July, 2014
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Sending Advice Upstream
All the “Advice for Job Seekers/Interviewees” columns that pop up during this ‘waiting for the new joblist’ time of year (actually all year) made me start thinking seriously about my parting shot the other day “write better ads, ask better questions.” A quick Google search, not exactly exhaustive research, revealed that there are many articles in the business world about how to write a good job ad and/or attract good candidates, but in academia the advice is all pointed at the job seeker. As you might have noticed from the last post, I’m a little tired of it all. After some serious consideration, here is what I have to offer, some advice from the other side of the table for everyone currently getting ready to post ads.
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Reversing the Advice …
Today’s advice at Vitae – Don’t Dodge the Diversity Question – stuck a nerve with me. There’s nothing wrong with Nicole Matos’s advice, in fact I think you could call the heart of it common sense; as long as the question does not cross any legal boundaries, answer it.
For me, the problem isn’t necessarily people dodging the “diversity question,” the problem is the question. In the opening paragraph of her column Matos paraphrases the diversity question as “one that goes something like — Describe your experiences with diversity in and/or outside the classroom.” As someone who has been doing what I call “baby searches” for the past four years, I have one very big question of my own: “What the hell does this question even mean?”
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Changes
You might notice that I’ve made some changes around here, added a few pages, and things. I really hated having my CV just copied and pasted to a single page. It was just too much text for one page, so I broke up the sections into individual pages. I even included sub-pages with my teaching and administrative philosophies, not that anyone would really want to read them. In general, I like this new organization, and I think it will make it easy for me to keep everything updated. In the future I imagine a reversal of process where I cut and paste from my website to update and create a new CV.
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