I’ve been doing loads of Interview Interventions these days (there are still some open searches going on!) and over the past few weeks I’ve come upon an insight that I really want to share. While I’ve been coaching PhDs for academic interviews for 15 years (!), and always noted and flagged versions of this issue, I’d never found a way to precisely identify it until now.

The insight is this: untrained interviewees tend to fall into two categories of error. Either they launch into interview responses that are all about what the department/job will do for them, or they launch into interview responses that are all about how they will do anything for the department/job and just need to know what that is.  Like Goldilocks, they go too big, or too small… when what they need is: just right.

The first is problematic because you are in essence telling the search committee how they and their department exist, in your eyes, to serve you and your needs and wants. What does this sound like? Consider the following response to the question, “why are you interested in this position?”

“I’ve always wanted to teach at a small liberal arts college so your position at Amherst is appealing to me because it will allow me to teach in the environment I’ve been aiming for, and teach the small classes that I am particularly interested in.”

This is an extremely bad interview response! Why?  Because you are damning Amherst with faint praise, first of all, by categorizing it as just a generic small liberal arts college (implication: any one would do), and telling Amherst that the goal of its hiring should be to satisfy you and your personal desires.

Amherst is not in the business of satisfying Candidate Bob’s personal desires.  Amherst hears such a response as arrogant and off-putting.

Amherst is in the business of finding a candidate who advances THEIR agendas and goals.

However, having said that, I do not mean that you go to the other extreme. Which, as I note above, is a response where you flatter and pander the department, abjectly offer to do anything for the department, and meekly ask the department what their priorities are so that you can show how you meet them. What does this sound like? “I am interested in Amherst because obviously it’s just an amazing campus with such brilliant faculty, and one of the leading small colleges in the country, and I would be so thrilled if I could contribute to its programs. I am really prepared to teaching anything you need in the xxx area because I have taught those courses a lot and for example just last year I taught xx and XX College and I’d be thrilled to bring that to Amherst if you would be interested.”

This is an extremely bad interview response!  Why? Because it’s abject, undignified, and shows none of the intellectual or academic poise or confidence that is appropriate to a tenure track hire. Tenure track colleagues do not just teach “anything,” on an ad hoc basis. With the greatest respect to adjuncts and no insult meant, that is what institutions hire adjuncts to do. Tenure line colleagues teach specific courses in their specific areas, develop NEW courses in their expertise, and allow their records to speak for itself rather than anxiously and defensively repeating past experiences that the search committee already knows from the CV.

Another way this latter issue arises is at the end of interviews, when they ask, “Do you have any questions for us?” and the candidate asks (and I hear this with depressing regularity): “what are YOU looking for in the person you hire for this position?”

No. This is so desperate and undignified. Just think. What’s the end game here? They say, “we want xx and yy,” and then what?  You have backed yourself into a corner where all you can do is desperately say, “OH YES I CAN DO ALL THOSE THINGS!!”  That is not a position of strength at all.

Just yesterday I worked with a Canada Research Chair candidate going to their final campus interview, who, when we got to the “Do you have any questions for us?” part, asked “What would you consider success for the person hired for this position?”

NOOOO, I said!  No!  “You don’t ASK them what is success for your research program as Canada Research Chair, you TELL them what is success for your research program as Canada Research Chair!  You’re a finalist for one of the most prestigious academic posts in Canada!  Why would ask someone else whether or how you would be successful as a researcher?”

Asking questions like this tells the interviewers that you have no confidence in your own program, and that fundamentally, you do not comport yourself like the kind of academic leader that CRC positions (or any tenure track job) are meant to support.

So what is the solution? Like Goldilocks, it is the third option, the one in the middle, the one that is “just right.” And that is articulating that what the department already does, and what you already do, are so evenly and well matched, on such lines of parity, that you simply belong together to do them jointly.

Language like this sounds as follows: “The department’s emphasis on an interdisciplinary approach to the study of transatlantic literature with a focus on postcolonial theory and attention to marginalized authors closely matches my own ongoing research on Caribbean author X and author Y and the ways their novels were written and received within a rapidly globalizing, literary economy in the late 19th century – an economy that placed them in a subordinate relationship to Western, particularly American, publishers and readers.”

It sounds like, “In terms of the courses on the books, I have 4 years of experience teaching most of the core courses, and am particularly well prepared to teach your course on ethnographic methods. In addition, I would like to contribute a new course to the program on [your specialization].

It sounds like, “I can imagine constructive conversations with faculty colleagues such as Bob Smith around our shared interest in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy training, and with Margaret Nelson around our shared interest in counselor education around issues of neurodiversity.”

In short: “you do X; I do X; we can do X together.”

Schedule an Interview or Campus Visit Intervention here.

I won’t lie, this is very difficult to hear and grasp without help.  It requires a re-calibration not so much of speech as of identity. You have to – often with no experience whatsoever – imagine and see yourself as a peer and a colleague. And also grasp how departmental colleagues speak to one another.

I spend the majority of my time in Interview Interventions addressing this one thing, as it arises in response after response. People start at abject, veer wildly into arrogant, or vice versa, and then improvise frantically, until finally puttering to a stop and staring at my helplessly through the Zoom.  Having now talked with them for some minutes, I usually have enough foundation in their work to articulate provisional placeholder prompts incorporating as best I can (within my limitations of discipline and topic) their research and or teaching substance, to model what the middle way should sound like.

Because they are brilliant PhDs, they almost always instantly grasp the task at hand from my placeholder prompts, and quickly revise them into excellent usable language. Sometimes it takes a bit of workshopping. I say, “OK, you’ve gotten X part of your work into the response, but not yet Y.” They try again.  “Ok, now switch from passive to active voice,” I’ll say, or “cut out the apologetic prefatory remarks! Go straight into your substance.” Now completely grasping the logic and ethos and goal, they do it again, and before long, it’s great! And by the end of our hour, they are doing it themselves, *without* my prompts.

It’s all doable. You have the expertise. You just don’t know how to talk about it.

If you’ve done a few interviews and never moved on, or suspect you do what I’ve described above, get in touch. Click here. We can practice crafting the interview responses that are not arrogant, not abject, but are just right.

[There is a related interview problem, which I call “wasting time telling the department who they are and what they already know,” and I will discuss this problem in my next post.]