(How) do 'little things' make a difference on the job market?

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

In the post about the VAP treadmill, a commenter said the following:

"In my experience in our searches, probably the top 20-50% of the applicant pool would be successful in the job and be an adequate fit for the specific role. The differences between the person who gets the job and the person who is 15th on the list are often small and hard to characterize."

I would love to hear from people who have been on search committees (or ppl who were told by someone on the search committee why they were hired) some examples of the tiny little things that ended up making one candidate get the job over the other equally-qualified candidates.

If these reasons are silly or arbitrary (e.g., this person just "seemed cooler" or had one more publication than someone else), all the better, since it helps us to remember just how much randomness there is. If some of the things are tiny things that others (like myself) can somehow imitate, then that is great too!

This is a great query, and I'd love to hear those who are in the know weigh in. One reader submitted the following reply:

Not a really practical advice, but making one's CV and/or cover letter unforgettable in the right way helps. According to my future employer (I've explicitly asked why they decided to hire me), apart from a promising research project (from their point of view) and institutional fitness (which played a central role in the final decision), I received a prestigious prize during my phd candidature and this really helped me get into the interview stage. Judging from other people who got a job, prizes help. At least everyone I know who got a prestigious prize (like from a journal or from some philosophical association) eventually got a TT or permanent job.

And another reader submitted this:

[H]ere is a tiny thing that might matter - imagine a position is advertised for Business Ethics, with an AOC in history of philosophy. The two finalists are matched on Business ethics, but the one has a broader range of history competence (early modern AND 19 C); or the one has early modern and 20th Continental and the other has early modern and 19 C. - and you think, a course on Nietzsche will fill seats, let's go for that one. These are small things that cannot be anticipated, and when a decision for ONE and only one candidate is required they become the difference maker.

Any other readers have good examples of 'little things' making a difference in the hiring process?

Comments

[Ted Williams mostly got out]

Although I do not want to dissuade from working on the little things, I think this is key:

"These are small things that cannot be anticipated"

Do what you can, and get the feedback you can—but this is a process that is significantly out of your control. No beating yourself up!

[VAP]

If that one commenter is right that "prizes" matter, we really ought to create some kind of centralized resource for information about available prizes to compete for, and convey that information to grad students. When I was a grad student I had only the vaguest idea that there even were such things, and they seemed (and honestly many still seem) more like nice/fun vanity awards rather than something that speaks to qualifications for a job.

[Points means prizes]

I suspect the prizes and the jobs share a common cause (good work), as opposed to the former causing the latter. I would caution against focusing on prizes.

[Just a thought]

I agree with the first comment that these are things you mostly can't plan for. But I will suggest you take opportunities, when they arise, to do things for the first time. This is obviously defeasible since often the thing in question is rather time consuming, but some examples include:

-teach a new prep rather than the same course
-give a presentation to a philosophy club or community group
-assign a piece of literature or a film
-serve on a committee

Though each individual thing will likely not matter, there's a decent chance that one of them will come up in some way in a job ad or interview. The broader your experience, the greater the chances you can use these little things to your advantage.

[awardseeker]

It's not exhaustive (it doesn't have some of the journal based prizes), but the APA have a list: https://www.apaonline.org/page/grantsandfellowships

I'm sure if people write to the APA they would update the list! Being on subdiscipline specific listservs (or looking at society websites) and the Philos-L listserv will help keep people updated as well (my unscientific opinion is that more of these essay contests, etc. are popping up). This might also be crowd-sourced in a thread if Marcus so chooses.

[Bill Vanderburgh]

Glad to have sparked this query. The point, though, was that candidates have almost no control over those tiny differences and so they cannot do anything about them and should not try to. Make yourself the strongest candidate you can be in teaching, research, and service, then get lucky. That's the post.

Further elucidation: When I said 20-50% could do the job, I meant that they would meet minimum standards and earn tenure, not that they would all be equally good in the role.

To the query here: Committees are trying to weigh and balance a huge number of pieces of evidence, some of which are inevitably only going to give a partial picture of the candidate (cv, teaching evals, etc.). Other pieces of evidence require interpretation (Is the letter writer honest about how great this candidate is, or doing a sales job? Can the candidate really teach all the classes they are claiming?). Other times we are dealing with matters of taste and opinion (I like Job Talk A more than Job Talk B; candidate A seemed like they would be a better colleague to have around the department than B). Then we have to compare all those things across candidates who may be stronger and weaker in different areas. Then add in differing backgrounds and attention levels of committee members, the usual complications of collective human decision making, specific department politics, what the dean and provost want from the search, what the department is rhetorically successful in convincing the dean and provost that they want, etc.

Upshot: When a committee selects a candidate at any stage of the process, it is almost never an optimally rational or objective choice. So don't go chasing will-o'-the-wisps.

That said, the person who is chosen is deserving of the post. But many other people in the pool were, too. (Kind of like teaching awards: The winner deserved it, but lots of other people would have, too.)

[Northeast prof]

Not sure if this counts as a little thing, but I was told one main reason why I got hired was that I worked on what the search committee thought of as a "core" question in political philosophy rather than something they considered "trendy."

I had often worried that the fact that my dissertation wasn't on something trendy would instead keep me from getting a tt job. (And who knows, perhaps it did work against me in other job searches.)

[Tenured now]

It once came up in conversation with someone who sat on the committee that hired me that it had made a big difference that my work was *interesting*. Kind of depressing....

[Teaching Prof]

I'm at a public university with a heavy teaching focus. A "little thing" that makes it easier for me to support a candidate is if they have made it absolutely clear that they can meet the teaching needs of the position. I want to see that at the beginning of the cover letter. This is especially true if we've asked for an AOC. E.g. We are hiring a TT professor with an AOS in Ethics and an AOC in Ancient Western Philosophy. You wrote your dissertation in Ethics. Make it clear to me why you are qualified to teach an upper-division class in Ancient Philosophy. We put the AOC there because we have a teaching need.

In the later stages of the search, it is easy to defuse candidates that are being supported for more arbitrary / luck-based reasons if I can clearly point out that another candidate is better qualified to teach our classes and support student research (a requirement at our institution). The more objectively I can make that claim, the more likely you are to get hired.

[On prizes]

Quick comment on prizes: my experience on committees is that they do NOT generally make much of a difference. This is mainly as only very few prizes are ones that committee members have heard of (and the people with them tend to already have a strong/highly competitive CV). Other prizes (e.g. UG prizes, prizes from journal/society/conference few have heard of, teaching prizes from PhD-granting insitution) are not worth much as we don't know the process that is involved in them/what the competition for that prize was. (Related Anecdote: I worked for a while at a place where there was a teaching prize for PhD students. It was basically assumed that everyone by the end of their PhD would win it. People were good teachers, but that prize did not really indicate any special achievement)

[re on prizes]

The basic idea was that it must be prestigious prizes, something external and preferably not limited to just grad students. One must explain in the cover letter why the prize is worthy of the committee's attention. The general thought behind it was that it must make the CV and cover letter unforgettable in the right way. At least that's what my future employer told me.