Faculty committees will wade through reams of letters, vitas, references, and supporting materials. There will be long meetings, contentious debates, exciting as well as disappointing interviews, and agonizing choices. The hiring process will include the opinions and observations of many constituencies and administrative offices. For the applicant, the dance is time-consuming, anxiety provoking, and laborious. There are job notices to check, applications to write, supporting materials to organize, references to request.
Some schools have programs that assist their graduates and alumni to find employment.
Regrettably, they are the exception, not the rule. As professionals, we need to be better mentors. In this essay I offer suggestions to those aspiring for college teaching positions, especially at the instructor or assistant professor levels. I have no dreams of superseding, even replacing the work of highly trained professionals in this area, let alone the substantive literature in professional and trade publications. Instead, I offer advice from the field, culled from work on search committees at three different institutions.