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A Perfect Faux Finalist

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By Elizabeth Sayer

I recently applied for seven administrative positions within two large state university systems. All of them were great jobs that seemed a good match for my experience and interests, and I was chosen as a finalist for six. In each case, however, the search committee hired an internal candidate, who in most instances was already serving in the interim position.

Eventually I concluded that the universities really wanted system insiders and should have simply advertised the job internally, but since the positions were high-level, apparently the human-resources folks had insisted on a national search.

I was a perfect "faux" finalist. I was from out of state, I was female, and I had credentials that were a strong match for the advertised qualifications. By interviewing me, both systems could document that their searches were completely open. It just so happened that the best person was the one already on the job.

Perhaps the best candidate did win, but in many of those interviews I received some puzzling treatment that, in hindsight, should have clued me in that the result was a foregone conclusion. I know that other job candidates have had similar experiences, and by describing my own, I hope I will provide a heads-up to others who unwittingly find themselves in the position of window-dressing finalist.

If you recognize any of the following warning signs, that should at least give you comfort. It wasn't any fatal mistake you made that cost you the position; you never had a chance to begin with.

It all starts with the search committee. Beware if it's filled with people who have no campus authority, such as untenured faculty members, librarians, nonacademic administrators, or anyone hired only a few months ago. If it is, that's a signal that the more senior people with real clout have better things to do with their time. If the search were truly open, then deans and top administrators would want to have some influence over the decision.

Pay attention to who's going to take you out for meals during the interview. If it's the young assistant professor who blurts out that he was the only one who volunteered, that should tell you something.

Then there's the schedule. Sure, it may be close to the end of the semester, but if you're given less than a week's notice to book a flight for an interview halfway across the country, that suggests that the search is not being organized with consideration for the candidates as a priority. In one case, I was told to book my ticket for a specific day, and then after I had purchased the nonrefundable ticket, the secretary called back to say I had to come on a different date because a senior administrator had been called to a meeting he couldn't cancel. That kindhearted secretary apologized profusely, and I paid the fee to reschedule the flight, but it was a bad sign.

I felt worse when I found out whom the administrator met with on the day my interview had been originally scheduled: a consultant from a nationally recognized company who was being paid by the university. Normally, such a meeting would be scheduled at the institution's convenience, not the consultant's. I can only assume that the real meeting (with the consultant) trumped the fake one (my interview).

The interview schedule can give some important clues that a search is not truly open. A position at a senior administrative rank should require an interview of at least two full days. Several of mine were shorter than one business day. In two cases when my return flight was not until late at night, the interview schedule ended, and I was left to my own devices as of 3 p.m.

At another interview, the hiring committee organized an open meeting for me to meet with the faculty. But it was set for late Friday afternoon, when virtually no one was around. I might be pardoned for the suspicion that someone didn't want to risk that some faculty members might actually like me and lobby for me to be hired.

Some red flags started waving almost as soon as I arrived in town:

• Once, I was greeted at the airport by a secretary who wasn't even connected with the search committee; evidently no one from the panel wanted to pick me up.
• Another time I was instructed to get a rental car to drive myself back and forth, not just from the airport to the hotel but also from the hotel to the campus, to spare the search committee members that "inconvenience."
• One institution had a very nice hotel right on the campus, but somehow the hiring committee neglected to reserve a room for me. It was fully booked when I arrived, so I was directed to a budget motel down the road. Perhaps the committee members thought I would never find out, except that nearly everyone I met with said, "You must be staying at our hotel. Isn't it lovely?"

More problems surfaced in the actual interviews:

• I was kept waiting 10 minutes for a 30-minute interview with a top administrator. No one was in his office; he just had something more important to do. His secretary then popped her head in before the end of my scheduled time to say that his next appointment was there. Too bad she hadn't popped into his office to announce my own arrival.
• During my final interview at that institution, only two people attended: the head of the search committee and one other member. Both were very gracious, but that didn't conceal the fact that so many others were missing. One member had actually told me earlier in the day that she was going to leave early to beat the Friday afternoon traffic.
• The behavior of the senior administrators who will make the final hiring decision is the most revealing of all. On several occasions, they spent precious interview time talking about themselves, seemingly to put me at ease, but in fact wasting the time that would have allowed us to engage in a meaningful exchange of ideas. They didn't seem to really care about getting to know me.

If I had not already figured out that I was a faux finalist, my experiences at the dinner hour often settled it. Some frugal campuses have figured out that if no one from the search committee eats with the candidate, it's not part of the interview, and they can send the person off to forage for themselves with a $15 reimbursement limit. As I sat eating a take-out sandwich in my hotel room, I thought about a graduate student I knew who was courted by several top-flight universities and taken out to numerous meals at first-class restaurants, simply as an applicant to a doctoral program.

When I was taken out to dinner, it wasn't always the hospitable gesture that might be presumed. I was once taken to a steakhouse where there was not a thing on the menu that had not once mooed or oinked. I'm not a vegetarian, but the fact that I was not even asked the question, or taken to a place with some choice of food, suggested that my host was less interested in courting me as a candidate than in getting his favorite meal on the campus's dime.

By now you may be thinking that I must have some virulent personality flaw that causes people to dispense with common courtesy. I hope that's not the case, and in every interview I had, I did meet some people who treated me very well. But now I have to wonder if some of their kindness may have been motivated by sympathy, since they certainly knew about the internal candidate and probably guessed correctly that there was little chance I would be hired.

Here's one final way to verify if you are a pawn in a fixed game: Keep checking the institution's Web site after your interview. Rarely did I find a formal announcement posted there about who had been hired, although similar announcements appeared frequently for people hired into lower-ranking positions. Instead, I once came across a small blurb in a campus newsletter, congratulating the colleague who had just been appointed to the permanent position. Twice I found no announcement of any kind; the word "interim" was simply dropped from the incumbent's title.

In one case, I found the appointee's name on a roster of the president's cabinet for the new academic year, although the Web site for the position did not disclose the appointee's name until months later. Searches conducted in a fair and open manner don't treat the successful candidate as though she or he sneaked in through the back door in the dead of night.

After reading the above, if you are a job candidate, I hope that you will be better able to spot when a search is a done deal. And if you are on a search committee, I hope that you realize that your intentions, while they may have been honest, caused candidates to perceive your behavior as disrespectful.

And if your intentions were not honest, and you were going through the motions of a national search just to be able to say you did it, then shame on you. No candidate deserves to be reduced to a box that you check off under "applicants interviewed."