented. Do you give him or her the job? Putting the most talented people in jobs that they are good at increases productivity -- an odd concept for English professors in a socialism, but still generally true -- and gets you closer to post-scarcity. Or do you tell SEK that it's just luck that he or she was born with his or her talents, and that social solidarity requires that he or she have an even chance with all the other qualified people?
OK, boring thought experiments like this have nothing to do with the real world of mysterious academic hiring practices to be complained about, right? Well, it seems to me that your answer to the last question determines whether you should either want to reform current practices -- to make them more meritocratic, or at least better at detecting talent -- or whether you really would rather have them be truly random among qualified applicants, like a lottery. And your answer sort of shows which aspect of "deserves" you may be objecting to, beyond the declasse mores bit in which no one is supposed to publicly say they deserve anything.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Monday, 10 December 2007 at 07:42 PM
I think understanding this is the key to how you're getting probably wrong here. Basically this is based on what I've learned about probability from playing poker:
Better players win slightly more often than inferior players, win slightly more money when they win, and lose slightly less money when they lose, but they still have losing sessions, just as bad players have winning sessions [that's why you need a bankroll, for example]. Thus, if you have a winning session, it doesn't mean you're good at poker, and if you have a losing one, it doesn't mean you that you're not good a poker. You can't conclude anything definitively about the quality of your play based on the results of a single session. But if you're losing consistently, it's cause for concern, and if you're winning consistently, it's a good sign.
I'd rather not post the numbers publicly, but if you ask me personally, I'll tell you how much money I won over my career playing online poker, and how bad my biggest losing session was. The former is about 15-20 times the latter, but the latter's pretty big. When you play medium stakes hold 'em, even the best players can expect down-streaks of 300 big bets. But even if you know they're coming, when they actually come you have to at last be slightly concerned that you're not playing your A game.
To bring the question back to the job market, imagine two candidates, one slightly more qualified than the other. I'm picking totally arbitrary numbers to make the calculations easier, but the conclusion should be the same for any numbers that don't somehow put the probably of getting a job at >100% or <0%:
In a given year, Candidate A (hypothetical Scott), without the lit-J experience, has a 50% chance of landing a job on his other merits and specializations.
In a given year, Candidate B (real Scott), with the lit-J experience, has the same 50% chance of landing a job on his other merits and specializations. There is a 15% chance that his lit-J experience will be the dealmaker in a job and a 5% chance that it will be a dealbreaker (because someone on a search committee has a grudge against lit-J), for a net probability of 60%.
Candidate B will get more jobs on average than Candidate A. If they both go on the job market every year for 10 years, Candidate B will average 6 jobs, and Candidate A will average 5 jobs. [#2 above]
However, if Candidate B gets a job, he won't be able to determine if this was the 45% of the time that he got that job on his own merits (and didn't lose it because lit-J was a dealbreaker) or the 15% of the time that lit-J was the dealmaker. 3/4 of his jobs will have nothing to do with his additional qualification, and 1/4 will have everything to do with it, but he won't be able to tell which is which based solely on the fact that he got a job. [#3 above]
Nonetheless, it's still the case that, if you don't know whether you're Candidate A or Candidate B, it's more likely that you're Candidate B if you get a job than if you don't. Imagine that both candidates go on the job market for 10 years. 11 total job offers will be made on average, 5 to Candidate A and 6 to Candidate B; if you get a job, there's a 6/11 chance that you got one of the jobs given to Candidate B, i.e. about a 54.5% chance that you're Candidate B. 9 total rejections will be made on average, 5 to Candidate A and 4 to Candidate B; if you don't get a job, there's a 4/9 chance that you got one of the jobs given to Candidate B, i.e. about a 44.4% chance that you're Candidate B. So, if you get a job, it's slightly more likely that you're slightly more qualified, but it's not definite.
