Job Market Lessons Part II: Interviewing

The interviews made the long ocean voyage I thought I'd already taken while applying look like a skip across a puddle. The preliminary phone or skype interviews were harrowing in unpredictable ways, like the time I was interviewed for a position, while sitting at lunch, because a job search chair just called me up to chat, and I didn't have my computer or my application and grasped away while he asked about why I thought I'd fit into his specific department and who I saw myself working with. Wait, are you interviewing me? Right now?!?!?! Silly me, I thought we were going to set up a time for that.

My preliminary interviews stretched from November to March. (December and January were very quiet).

But it was the in-person grueling scheduling that made me think "oh wow, no, I really, really couldn't do this year after year." It's not just the travel. It's not just the flights, the strange bed you wake up in, or the man who picks you up from the airport who you are not technically being interviewed by, but whom you feel obligated to make charming small talk with nonetheless. For a traffic-filled hour and a half journey.

One day, I was interviewed by no fewer than eight people in four different buildings. Sometimes I had help traveling from place to place i.e. no time alone, even for a moment, no matter what. Otherwise I had lengthy instructions about parking in blue lines and getting visitor passes. It's hard to go talk to one more stranger when you've been doing it all day and you're supposed to be on, and on and on.

And then each person I spoke with was a comedy show unto itself. One woman showed me the evaluation sheet she was supposed to fill out about me and asked if I was supposed to do it. "I don't think so..." I said, politely, confused. Why would I be evaluating myself during this interview? You are interviewing me, right? Other people parsed through my words, driving toward a point, telling me indirectly that I wasn't being concise or clear. And sometimes, I also didn't know what they were actually asking.
"What do you think of climate change?" one man asked.
"It's probably real?" I offered.
"How do you feel about the environment?"
"It's good? It's not good that we're destroying it?"

I found out ten minutes later he was writing a grant related to my interests but that intersected with climate change, and he was trying to determine if I was a good fit. 

Oh.

So I learned not to assume interviewers were good at interviewing.

And I got this a lot: "Oh, I'm sure you've been answering questions all day. Do you have questions for me? About the school, or anything else?" Uhm. Well. If you weren't the eighth person today to ask me that... maybe I would have questions for you. Another offered up "Oh, I'm sure you have questions you're asking everyone to get a sense of each of the different answers. So, why don't you get those out of the way with me first."

WAS I SUPPOSED TO BE DOING THAT?!?!?!

But you have to talk to so many people on a campus visit. And they all have different irons in the fire. They all have different levels of investment in you as a candidate, or the process in general.

I agree with others: bring snacks. Pack more snacks with protein and comfort foods and a water bottle than you think you could possibly need. Your body will be running on stress the whole time, and you have to take care of yourself. Here is what else I brought: I wore my suit jacket over a dress for the flight, and only packed suit pants, a backup skirt, and 3 blouses, for a 2 night/3 day affair. I wore flats and packed heels. I fit my lap top and a thumb drive with backups of my presentations in the same bag, and threw in a notepad for taking notes. I wasn't up for carrying some kind of suit bag, and the hotel iron worked just fine for steaming out wrinkles.

Also, for the record, after all the soc-grad-chating about dressing conservatively and seeming neutral and toning down personal style: I wore skinny pants, and spiked my faux-hawk and left in my nose-piercing and didn't wear button-down shirts, because, I just couldn't bring myself to do it. No one who saw my outfits didn't hire me.

Since my fly-outs were close together, I got massages, pedicures, ROLFING, and anything else I could before, in-between, and after. This was a major expense of interview season, but it was what I personally needed to be able to be home for only three days at a time and then turn around and do it all again.


The last thing I want to say is that I plead ignorance a lot in all of my interviews. I openly said to liberal arts colleges: "Hey, I've only ever been at R1s. Mentoring and teaching have always been really important to me, but I'm still trying to learn more about just what a liberal arts research college is about." I also said to research positions who asked me where I saw myself in five years that I was still trying to figure out if grant-writing was something I could or wanted to be good at. I tried to be very direct about what I did and did not know. I think when you're honest like that, people know you aren't just trying to tell them what they want to hear, and they trust you more. In my experience, they also became much more helpful in teaching me and guiding me towards figuring out what the culture of each place did look like. We were in it together, they got to be my mentor, as I tried to be honest about who I was and what I wanted and what I was still trying to figure out. I suppose that could backfire too, depending on how you go about it.

In the end, I had multiple offers, at the same exact time, which I realize is a tremendous blessing on this job market. The experience of getting each offer was dramatically different, in terms of the rigor of the application, the timing of everything, and the interview process.

Ultimately, there was a lot to consider.

In my next post I'll cover the negotiation stage, and how I settled on my final decision.

Namaste.