(Edit: My household’s dependency ratio having gone from zero to 0.33 overnight two weeks ago, in my sleep-deprived state, I had initially titled this post “Sitting on the Supply Side …,” when I truly meant “Sitting on the Demand Side ….” Apologies for the confusion.)
Jessica Hoel comments on my last post, in which I gave my usual advice to job-market candidates interviewing at ASSA:
Any advice for first-timers on the other side of the table this year?
Having sat on the demand side for the last two ASSAs, I think I can offer at least some general thoughts. A lot of those thoughts are similar to my advice to job-market candidates, but here goes nevertheless:
- Invest in staying at one of the conference hotels, if not the hotel where you’ll be conducting interviews. In both Boston and Philadelphia these past two years, I stayed at hotels different than the ones we were interviewing at. Both times, this was a mistake: In Philadelphia, I could walk to our interviewing hotel, but on the day of the snowstorm, the walk wasn’t too pleasant. In Boston, I had to take cabs all the time, and cabs can be pretty scarce around ASSA conference hotels.
- Know your limitations. This is increasingly important the more outside your field candidates are. In other words, if you are a development economist who’s all about causal identification and you are interviewing for an applied macro position, trying to poke holes in candidates’ identification strategies is probably not a productive use of your, your colleagues, or the candidate’s time.
- Eat well, get exercise, and sleep well. Sitting through 25 or more interviews, each lasting 30 minutes, in a hotel room whose windows you can’t open can get trying on your ability to concentrate, and it will make you very tired mentally. This means you should make a point of eating outside that room for lunch instead of getting room service, and to eat the kind of food that will keep you awake rather than carb slump-inducing stuff like sandwiches and fries. Also, since a lot of your grad school friends will be around, it might be tempting to go out partying with them until early morning. But come 3:30 pm the next day, when you have five more interviews, you might hate yourself for it.
- Take copious notes, especially regarding stuff that is not in a candidate’s CV. When your committee meets to discuss candidates, you might not remember which candidate is who. Having notes is helpful, extremely so if they are searchable, i.e., if you type them. I used my iPad’s Notes app both times, and my notes came in very handy at the search committee meeting where we discussed who to fly out.
- Again, to the extent that you can influence the process, agree on a list of questions you will ask each candidate in order. This might seem bureaucratic, but it’s really the only way you can give each candidate a chance to impress your committee.
- Be ready to answer all kinds of questions about your department, university, or community; this is self-explanatory.
- Somewhat related to the previous point, know which questions you cannot legally ask at a job interview in the US, i.e., civil status, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, whether a candidate has children or is pregnant, age, disabilities, and a few other things. This is especially relevant because many of us are foreigners and might not be familiar with these peculiarities of US law, but also because sometimes interviews become friendly conversations, and it is easy to let your guard down, so to speak, and ask a friendly albeit borderline illegal question. This then makes the candidate hesitate between (i) potentially giving you information that you cannot use in hiring, or (ii) refusing to answer your question, neither of which will make them feel good about their interview.
- This is especially true for new faculty: After listening to a bunch of really good candidates talk about their exciting, cutting-edge research, it is easy to get a bad case of impostor syndrome and feel like your own accomplishments aren’t that great. A little bit of this can be healthy, as it shows you that there is a whole world of exciting research out there, and that your own research is but a small slice of it. Too much of this is unhealthy; remember that your department had good reasons to hire you out of a similar group of really good candidates doing exciting, cutting-edge research.
- Last, but not least, be nice to job-market candidates. Knowing for a fact that you won’t be hiring a given candidate does not mean you cannot be nice to them. Though the 12,000-odd people ASSA brings to a given location might make it seem huge, the profession remains a relatively small world, and you are likely to interact with those people in the future.