Similar results if Candidate A has a specialization in one subject, such that there is an x% chance that subject will be a deal-maker, and Candidate B has a specialization in another subject, such that there is a y% chance that subject will be a deal-maker. Sometimes x=y, but the rest of the time x>y and Candidate A is more likely to get a job, or vice versa. The fact that it's hard to KNOW whether x>y or vice versa is irrelevant. Also, another factor to consider is that part of getting qualified is marketing: judging the state of the discipline, and trying to draw an accurate conclusion about whether x>y before you commit to either x or y. Despite the fact that this is extremely hard to do with much accuracy, more qualified candidates will do slightly better on average at making this judgment.
[Side note: I will have a better chance of getting a job of I don't waste time on things like this excessively long comment]
Posted by: surlacarte | Tuesday, 11 December 2007 at 02:19 AM
Again, from the search committee perspective, I have to tell you, you would not believe how many people apply for jobs who are not formally qualified for them, and then of those who are formally qualified, how many applications reveal a major inadequacy that would prevent us from offering an interview. Seriously. In a position announcement for which we receive 150 applications, maybe 70 of those people actually meet the criteria in the ad. (So while I am sympathetic to people who are distressed because they don't receive acknowledgements from the advertising department, I also resent having to write letters to people who applied for a job for which they were clearly not prepared). Once you are down to the 70 people, 30 candidates, MAYBE, have an acceptable writing sample. We see writing samples with grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, major rhetorical flaws. We see prose in all kinds of states of disrepair. And that's completely aside from the merit of what they are trying to say (which we can often not distinguish due to the poor writing). So looking at the 20% of a pool of applicants who are qualified by the criteria of the ad and have demonstrated the capacity to write and think at the level our department requires, if at that point you want to say "no one deserves a job more than any other," I can start to get on board. Even so, the differences between the people who make it to the conference interview stage among that 20% are usually pretty marked. Often it is as simple as the fact that the interviewees have the Ph.D. in hand or a year or two of their own classroom behind them. Sometimes it is the quality of the letters (not necessarily the prestige of the recommender, but the detail level of what he or she says about the candidate). Then we go to conference interviews, and discover that some of the candidates simply do not have the personality to do well in the classroom at our institution, or can't think on their feet, or don't know or can't explain why their research is significant. In my mind, if you can't tell me in 5 minutes or less why your dissertation is significant, you deserve the job less than someone who can. Sorry if that is elitist. Personality issues are difficult, because someone who is a poor "fit" for us might be a better "fit" for a different institution; even so, flexibility to get along with people in different speech situations is an important skill. Again, in my mind, people who have it probably deserve the job more than people who don't. In my experience of hiring, the last 10 or so people in the search are usually equally qualified, and it's true that at that point we start looking for reasons to eliminate someone. But there's a huge difference between that and saying any candidate doesn't deserve or does deserve any position as much or as little as anyone else.
Posted by: SB | Tuesday, 11 December 2007 at 06:06 AM
As my adviser had to frequently remind his students - "there's no rhyme or reason to the job market."
Posted by: Foscavista | Tuesday, 11 December 2007 at 11:24 AM
Sur la Carte is right, and he puts his finger on a conversational block that's caused a number of odd moments in this discussion (the false choice and straw man that I called you on in the other thread, for instance). Basically, saying that some candidates are better than others, and that those candidates are more likely to be hired, does not imply that those who are not hired are not superior candidates.
Matt presented a mathematical analysis; I'd look at it as a logical syllogism. Let's suppose a simplistic category, "superior candidates," which will mean candidates whose dissertation, teaching record, and interview skills put them in the top 80% (say) of all candidates in a given year. (Again, I know this is simplistic; I'll discuss that in a bit.) Then, let's suppose the following, which I don't actually believe but which helps clarify matters:
1. All candidates offered jobs are superior candidates.
2. No one is offered a job who is not a superior candidate.
…and that, this time on the job market:
3. Xavier is offered a job.
4. Yancy is not offered a job.
From this we can conclude that Xavier is a superior candidate. But can we conclude the converse--that Yancy is not a superior candidate?
No, because universals can't be fully converted. Just as all mortal things are not men, all superior candidates are not hired. In a particularly tight job market, it's even possible that a minority of superior candidates would be hired. Nevertheless, in the system above, being hired would still be proof that you were superior--something to feel proud of, whether or not you e-mail the listserv about it.
