Faculty candidate interviews

A few weeks ago, I wrapped up my service on a faculty search committee made up of half dozen graduate students. We interviewed six senior-level faculty candidates (there were more, but we missed a few). It was an interesting experience.

I was present at four of the interviews. So what did I learn? Having good social skills really makes you stand out. I suppose that physicists didn't get into their field because they were interested in people, but we certainly took note of candidates with particularly good people skills. By social skills, I mean shaking hands at the beginning/end of the interview, engaging the committee and talking about how your research relates to their research, remembering people's names, general enthusiasm and dynamicism. Personality certainly makes an enormous role in a graduate student's choice of advisor. This skill set doesn't seem much different than the business world.

I think it also helps to give concise but meaningful answers to questions. Going on and on about your research forever is not a good idea. Straying from relevant topics like research, teaching, university environment, etc. is not good either. I also think it's a bad idea to speculate about working on projects that haven't been funded yet.

I noticed that most of the candidates didn't have much to say about teaching. I guess that's probably because I work at a big research university. I'm not sure how much the faculty at my university care, but I would have liked to hear more innovative ideas about teaching. Making up something like "oh, it would be neat to teach pre-meds about mechanics of the skeleton in a lab class" doesn't sound very impressive.

Our committee liked it when candidates were up front and honest, especially about why they wanted to work at our university. Saying you want tenure or to work on a particular project is much more compelling than saying you want to work at a university with better funding and better students. You have to sound like you really want this job!

All the candidates were very good at explaining their research at a level that graduate students could understand. I guess that can be expected since they already got one job, being seniorish people.

It would be interesting to see how interviews of junior-level faculty candidates differ.

I hope I remember all this when I go interviewing...