Doug Natelson posted the second installment in his inside view of the hiring process for academic physics positions, this one describing the campus visit/ interview process. Again, the description is mostly accurate for a much larger department than ours, at a research insitution, but the basic idea is the same.
In our department, candidates making campus visits meet individually with each of the faculty for about half an hour, and also get tours of the campus and the department labs. Throw in a meeting with the Dean, and a colloquium talk, plus a meeting with students and dinner with a couple of faculty and, well, my interview was one of the most exhausting things I've ever done. You don't realize how much work it is to be "on" for that length of time until you've had to do it.
It's a process I fervently hope never to go through again from the candidate side. It's not a great deal of fun from the hiring side, either, but I don't have much chance of dodging that-- the official start date for reading applications in our open tenure track search is tomorrow, and we're nearing 200 applications for the position. Shoot me now.
Obviously, there isn't a chance in hell that I'll discuss any of the details of the search here. I may post some general comments later on, in the form of advice to future job seekers, but not until much later in the process, on the extremely small chance that anything I said here would be construed as giving anyone an advantage in the search.
If I start to seem a little punchy, though, that's a big part of the reason.
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I will give this one bit if inside info from the Vanderbilt astronomy job search:
There are more really good candidates than we will be able to invite for interviews.
It's kinda depressing.
-Rob
Our department is hiring this year. I am tired of it already and I am not even faculty.
Hey Rob - isn't that pretty much always the case, though? I mean, say there's 25 "top" departments in an area, and another 25 "second-tier" schools (whatever that means). Say a third of all of them are searching in a given year, giving us about 17 searches that ideally are all going to result in a hire, if we're in the conservative limit that the labor pool exactly balances demand. Assuming no one really sacrifices standards, there have to be at least 17 decent candidates out there. Since each place probably only interviews 4 or 5, there are always more good candidates than interview slots, even when there isn't an excess of candidates (which there usually is in physics academia). (on a completely different note, Hi Brad - please tell Connie I said hello!).
Doug -- yeah, it's always like that, although I'd expand your definition a bit.
At "research Universities," there will probably be 10-20 a year doing a search in astronomy. (Maybe more if you count all of Physics, not just those Physics jobs to which an astronomer could apply.) Each one of those will get (the same) 100-200 applications.
At small liberal arts colleges, there will also probably be 10-20 a year doing a search, although these are all physics. Only 3 or 4 are specifically looking for an astronomer, although many will consider an astronomer. They also probably get 100-200 applications.
In the latter case, at least half can probably be thrown out right away. I've talked to a number of people at places like that, and it's often clear from the application that these are people interested in a research University who just scatterfire to all Physics Today job listings. (Ask Chad; he's in it right now.)
What sometimes happen is that five or six people get most of the job offers, and some places are left not able to fall back to their second-choice candidate... meaning no job is filled, *and* lots of good people get no offer.
In any event, it's always a somewhat discouraging process. On the other hand, when you do bring somebody new in, it's exciting, becuase you have a new colleague who is going to be interesting and stimulating to have around.
-Rob
Rob - your description of how a small number of people can rack up most of the offers also gibes with my experience. My year in condensed matter experiment, two particular guys ended up with (each) something like eleven offers. Now, they're both very sharp, and had well-timed results (nothing like a Nature cover right around the beginning of interview season....), but that still seems excessive. The result of this, though, was that their decisions, both about where to go in the end and how long to negotiate between alternatives, had an incredibly disproportionate impact on where the rest of us all ended up. It's very hard to get non-academics to understand how much of this ends up being a game of small numbers with a high random component.
Context for the following comment: I am one of those people between applied math and theoretical physics, and I have been in math, applied math, and physics departments.
One thing I've wondered: Liberal arts colleges in math will basically not take anybody who doesn't have teaching experience. They won't typically require postdoc experience, but (as far as I can tell) somebody who has, say, TAing experience but not actual lecturing experience of some sort (experience as a head TA or something seems to be ok) will typically be excluded from the beginning (there are always exceptions, but never mind that).
How does this work for liberal arts colleges in physics? I know a _ton_ of physicists who teach for the first time when they get their faculty job. Does this happen with physicists at liberal arts schools as well?
And I hope I never have to go through one of those interviews again! (Just thinking about them causes me to remember the pain...) In my first faculty interview, I was given a temporary office and a temporary id and password to check e-mail. In two full days of talking to people, I never had a chance to enter that room even a single time.