Tag: Dossier Free-Legacy

Ask a candidate: where to look for faculty jobs

This is one of a series of infrequent posts by a onetime faculty job seeker, now academic-at-large, on the job market.

You know how to pull your materials together when assembling your applications for faculty jobs. You have strong relationships with colleagues or mentors who can write confidential recommendation letters (and maybe you have them stored online). But how do you find the jobs that are the right fit for your carefully curated set of documents? Don’t rely on one or two websites to surface job ads—cast your net wide with these options.

  • H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online is a massive old-school (archived content goes back to 1994!) organization of interest-group networks, offering newsletters, reviews of new books, teaching materials, and bibliographies. The H-Net Job Guide is the essential database of academic jobs in the humanities and social sciences in the United States. This database is free to the user, and you can register to have new jobs in the categories of your interest sent to you via email when they post.
  • HigherEdJobs is another job site that (like ChronicleVitae) runs ads for administrators and executive positions, as well as faculty jobs, and includes positions in STEM as well as in the liberal arts and social sciences. That means that they have a very large database of job openings (though, of course, many of them may not be in your field!) The HigherEdJobs search page allows you to select for jobs that have marked diversity and inclusion as a particular goal in their hiring.
  • The two-body or “dual career” problem can be a dealbreaker (for your career, or your relationship), so it makes sense to use any advantage you can get to solve it. Inside Higher Ed, which offers compensation data and career advice in its Careers section along with a jobs database, has a nifty Dual Career Search tool, letting you trawl the database for two faculty jobs spaced at a distance you’ll select.
  • The Academic Jobs Wiki can be a can of worms, since that’s where you go to find out (via anonymous user postings) how job searches are proceeding. That can be a recipe for bad feelings when you find out on the Internet that you weren’t picked to advance to the next round. But it’s worth braving the wiki periodically, for the following reason: it’s a targeted, crowd-sourced collection of jobs, aggregated by people in your particular field. The chances that a good job will slip through the fingers of all of those peers is low.
  • The Higher Education Recruitment Consortium is a group of institutions that banded together to help each other recruit diverse candidates for faculty and staff jobs.Since, as HERC’s website points out, female academics are especially hindered by the two-body problem, it makes sense that an organization interested in advancing diversity would invest in solving that problem. So, like Inside Higher Ed, HERC offers a special tool to use to help couples find jobs near each other. 

Depending on your field, and the year, the academic job search can be tough. But at the very least, the Internet makes finding every possibility easier.

Interfolio’s Dossier enables scholars to collect, curate, and send materials anywhere, including confidential recommendation letters, in application to faculty jobs. Learn more about Dossier here.

Ask a candidate: how to request a recommendation letter without being annoying

This is one of a series of infrequent posts by a onetime faculty job seeker, now academic-at-large, on the job market.

You can procrastinate while writing seminar papers (coffee), putting together conference presentations (but don’t count on that plane wifi—take it from us), or completing group projects (just don’t ruin any friendships in the process). But try not to procrastinate when it comes to one grad school task: asking faculty members for recommendation letters. These are the relationships you can’t afford to mess up.

Ask for recommendation letters early

So, ask in a timely manner: as soon as you’ve decided to apply, or at least a month or two before the deadline. In your admirably early email, make sure to include a link to the description of the opportunity (job or fellowship or grant) you’re applying for. To that email, or in a follow-up sent well before the deadline, attach as many relevant documents as you can provide. The writer should see what kind of a case you’ll be making to your potential employers—or to funding bodies, in the case of grants and fellowships. You could show your recommenders drafts of a cover letter, project statement, or teaching statement, all of which would give them a sense of which qualities to emphasize in their own letters. (Some kind faculty members will also help you edit these drafts, if you produce them far enough ahead of time.)

Consider your writers

Ask the right people—the faculty members who know your work the most intimately. If you aren’t quite sure whether your target recommender knows you quite well enough, everything we just said about providing context counts double.

Also, supply the writer with as much information as you can: the year you took the seminar; the gist of your final paper; the subject of the in-class presentation you did. Don’t assume this borderline recommender will recall your brilliant seminar comments in a class you took two years ago, or the work you did for a departmental committee your first year in your program. If it’s appropriate, attach copies of the writing you did that the professor really liked, and follow up by describing how that work fit into projects you’ve done since the class concluded (“I took this research I did for your class and turned it into a journal article on Helen Hunt Jackson; here’s a copy of that article”). That’ll help the professor get a full picture of your evolution as a scholar.

Provide deadlines

If you’re asking a recommender you know well to write recommendation letters for a wide array of jobs during your faculty job search, create a spreadsheet for them to access, with all of the relevant information for each job: contact info, deadline, a link to the job ad. Arrange the rows in order of deadline.

Remind your letter writers

And now that your recommenders have all the information they need, with plenty of time to put it to use, don’t forget to remind them to write. You can ask them when they’d like to be nudged, or you can take matters into your own hands and send a reminder ten days or a week before the deadline arrives.

Keep in mind, some of your recommenders may be writing recommendation letters for you for years in a row, and will then become trusted colleagues in your home field. In this situation, a little professionalism goes a long way.

Interfolio’s Dossier enables scholars to collect, curate, and send their materials anywhere—including storing reusable recommendation letters, kept confidential from the requester—in application to faculty jobs and other academic opportunities. Learn more about Dossier here.