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MY STRATEGIES for successful hiring were conceived in a painful process marked almost as much by failure as by success. I describe that process here in the hope that readers will benefit from my experiences and at the very least will avoid some of my mistakes. I am convinced that hiring is one of the chair's most important functions, if not the most important. In my five years as chair I have filled twenty-eight faculty positions on Loyola University's Chicago campuses. These have been tenure-track, visiting, and part-time appointments in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Polish, and Japanese. Several were made this year as the result of a merger. Next year I will probably hire someone in Arabic and an additional person in Japanese; but it was this year that I completed the major hiring task set before me when I assumed office.
Loyola University, Chicago, is an urban, private, PhD-granting institution with a student body of around 15,000. We have five campuses, including one in Rome. The Rome connection accounts, in part, for our having one of the largest Italian programs in an American university. Our institution is strong financially: it has gone from being a local presence with a large commuter population to a regional presence with a large resident population, and we now recruit nationally with increasing success. We have good leadership, responsive administrators.
Our department offers majors in French, German, Italian, and Spanish. In addition, we have a graduate program in Spanish, and next year we will revive our graduate program in French, which was suspended six years ago for lack of enrollment. We will also begin planning for a graduate program in Italian next year.
Like all others, our department suffered through the turbulent times of falling enrollments, lost requirements, and lost lines; times, too, when Loyola, traditionally a teaching institution, became research-oriented. Our chance to turn things around came with a juncture of events—rising enrollments and mass retirements. In the last five years, a third of my department retired. The rising enrollments, coupled with aggressive advocacy, enabled me to retain all my lines. After explaining to everyone what we do and why it is of vital importance today and will become even more important in the years ahead, I succeeded in having the language requirement increased and gaining permission to hire. I began recruiting and hiring in my second year. I have run seven tenure-track searches in four years for five positions. Three of the searches failed; four were successful—one permitting us to fill two vacancies. We got our first-choice candidate for each tenure-track hire: a professor of German, two of French, one of Italian, and one of Spanish. All but one were hired for entry-level positions.
From the beginning I realized that I had been given a unique opportunity to reshape my department, and I set out to hire the very best talent we could attract. I wanted people with excellent language skills who were interested in both teaching and scholarship. Fortunately, I had enough administrative support to make fairly competitive offers. We have always tried to maximize our chances by doing our homework well. We take care in wording the advertisement published in the MLA Job Information List , and we have learned to make it as explicit as possible. We found, for instance, that we were inevitably dissatisfied with candidates who were not knowledgeable in theory, but that we had not asked for this competence in our ads. When we finally did, we got better qualified candidates. In other words, when we stated overtly what had been an unconscious hidden agenda, everyone benefited. Our ad says that we want near-native fluency both in English and in the target language—and we mean it. The interview at the MLA convention is always conducted both in English and in the target language. We've found that many excellent candidates are disqualified because their language skills do not meet our standards. Inadequate English means an inability or an unwillingness to teach literature-in-translation courses, which are very important for us. It also means that the candidate will probably not represent us well at the college or university level. Inadequate skills in the target language are, of course, disastrous in the classroom. All our professors must have mastered at least one foreign language well; that foreign language may indeed be English.
We ask for full dossiers in the ad despite the recommendation of the MLA Committee on Academic Freedom and Professional Rights and Responsibilities, which discourages departments from asking for full dossiers in the October list. We do it because full dossiers permit a more judicious selection. The letters of recommendation, in particular, give valuable insights. What is not said is almost as important as what is said. And although I would encourage more truth telling in these letters, a perceptive reader finds them helpful despite their exclusively laudatory nature. All tenured and tenure-track members of the section that is hiring scrutinize everything submitted and make the initial cut. Our final short list is developed by my advisory committee, which includes members from all our sections. Input from outside the section doing the hiring has proved particularly valuable, even if it has been, on occasion, initially resented.
The next step involves calling everyone on the short list to set up appointments at the MLA convention. I also request additional data at this time. I ask for writing samples and sample teacher and course evaluations. We want to make it clear that teaching and scholarship are equally important to us. It is also now that we notify all candidates who will not be interviewed that we can no longer pursue their candidacies. I initially omitted this important step, thinking that candidates who had not been called for interviews would realize that they were out of the running, but I discovered that this was not true. Hope springs eternal, and it must be mercifully put to death before the convention.
Our convention interviews, which are set up at hour intervals, ideally last between thirty and forty minutes. The team prepares for them very well, and I insist that every candidate be given full consideration and be treated with dignity and kindness. We begin by briefly defining the job and then go on to describe the department and the university in general. We are ready to engage the candidate, in the target language, concerning the writing sample submitted. Needless to say, applicants who cannot talk about their own work, when we can, are at a disadvantage. Two or three recent candidates couldn't remember what they had said in the articles they sent us. Although discussion of the candidates' research interests is vital, we also talk about their teaching experience. Since we don't have a two-tier faculty, we make it clear that everyone in our department is expected to teach both language and literature. We are favorably impressed if the candidate has taken the initiative to do some research on us.
If possible, the key people in the section should be present for the interviews. If they are not, they will be screening the candidates during the on-campus visit when everyone should be in the recruiting mode, not the screening mode. This situation can lead to a failed search, as it once did for us. Every effort should be made to convince administrators that flying an extra interviewer to the MLA convention is less costly than a failed search. I should add here that it is also a bad idea to exclude difficult faculty members from the hiring process. If they participate in it, they are less likely to try to scuttle it. You don't normally try to destroy what you feel a part of.
