Tenure-Track Job Applicants, Google Yourself Before Applying: Tips From a Search Committee Chair

My friend and CSULB Associate Professor Ragan Fox posted some tips for folks on the job market for tenure-track positions. Good advice, much of which I'd recommend for writing cover letters for said jobs: know your audience, mention the department's courses and curriculum in your letter and link it to your own teaching strengths, note the impact of your research, etc. One tip I would add is to manage your impression, before even arriving on campus (provided you're fortunate enough to get an interview). The best way to do this: be aware of your online profile.

Managing Your Impression Online

I think most tenure-track applicants probably have some kind of online profile, whether it's a facebook account, a twitter feed, or a website. But what will the hiring committee see when looking for you online and, more importantly, what will they think about they find? Will they find your Walking Dead commentary as pithy as you do?

I've chaired and been on search committees, and I have Googled every single interview candidate as well as many of our second tier choices. Below I list the results I've encountered, from best result to what I consider the least desirable result:

Online Search Results of Tenure-Track Job Applicants: From Best to Worst

1a. Sometimes I'll come across a professional website that's near the top of the search results. As a search committee member, this is the best possible outcome of such a search: a decent-looking website with professional information on it: CV, publications, jobs, etc. This could also hold true for a person's listing on a faculty or graduate student page at a university. Mine's been around a while and isn't great, but it gets the job done. Search my name and it's one of the first sites to come up.

1b. An Academia.edu site. These seem to be taking the place of some faculty's professional websites. A good resource.

1c. A Linkedin profile. Yes, Jack Donaghy makes fun of it, but as a search committee member wanting information on an applicant, it's better than nothing.

2. The next best result is a listing of article links or publication titles. Sure, I could get this if I search Google Scholar, but having some kind of hit: citations for articles, popular press articles, mentions in the media, stories about awards given (maybe on a university's website), etc. tells me that this person is active academically-speaking. The same is true if I click on "Books" and search the candidate's name: Did they write a book? Awesome. Are they cited in books? Great.

3. A professional-looking Google profile is the next best result. Sure, it may not be "academic" in the sense of number 1 or 2, but it shows me that at least the candidate is aware of their online profile enough to care what people see in a search and to take care to manage that impression.

4. It wouldn't count as a negative (to me) to see a listing of facebook and/or twitter links in the search results. Not as good as the above, but not too bad. It doesn't show a lot of care taken to manage one's online impression, but it doesn't necessarily indicate obliviousness.

5. However, if I click on one of these links and get a facebook page with pics of partying with fraternity or sorority members, girlfriends at the bar, guys acting foolish (given particular privacy settings)... Well, I have to wonder. There's certainly nothing wrong with this, and I wouldn't think less of the person, but remember: this is a committee member researching a job applicant, and simply: This is my first impression of you as a candidate. Is that what you want?

6. Still, the worst possible result (provided there are no mug shots, arrest records, or news stories about the applicant running naked through the streets) is a listing of random links to random comments and sites that I can't tell whether or not belong to the job applicant. This tells me nothing about the applicant, and I don't have time to click every link and see if it the applicant. I'm not going to cyber stalk every one of our 100-plus job applicants.

So, numbers 5 and 6 above: Is that really what you want your impression to be for the person making decisions about whether to interview you and hire you? Granted, a strong vita and application packet would nullify any of that (usually except arrest records and mug shots) and get you into the interview. But as a committee member, I can't say wouldn't think about that first impression I had if the decision was a close one. Would this negative online impression be a deciding factor? No, probably not. Would it be in the back of my mind as I read your file? Definitely. I speak from experience.

Googling Yourself Isn't Just for Celebrities

What, then, should job applicants do? Create a website? Yes. That's my recommendation. Its too easy nowadays not to have a website.

Additionally, I suggest doing a search every so often by entering your name into multiple search engines. Try and get your desired site to come up first. At the least, know what others see of you and about you when they search your name as it appears on your vita. With all the applicants on the tenure-track job hunt, why leave anything to chance?

Top Ten Graduate Teacher Mistakes: Number 8

This is a continuation of the top ten list I started a while ago. I'll get to number eight below, but first a quick review:

Top Ten Review So Far...

Number Nine was asking too many questions. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, sometimes asking too many questions (of your peers, of the course supervisor) hampers you when teaching. Of course, you need to ask questions. I get that. But, asking too many can give you too many options, which organizational theorist Karl Weick argues may hamper your decision-making and inhibit your ability to adapt on the fly.

Number Ten, seemingly contrary to number nine, was not having a lesson plan--thinking that you're going to go in there and wing it is a recipe for disaster. The obvious reason is things might not go well. You won't know what to say, and you won't have plan for what to do. Having a script of some kind, even if you deviate from it, is ideal.

But let's say things go great, better than you expected. You leave class on a high, get back to your office, and sit down. Then you wonder, what did I just do? Unless you write notes of the class interaction, how are you going to repeat what you did for your next class or next semester (not that you can necessarily replicate results, but that's a mistake in thinking I'll tackle later)? So, you write down the class interaction. Okay, never mind that you're retroactively writing a lesson plan, which you may have been trying to avoid in the first place; what did you intend to accomplish in class? The only reason this question is important is, how do you know you accomplished what you intended?

This leads us to number eight.

Number Eight: No Assessment

I know I've said it here before, but you need to be able to assess whether or not you accomplished your objectives for a particular class. When many people hear the word "assessment," they think about statistical measurement. That's not necessarily what I mean. Sure, you can use tests. But you can also use qualitative measures like classroom discussion and written responses.

With assessment, you can better tell whether you accomplished what you wanted to in class that day. This, of course, assumes you also have learning objectives or goals (see my previous posts for more on that).

With assessment, you can tell what you need to tweak for next time. You shouldn't chuck your entire lesson plan because your assessment tells you you didn't meet your learning objectives for that day. Give it a few times. Then re-assess.

Teaching is nothing if not self-reflexive. Assessments help us as teacher be reflexive about what we accomplish in class.