Having made several mentions here of the two tenure-track faculty positions we were trying to fill, I feel like I ought to at least note the completion of the search. As of last Friday, all the papers have been signed with properly dotted i's and crossed t's, and we have two new tenure-track assistant professors on board to start next fall.
It feels a little weird and possibly inappropriate to go into much detail about the folks we hired, though, given that this isn't an officially official sort of blog, and it would definitely be wrong to go into details of the process. I will say that it was an exceptionally strong candidate pool, as you might expect from the state of the academic job market-- we had around 155 applications completed by the time we started reading folders in early October. There were certainly times when I was reading folders and thought "If I were on the market now with the CV that got me hired in 2001, I wouldn't stand a chance..." (probably incorrectly, but it wasn't a rational reaction).
We're very happy to have hired the two people we got, and look forward to working with them starting in September, and hopefully for many years to come. And I'm looking forward to not thinking about the hiring process again for a good number of years-- if I seem somewhat more cheerful these days than I was in November, not having this hanging over my head any more is a big part of the reason why.
Now I just need to work off the weight I gained from all those restaurant meals during the interview process...
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Congrats on getting the process underway early and completed early. Nothing worse than losing a really good candidate because the process was too slow.
We were constrained to go really early by our trimester calendar-- given our focus on teaching, it's important to have students involved in the interviews, and our students all leave campus right around Thanksgiving. So we needed all the interviews completed by then.
We actually had both offers made and accepted before Christmas, but it took forever to get all the paperwork finished, what with people being away for the holidays, and all.