Predicting fly-outs on the basis of interviews?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes:

Now that readers are doing interviews, I was wondering if we could field thoughts on how well, in your experience, your sense of how the interview went correlates to success in getting job talks (or from job talk to offer). Have readers ever gotten offers from truly terrible interviews? Or not gotten offers from interviews that seemed guaranteed to go through? Can you get a sense of how interested the committee is in your application based on how they act in the interview setting? Curious for your thoughts!

Another reader submitted the following response:

I think that job candidates can tell almost nothing from (1) their sense of how an interview went or (2) how interviewers act. First you may not have a good sense of how the interview "went." That's because how an interview goes is not just about your own performance, but how others perform. You can't know that by your own sense of whether your answers were good, whether you presented yourself as a collegial candidate who knows your material, has thought carefully about teaching, etc. It's also because we often misjudge, in either direction, how well we've done. Interviews I feel that I bombed were perceived by the interviewers as awesome and vice versa (I know this from later conversations). Sometimes they are looking for things you just don't know about. In one interview, I answered a question very carefully in a way that aligned with my sense of how I "should" answer. Apparently that answer was the direct opposite of what they were wanting (and what I'd been prepped to say in grad school). But I felt like that interview went well--I didn't get a flyout.

Second, that kindly nodding interviewer? The one who seems to be listening intently, smiling, and sending out good vibes? They may be your worst critic. The one with furrowed brows may think you are their best candidate. Unless you already know these people and how their visible cues are linked to their internal states, you can't tell were you stand with them. And, again, after the interview, a lot happens. You may have interviewed "the best" (whatever that amounts to) that you possibly could have for that position. But the committee has to then navigate questions about fit, about internal politics and whose favorite candidates get invited, etc. So you can't read anything from how you think *they think* the interview went. The best advice I can give (having been interviewing for about six years now, with success at all stages, though shy of an offer) is to interview having prepared as well as you can, and then set it out of your mind. You have no control over what happens next, nor can you anticipate what the search committee will decide.

As frustrating as it may be for job candidates (which I appreciate, as I was one for seven years!), this response sounds broadly right to me, both as a former job-candidate and (now) as a search committee members. As a job-candidate, my judgment of how my interviews went seemed to bear little (if any) correlation to whether I got a fly-out. Sometimes I thought I bombed an interview but got a fly-out, whereas in other cases I was sure that I "killed it" in the interview only to get a PFO. To me as a candidate, this seemed rather baffling. However, now that I've served on like five search committees, it makes more sense to me. Let me explain.

First, although this isn't always the case, search committees can have candidates 'ranked' prior to interviews, sometimes with fairly strong preferences (individually and collectively) about which candidates they think are best for the position based upon the dossiers (viz. publishing record, teaching experience, etc.). In cases like this, one or more of the committee's "top candidates" might need to totally blow the interview for those candidates not to get invited to campus. So, even if you interview well, you may not be able to beat out one of the candidates at the top of the committee's list.

Second, in my experience, what usually what happens is that most candidates give good interviews. So, even if you do perform well, there may be other six candidates that performed about as well too--in which case, things like "fit" and the candidate's dossier (publishing record, teaching portfolio, etc.) can again be the real difference-makers, not the interview.

Finally, my experience is that many search committee members can take interview performances with a serious grain of proverbial salt--and for good reason: interviews don't predict job-performance very well! Interviewers tend to favor extraverts in interviews--not to mention attractiveness, height, weight, voice tone, gender, and race--despite all of these things being totally orthogonal to actual job performance. Many search committee members recognize how imperfect one-off performances like interviews can be as measures of promise. Consider Tom Brady, for example. Brady is by all estimations the greatest NFL quarterback of all time--but this past Sunday, his team was shut out for the first time in 15 years. If this Sunday was only time you heard of Brady or saw him compete, you might infer that he is a below-average quarterback. Yet, of course, you would be profoundly wrong. Conversely, if all you ever saw of Jeff Blake, Chris Chandler, Craig Erickson, Nick Foles, Chad Pennington, Geno Smith, and Jared Goff were the single games where they (somehow) achieved a perfect quarterback rating, you might be forgiven for thinking that they would be among the greatest NFL QBs of all time. But, of course, again you would be profoundly wrong. We all recognize (or I least I hope we do) that how someone performs on one day (or one hour) of their life can be a very poor indication of their ability to perform a given job (and, for what it's worth, the best predictor of how I performed in interviews seemed to how well I slept the night before. NB: I have a sleep disorder!).

Now, in one sense, all of this might be frustrating: interviewing well may or may not be the difference maker when it comes to getting an on-campus. Then again, there's a less frustrating flip side of this: namely, that sometimes you can totally blow an interview and still get an on-campus due to the quality of your dossier! This, I think, is the best explanation of why my experience as a job-candidate was broadly the same as the person who responded to the OP above: it's a total crapshoot. You can do well and not get an on-campus and perform poorly and get one. Such is the academic job market, for better or (almost certainly) worse.

But these are just my thoughts. What are yours?

Comments

[Trevor Hedberg]

In a sample of about 20 1st round interviews, none of my best interviews (or what I'd consider my best interviews) have advanced me to the next stage of the search. Neither have any of my worst interviews. So I have my best results when I just have an average interview. I long ago learned to make no assumptions about what would happen following my job interview, regardless of how well (or poorly) I thought it went.

[Both sides]

Don’t read into interviews. Some of my worst interviews (i thought they were stilted, there were no follow-up questions) landed fly-outs, some of my best did not. I think some people are bad at interviewing, so keep that in mind. Unsurprisingly, the ones where I did well and didn’t get a fly out were for better jobs—I think I did great at the interview but didn’t have the publication record to justify a fly out at an R1.

On the other side now, there were people who barely made the long-list, did great at the interview, but others just had a stronger overall portfolio and also did great. Some considerations, rational and irrational, about the needs of the program and other such things also come into play with the determination of the short list.

[Michel]

I've only ever had two interviews for TT jobs (I'm in a permanent NTT job). I killed them both, IMO, but neither one resulted in a second interview.

In fact, I never heard back from either one. One made a (really excellent) senior hire instead, and the other hired someone whose AOS was a better fit. It would have been nice to have been told, though.

[Mike Titelbaum]

One big problem with trying to predict whether you'll get a flyout based on how you "performed" in an interview is that an interview's influence on a committee's thinking isn't just about how well the candidate performed in the interview.

I often go into an interview with specific things I'm looking to find out about a candidate. Maybe there's something I didn't understand about the writing sample, and I want to have it explained. Maybe I want to get a broader sense of the candidate's research program, and how it fits in with other things going on in the discipline. Maybe I want to find out what their background and training is like in some area we'll want them to teach.

If you're better at being interviewed, or if you're having a good day, you might do a better job of providing the information I'm looking for. But oftentimes it's the substantive information provided—not how well someone came off in providing it—that is my biggest takeaway from an interview. And since the person being interviewed doesn't know what information I'm looking for, and how it fits in with what I want for this particular job, it can be very difficult for them to predict from the interview what's going to happen after.