I just read yet another interminable post about the stupidities of job candidates who don’t know how to apply. The tone of these is usually to point some of the howling tactical mistakes that applicants make and to imply that everything about how to apply is common sense and not a hopelessly arcane ritual, so applicants should just stop being so lazy.
I’m kind of tired of this. And it’s not because I am notionally on the market this year. It’s because it is so unreasonably meanspirited.
I have been hired for two tenure-track positions and one adjunct job and have been on campus at least a dozen other times for interviews, so I think that my understanding of how to apply for a job effectively is as good as anyone’s, and yet I know that no matter how many webpages I read about the institution (many of which are opaque and uninformative if the reader is not an insider), each application is a shot in the dark. Am I going to say that thing that puts my application on the “maybe” pile, or will I use some turn of phrase that turns the reader off? Am I guessing correctly about whether the campus sees itself as a teaching institution or a research institution, or have I read it wrong, and this was the wrong place to put the teaching information first because it is an institution with aspirations? Are the readers going to accept my recommendations dossier and understand that many of the leading scholars in my field who are my references are writing hundreds of recommendations a year, or will they sneer at it because the letters are not tailored specifically to them? Are they going to expect a handwritten thankyou for the conference interview, or will they see that is inappropriate, quaint, sucking up?
Maybe my frustration comes from watching it from the inside too many times. For example, in my first job, where the search committee tossed out every applicant from an Ivy-League institution and passed around some of the applicants with gender studies interests to giggle about in the hallway. At my current job, where people latch on to some misstep during the campus interview and gossip about it in increasingly abusive terms until I start to wonder why we invited the applicant in the first place if he is such a hopeless dunce.
This is my request to applications readers: yes, we know you have a lot to do, and we know that many people apply for jobs where they lack the appropriate qualifications. How about you just put those inappropriate apps aside quickly without attacking the desperate individuals who are sending them? Don’t you see how that kind of statement in the blogosphere escalates the paranoia that job candidates feel? At the same time, keep in mind that no matter how well-crafted your announcement was, and how informative your internet presence is, the rules are not so uniform or clear that someone who doesn’t do what you expect deserves your ridicule; many job applicants receive very little advice about how to apply (I was prepared for my first job market by being given an application that had been successful at my campus eight years earlier and being told to copy it).
Also remember that many of the people writing recommendations have no understanding of what the market is like now, or what your individual campus is like; what they have is dozens and dozens of letters to write during the application season (I have three former students on the market now, and just with the law school, grad school, business school, study abroad, scholarship letters, I wrote something like three dozen separate recommendations since September. That doesn’t count reprints of the same recommendation to send to different institutions. And I am NOBODY). Here’s a tip: do a prestep and only ask for letters from applicants who you will consider more closely rather than forcing us to empty laser cartridges printing these things. We might then be more sympathetic to the demand that the letter be tailored to your insititution. I’m not at an Ivy, but your wrath at those lofty people in the endowed chairs at Harvard or wherever who have multiple students they have to place in a limited amount of time only makes you look petty.
Cuz you know what? These people are our current and future colleagues. Brutalizing them now just makes it more likely that they will brutalize their future colleagues down the road. If you are one of those people who think spanking is counter-productive, why don’t you think for a minute about the potential effects of these public, satirical complaints about job applicants, none of whom ever set out to damage you? And you know what? If you have to spend a day, or several days, reading applications that are less than you wished they were — at least you are being paid to do it. All the effort that goes into an application is volunteer work.