Now, we live in a system where non-superior people do sometimes get hired, plus some of the criteria that define "superior" vary depending on the institution, department, field, year, and God knows what else. However, from what SB has said, and from my experience attending job talks, and from common sense, I feel confident in saying that some candidates are generally considered superior to others regardless of those variables, and that they are more likely to be hired than those who are not. So it is possible to say that some candidates are superior to others, but also that many superior candidates will not get hired. In fact, it is logical to look someone in the eye who hasn't gotten a job and say, "Don't worry about it, you'll get hired soon. I know that you're a superior candidate; you just got unlucky this time."
Posted by: tomemos | Tuesday, 11 December 2007 at 11:34 AM
The only problem with saying that, Tomemos, is the ratio of chances to time available.
In a given year, a "superior candidate" is perhaps likely to see 5-10 jobs for which they are in fact a superior candidate, e.g., strongly match the position as defined. (The additional complication of multiple tiers of institutional quality in the marketplace adds another headache: candidates who are "superior" for top-tier jobs may in fact not be competitive for bottom-tier jobs.)
You have perhaps four years in which you are a superior candidate, after which the length of time between completion of doctorate and acquisition of a position begins in and of itself to affect whether you are judged to be superior. Moreover, that's four years in which you need to continue to do the things that define someone as an active, productive scholar, which can be extremely difficult if you are not in an academic position in the first place.
So at best, the superior candidate gets 40 chances or so. It then becomes a question of how many superior candidates there are out there in that time period. If it's 30, then eventually everyone "gets lucky". If it's 80, it is not logical to look someone in the eye and say "You'll get hired soon", because the fact is that half of the superior candidates will never be hired.
Posted by: Timothy Burke | Tuesday, 11 December 2007 at 02:06 PM
Tim: Fair point. So, my optimism probably isn't justified. I stand by the rest of it, though.
Posted by: tomemos | Tuesday, 11 December 2007 at 04:30 PM
Based on my personal experience (in the physical sciences, not humanities/social sciences, so caveat lector), I feel that SEK's initial claim ought to be turned on its head: "You are equally deserving of the jobs you don't get, as those you do." To me, there is a world of difference (psychologically, at least) between "equally deserving" and "equally undeserving".
In 1.5 years, I applied to roughly 40 postdoctoral positions, had 4 interviews, and received 2 offers. What of the other 38? In my head, I blamed the various search committees for not seeing the brilliance of the candidate they had before them; but at the same time, I didn't really expect to receive 40 offers. Some of the applications were a bit of a stretch, but I didn't know what the applicant pool was like, so I allowed myself a few "why the hell not?" applications. In other circumstances, it seemed like the job notice was individually tailored for me, and yet I still wasn't hired. So I admit that the end result of my outlook and SEK's may be the same: finding the "perfect storm" of specified qualifications, unspecified intangibles, and search committee idiosyncracies may be a crapshoot, but knowing--or just fooling myself into thinking--that I "deserved" nearly every position still made me feel better while I was in the midst of rejection after rejection.
And as it turns out, once I applied to "enough" jobs, the "match" emerged. It was in part my more generalized computer programming/data analysis skills that landed me the job, as opposed to my grasp of the minutiae of my dissertation topic. And even though my research now is drastically different from what I did in grad school, it helped that the professor was somewhat familiar with my dissertation topic as well. Probably the most unique aspect of my current position, however, was how the job search was handled. To my knowledge, every other position to which I applied had a pool of candidates applying in parallel, and thus they were competing against one another. On the other hand, applications for my position were handled "serially". That is, a single candidate was interviewed and assessed--on their own terms--to see if they were a match for the position. If that person was rejected, a second applicant was sought, and so on.
That alternate method really intrigues me, and I find it in some ways a much more objective process. But I'm probably just saying that because that's how I got my job.
Posted by: KWK | Wednesday, 12 December 2007 at 01:39 PM