I see a lot of advice from faculty and professional organizations to people seeking jobs in English departments, but most of the potential feedback for search committees trying to create job postings is buried in discussion boards and wikis where job seekers kvetch about the process. Since I’m looking for a job now and I’ve been on a couple of committees trying to formulate job postings, I thought I might offer a little feedback and advice from the job seeker’s perspective.
It all boils down to telling people what you really want. Of course, that’s not so simple, is it? You may want to offer a broad description to gather a wide range of responses. Or you may be trying to balance the disparate desires of the various faculty in the department. But there are a few things you can do to make sure that you don’t end up having to sort through a big stack of applications that don’t suit your department’s needs.
Establish priorities as clearly as possible. Many listings are confusing because they demand multiple, distantly-related specializations. Others demand relatively specialized skills but then say those will be applied to teaching only introductory courses. I know you’re working in committee, and it’s probably a long, tiring process to produce the listing, but specifying very clearly what qualities are most important and which are truly optional will save the committee work when it comes time to read the applications.
If your school has a mission statement, provide a link for it in the job listing. This is especially important if the mission statement is hard to find and/or that mission is a little different from the common and honorable goal of providing students with a solid liberal arts education.
If your institution has a religious affiliation, listing the mission statement is even more important, especially if you expect applicants to provide a statement of adherence to your school’s particular religious doctrine. It’s helpful to indicate if you only expect a new faculty member to support your school’s mission or if you expect them to be a professed communicant.
It’s also very useful to make sure that you have faculty webpages that are up to date and clearly show the research and teaching interests of your current faculty. If a job seeker sees that her research interests are already well-covered by your department, she can move on to apply to another school. If, however, you want more of the same, you might specifically indicate a desire to continue building in that particular area.
Also, I have been surprised at the number of faculty who are unaware that the job search today takes place primarily online. I do not know a single job seeker (and I know at least a dozen) who consults the MLA print job list. The online MLA job list is updated every Friday, and job seekers consult this weekly. HigherEdJobs.com is also popular, and there are also lists popular in Europe; I’ll try to update this post with a couple of those when I have a chance to ask the colleague who tipped me off about them. At any rate, there’s no real need to be nervous about making the deadlines for the print job list.
My last suggestions are simply pleas for kindness and consideration.
Be mindful of the expense to which you put applicants. Official transcripts cost money, as does mailing writing samples. I happily send these out, but I wonder if committees are throwing out large stacks of unread manuscripts as part of the winnowing process. Certainly, your department may be working under a time-crunch, and if so, you may need to request all application materials at once. But I can tell you that applicants are grateful to be asked to send a job letter and CV with a later request for additional materials, especially as anything more than a letter and CV means a trip to the post office to have the package weighed.
If you have any suspicion that your listing is contingent upon funding that may or may not materialize, it wouldn’t hurt to say so. Sure, some people might not apply. But I suspect those would be people for whom the position isn’t a very good match.
Thirdly, it can be helpful to provide some indication of how comfortable ethnic and gender minorities will be on your campus. I know this can be touchy on some campuses, but a simple statement like “Our university/college supports a diverse faculty” can be very helpful. This is another area where a campus or department website can help by providing links to student and faculty organizations or simply by showing the faces and research interests of the faculty.
16 Nov 2009
A friend pointed out that Michael Bérubé recently addressed similar concerns about application expense in a blog post entitled “Applications.”
Another friend suggests that faculty websites often might be more easily navigable, and she requests a direct link to the course catalog. And I’ll just add that it’s always wonderful when course descriptions are up-to-date, not only for job-seekers but for our students.