I would also counsel against running more than one search at a time, if this can be avoided. I have conducted as many as three searches in three different languages in the same year, involving more than twenty-five interviews at the convention. Even if there are people speaking at the convention who can help with the interviews, it is difficult, if not impossible, to put together effective interviewing teams for more than one search. On the other hand, if the searches are in the same language, running more than one at a time can actually have some advantages. We have really only done it well once, in 1990, when the convention was in Chicago and I was able to put together two effective teams. I should also note that that year, because of a special set of circumstances, we were able to interview in a suite. Our success was undoubtedly due to many factors, but I'm tempted to say that the lovely setting had something to do with it. It certainly had a lot to do with how we all felt about the process. In years past, I had always made good use of the facilities provided by the MLA, but on the one occasion that I was constrained to interview in my hotel room, I found the situation uncomfortable, if not embarrassing. Female candidates interviewed in such surroundings have expressed similar discomfort with the arrangement.
After all the convention interviewing is completed, the team ranks the candidates. Those who will not be invited to the campus should be notified in writing as soon as possible. I begin calling the finalists in early January to determine whether they are seriously interested in the job. This is a crucial consideration, and candidates who did not seem eager for the job during their convention interviews are not likely to be selected for on-campus visits. For each position, three candidates are normally invited to Chicago. These visits are usually planned for the second week of class in January. If we are running two searches, the second trio is scheduled for the fourth week of class. Although these visits occasion a great deal of stress for both the department and the candidates, they can be a valuable experience for everyone, and we try to organize them carefully. Each candidate is sent teaching materials and a schedule for the appointed day, and each is expected, during the visit, to teach a language class and to present a paper to the entire department. Other activities include a private meeting with me and one with the humanities dean. Ample break time is allotted, along with the opportunity to meet and talk informally with the faculty. We, of course, also wine and dine our candidates and show ourselves off to our best advantage. We put them up in a charming small hotel in downtown Chicago near our Water Tower campus. We capitalize on our exciting urban setting, stressing how livable Chicago is.
The good news about these on-campus visits is that we've seen some excellent teaching, particularly among candidates for Spanish and Italian posts. The bad news is that much can go wrong. My first experience was particularly stressful. The first candidate was fine, but he told us that he had another on-campus interview lined up for later that week at a very prestigious university. Then there was a racial incident in the class taught by our second candidate. The third candidate insulted one of our part-time instructors. So, after screening over a hundred applicants for the job, we were left with only one viable candidate, who was by no means a sure thing. The story has a happy ending—due, I am convinced, to divine intervention—but we suffered much travail along the way.
The worst thing that can happen, though, is something that is just sensed and cannot be proved: the adverse response of colleagues who, for reasons fathomable and unfathomable, seem to feel threatened by a candidate. Obviously only excellent candidates inspire these unfortunate feelings. Full departmental participation in the selection process appears to be the only way to minimize this danger, since only those from the section hiring seem vulnerable in this regard.
Before the on-campus visits begin, each candidate's curriculum vitae is circulated to all members of the department, who also receive response sheets to return to me after the visits are over. As originally designed, the response sheets elicited commentary and called for rating the candidates on a scale of 1 to 10. I now strongly discourage this type of rating, which I have found to have great negative potential. It is extremely disconcerting, after our grueling selection process, to see candidates given a rating of 4 or 5, for example. These harsh assessments not only trash the candidates, they also trash the judgment of the recruitment team. I now recommend, instead, that each candidate be ranked as first, second, or third choice. This practice leaves little room for disparagement and ensures clearer outcomes. First choice is first choice. Under the numbering system, first choice could be a 10; it could be an 8; it could even be a 6. Whereas, in one way, the 1-to-10 ratings are revealing, in another, they cloud the outcome and complicate the selection process unnecessarily.
After our first choice has been determined (and, mercifully, we have always had something approaching consensus, even unanimity on one occasion), I move quickly to secure the dean's approval for the offer I want to make. I have discussed salary with the candidates during the on-campus visits—privately, since I need to find out what they are currently making, if they are already in the ranks. I naturally try to hire at as high a salary as I can. I would not, however, seek permission to make an offer totally out of line with our current scale, which is competitive for our area, nor would such permission be granted.
Once I have made the offer, I try to get an early decision from the candidate. Delays can jeopardize the search. It should be noted that the time crunch makes it almost impossible for us to give serious consideration to senior candidates who apply for entry-level jobs, as many do these days. We cannot keep two junior candidates dangling while we try to secure the institutional endorsement required for senior appointments with tenure.
It would be nice if I could report that after the contract is signed, everything is settled. I've learned, painfully, that that is not so. One of our searches failed, as I already mentioned, because senior faculty members did not participate in the interview process. Another failed because the candidate signed at least two contracts, including ours, and then decided to go elsewhere. The third failed because the candidate decided to change professions—two weeks before classes began. I suppose we were lucky that neither of these two came on board, but I didn't feel that way at the time. I will never forget the parting words of one of these candidates: “Institutions survive; people don't.” The candidate was the person; I was the institution. Yes, we are the powerful ones, but we are also vulnerable.
The author is Associate Professor of French and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Loyola University, Chicago. This article is based on a paper presented at ADFL Seminar East, 6–8 June 1991, in New London, Connecticut.
© 1992 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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