“I believe the search process should be radically reformed and reduced to one interview per candidate, either remote or fully funded, and include childcare.”
Open Letter To the Department of Hiring:
For the last ten years, I have worked as the very well-paid Dean of Hiring at Fred’s University. I am stepping down with an insanely excellent exit package, including a massive TIAA Cref and a fat 401K plus free post-its for life and a subscription to Golden Parachute Magazine.
During my tenure as Dean of Hiring, the university-wide interview process I oversee has gotten longer and more expensive with every passing talent search.
While the hiring of academic faculty members continues to exist in a sad little world of Best Western Inns and breakfast buffet interviews, hiring for the administrative jobs that are at the heart of Fred’s University has become an art form of institutional grift.
It is routine for the evaluation process for admin candidates to stretch to weeks of interviews, including joyride junkets, banquet boondoggles, gratuitous golf, pork barrel per diems, canape capitalism, crony shenanigans, and the ritual massaging of insider straight white male social values.
Yuck.
In the end, the hiring has left me feeling dirty. If there was only a shower like they used to have in nuclear power plants to wash off the radioactive feeling of complicity.
At Fred’s University, there are no visits to strip clubs or lap dances like you read about in the Brotopia of Silicon Valley. At least not since that thing that happened with Bob.
But there are endless hours of social interaction that require the candidate to conform to rigid, dated rites of belonging embedded in the rituals of straight white male cis privilege and neurotypical tyranny. The longer the interview process is, the more it enforces those values, which include the stamina for soul-smushing small talk and advanced admin speak.
Who has the time for the third flyback?
Someone with childcare at home for their angry toddlers, someone with a caregiver for their volatile aged parent, someone with a strong network of care for their frail Labradoodle named Lyndon Johnson, someone with enough status at their current job as Dean of Industry Collaboration to take time off from it without sacrificing vacation days from summer in Nantucket.
Who seems like a “good fit” at the Tahiti-themed drinks party and will be a compatible member of the “team.”
Someone like me with a wardrobe divided up by season and carefully stored until next year by my wife/housekeeper. Someone who has time to work with a marriage therapist on whether he treats his wife like a housekeeper.
Someone whose massage therapist, not his wife, rubs out the fake smile lines left by a week of steak socials at the country club that only recently started accepting black and Jewish members but has no plans to let in Muslim members.
Someone whose children barely recognize him because he spends every night eating out at expense account restaurants hobnobbing with the insider candidate who already has the job nailed. Someone whose family nickname is Doggie Bag because he comes home every night with the better part of a bison-sized portion of uneaten food for Lyndon Johnson.
Someone whose doggie bag of regret hangs heavily from the plastic bag on his wrist as he contemplates how he didn’t correct the President about Fred’s University’s (in fact, non-existent) diversity.
Someone who walks to his SUV in a lightweight summer suit after a night with the white male members of the well-funded Diversity Equity and Inclusion Committee notices his unpromotable assistant leave in a dented Daweoo wagon and feels a pang of self-hatred right around the spot where his Hermes belt cuts into his middle.
Someone who sighs as he hires the person who was hired away from the job they had before with the person who has taken the new job who replaced the other candidate who was friends with the previous hire who is now the trailing spouse of the rehire of the acting interim who failed up in a silver circle of cultural exclusion.
Someone who has spent more of Fred’s University’s money on the search process this year than Fred’s University has spent on books for scholarship students.
That someone is me, and I believe the search process should be radically reformed and reduced to one interview per candidate, either remote or fully funded and including childcare.
But before such utopian goals are met, I am pleased to announce that my successor, Fred Friendly, incidentally my roommate back at Richard E Rich Academy, will be forming a Committee to Reform Hiring and is calling for applications from qualified candidates for the newly created Dean of Lean Hiring position. Our childhood friend Charlie Chum will spearhead the report on hiring bias and help select candidates. An appointment is expected by the end of next year.
Sincerely,
Fred’s Friend
Comments Closed on Reform the Hiring Process
**Starred Comment**
DeptH
I am shocked to hear about the administrative bloat going on in the hiring process for admin candidates at Fred’s University (and, of course, all the hiring bias, racism, sexism and classism, whatever). How is it that admin job searches have such big budgets when we department heads can barely pay for our plane tickets to conferences to interview candidates for teaching positions?
I wish we were getting a Best Western breakfast! Often we are at a hotel that doesn’t even have a buffet! My meals are usually protein bars I steal from the sports recruiter table. So unfair to the faculty doing the faculty hires.
My question for Fred’s Friend is how we in the History Department can get a piece of the hiring budget for ourselves. We would like transportation from the airport to our hotel to be covered this year, so we don’t have to take the subway at the late hours our cheapo tickets have us arriving. And we would like the cost of the coffee we have to provide at our Department Coffee Hours to be covered as well.
I am very interested in how golf plays into the hiring process. I love golf. How can we expense golf as part of the search? What codes do you enter golf in on your expense report? We would like History to be more golfy. Please tee me up.
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