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?

Bursting the Bubble, Knocking Down Silos, and Other Metaphors We Live By

A while ago I came across this provocative interview with Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, who's so adamant that school no longer teaches us what we need to know to succeed in the "real world," that he gives money to schools' best and brightest to leave school and start a business. Such a move implies that colleges aren't teaching students what they need to learn in order to succeed "out there."

I consider this now well-trodden metaphor of the "bubble." The dotcom bubble burst a while ago. The housing bubble just recently burst. When thinking about this metaphor, a few aspects of a bubble come to mind. First, a bubble obviously isn't sustainable. It floats in the air without the ability to avoid something that might break it. The thin membrane filled with air is bound to either land then burst, or pop in midair. But watching a bubble can be mesmerizing and peaceful, a seemingly undisturbed journey that ends suddenly (if one can't see what pops up in the bubble's path). The bubble can't last forever.

Have we, as Thiel argues, become so mesmerized with the seemingly undisturbed "journey" of higher education? Hardly. Some of us have gotten pretty good at spotting things in our way and have begun to adapt.

In the midst of considering this, I came across this news story regarding an open letter from the University of Texas-Austin Student Body President, Natalie Butler. She accompanied some UT regents on a trip to Arizona State University, my alma mater, about which I've written before. The trip was apparently an effort to learn how to increase UT's online learning program. The letter, however, warns the regents about becoming like ASU, who practices a "use-inspired" research, rather than the "intellectually-inspired" research practiced at UT-Austin.

While I admire this Tempe native's dedication to rigorous study, I take umbrage with this dichotomy of use-inspired versus intellectually-inspired research. All communication research should solve problems. Period. Granted, to some people, some of the problems we're tackling in higher education and communication research may seem needlessly esoteric or theoretical. That's to be expected. But whether we're building on theory or out in the streets with protesters, we're solving problems. Unfortunately, we often think of certain types of problems as being the domain of a particular discipline. We've built these silos around ourselves and claim ownership over problems, issues, approaches, etc. I think part of what Ms. Butler is witnessing is a move away from these silos.

ASU President Michael Crow's move what toward he calls a "New American University" has been accompanied by, at times, seismic shifts in the symbolic identities scholars craft for themselves. This includes changing the names of departments whose presence on the university campus has been a mainstay for perhaps as long as higher education has existed in its current, more-or-less, publicly accessible form. For example, ASU no longer has an Anthropology department (or school); instead it has a School of Human Evolution and Social Change. No longer is there a Political Science department; there is, however, a School of Politics and Global Studies.

For all the flak ASU President Michael Crow has gotten, I appreciate his move toward issue- or problem-oriented research. I also understand and appreciate the resistance toward such a move. For those unfamiliar with academia, talk of solving "real-world" problems often includes applying for grants--external funding from philanthropic, private and public not-for-profit agencies.

What's wrong with that? Getting money for your research is a good thing, you might say. Yes, but. The "but" is that often these granting institutions and the grant application evaluators expect reports that quantify results. Many in the communication discipline don't use a quantitative approach to gathering and analyzing data. This leaves some of us forced to employ methodologies we're either not familiar with or disagree with on an epistemological level. Sure, this thinking might be akin to the silo metaphor I invoked earlier, but I can empathize with these folks. The communication field is broad and deep, and those more humanistic researchers who qualitatively analyze texts of all kinds may not identify a place for them in this "problem-solving" approach.

Some have managed to cross this divide in interesting and uncompromising ways. I've been taught well by these folks and strive to incorporate it into my own research. Selling out? Compromising? Tacitly accepting the devaluing of humanities and reifying the place of the almighty dollar in academic research? I suppose some might say that's where this line of thinking leads. But I prefer to view it optimistically as an opportunity to begin chipping away at these calcified silo walls.

When research and teaching isn't enough

Getting tenure this past Spring has got me re-evaluating my role of as a professor (Associate Professor, to be more precise). I'm sure everyone who gets tenure goes through a similar process. But this and other events have also prompted me to re-evaluate what it means to be a professor more broadly.

As the higher education system comes under fire, including tenure, tenure-jobs become scarcer, and budget cuts in many states threaten the very foundation of higher education, a lot of teachers have realized they have to look out for themselves as much as for their students.

This chain of thinking is not new and didn't originate with me. Our organizational communication textbooks have consistently discussed the "new social contract" between companies and workers that has resulted in a diminished sense of loyalty on both sides, portable 401/403 k/b etc. plans, and regular attendance at self-help classes, self-improvement seminars, and graduate schools. Certainly, academics aren't exempted from this and may have been some of the first to capitalize on this. After all, what are research agendas, pubs, and grants if not vital parts of a CV one can market to other universities for better pay?

So, I'm sitting on the couch thinking about all this, and my colleague and former office mate appears on television. He's one of the newest house guests on the CBS reality show Big Brother. This person, in addition to being a great writer and super smart, is also adept at self-branding. Again, I'm not the first to make the connection between personal branding and the academy, but I worry (even though I've embraced it to a certain extent).

Maybe I worry because I don't think I'm that good at it. I remember the difficulty I had in "branding" myself in my personal statement as part of my tenure files. Having to articulate and argue a particular research agenda, arc, and coherent body of work was difficult. Not because it wasn't there, or because I hadn't been trained to think that way by my great advisers, but it because it required me to think of myself as something more than a summation of my publications. And it was precisely this "summary thinking" that had prompted me to keep churning out articles.

Now I worry because I don't have much experience translating my ideas to a broader audience, something I think will become vital in the personal branding academics are and will continue to be required to do. Radio and television appearances, social media updates and plugs: all will become increasingly important. Does this mean the watering down of genuine (i.e., complex, problematic, heuristic) ideas? Does it mean a change in what we think of as ideas traditionally in the domain of academics? Both?

Fortunately, many academics are already blazing trails here. From podcast reviews of articles to blogs to more blogs to alternative forms of online scholarship. While not all even roughly fit into this notion of personal branding, they all illustrate the potential to move to more diverse, wider audiences, a necessary consideration in personal branding and marketing.

So, when is research and teaching (and service) not enough? Soon, if not already.