A primer on faculty searches, part III

Here is my long-delayed third post about faculty searches, a follow-up to Part I and Part II. One reason for the delay is that I was chairing a search. That took quite a bit of time, and I also didn't want to give an unfair advantage to any of our candidates who happened to read my blog.

In Part II I'd described the process in fairly complete detail. What I want to do here is give a few pointers to would-be candidates, and answer a couple of questions that people have emailed me in the interim.

• Look over the department webpages before you visit. If the school gives you an advanced or draft copy of your schedule, actually look at the pages of the people you're going to meet. More than likely, most of the people you meet are on the search committee. You want to have some sense of what they do so that you can (a) ask decent questions as you meet them, and (b) pitch your own stuff at the right level. An astro person may not have any idea what "valley degeneracy" is.
• Listen to what your point of contact tells you about who the audience is for your talk(s). No one wants a talk aimed at the wrong level. If you're supposed to give a general colloquium, that usually means that your audience is very broad and may contain undergrads, grad students, and faculty from different subfields. If you're supposed to give a seminar, that usually implies a more specialized audience. Remember, people need to know why they should care about what you're doing.
• Rehearse your talk. Speak clearly. Do not speak super-fast, especially if you use technical terms or people's names.
  
• Listen carefully to physics questions that you're asked, either in the talk or one-on-one. Repeat the question back at the person asking, rephrased slightly to confirm that you know what you're being asked. It's ok to say "I don't know" in response to a question, but don't use that dismissively. If you think of the answer later, make it a point to try to tell the questioner.
• Don't use terms that you don't understand or can't explain. Don't assume that everyone in the audience has heard of the So-and-so Effect. Make sure that you know all the relevant numbers for your work. If you're a theorist and someone asks you how to measure the effect you're calculating, at least have a handwave idea. If you're an experimentalist and someone asks you about errors and uncertainties, make clear that you've thought about those issues.
  
• When discussing budgets, etc., make sure that you know who actually is the point of contact for negotiations like that. In our case it's the department chairperson.
  
• The rule on startup packages is generally "you might as well ask". Show some reasonable judgment, though. A junior person asking for $5M in startup is not reasonable. A junior person asking for 5000 sq.ft. of lab space is not reasonable.
• Find out whether lab renovation costs are counted separately from your startup. That's the case at all the big schools, but some places can be funny about this.
• Ask about the tenure process. Ask about tenure history in that department.
  
• Ask about the department's long-term plan - where are things trending?
• Find out what their schedule is. When do they think they will be wrapping up the search?
  

I've been asked about whether politics can enter decision making in these searches. Someone emailed me who had not been offered a position somewhere despite having multiple first-author papers, and the candidate that had been offered the position had many fewer and less postdoc experience. The short answer is, well-run searches make decisions based on the whole package (departmental needs; research quality; communications ability; personal interactions; etc.). So, it can be hard to say from the outside why a particular committee made particular decisions. Can there be poorly run searches? Can there be searches where one category or need trumps the others, and the candidates don't know about that, and isn't that unfair? Sure, and we don't do that because it's long-term stupid - that's not the way to hire for the future and build up a department. I'm not sure that the situation is worse in academia than in any other profession, though. There is no question that where someone comes from and what their "pedigree" is can have a big impact, as discussed here by the Ponderer, but the process is inherently complicated. Hopefully these postings have clarified things at least a little.