Speaker 1: In this video, we're going to be talking about the first round interview in job searches. Hi, I'm Tom Mulaney, and if you're navigating a career in academia, please consider subscribing. Okay, so the first round job interview is a source of anxiety and stress for so many. We're all trying to get that first round interview, we're all trying to figure out how to write our cover letters and our application materials so that we kind of rise to the top of the applicant pool, and I'll be making many videos about each and every one of those elements. But for this video, I want to give you some insight on what the first round interview feels like for the interviewers themselves. The reason I want you to know this is because it will help you relax and do your very best during the first round interview. The more you understand that these are human beings on the other side of the table or on the other side of the Zoom conference call, the better that you are going to do in the interview itself. The first thing you need to know is that for the interviewers themselves, they are learning on the job. Yes, there are going to be a number of senior scholars, likely, on the committee, but there are also going to be more junior members of the committee or advanced graduate students. For many of the committee members, this might be the very first time they have ever been on this side of the interviewing table. So what you should know is that as the day of interviews go by, because often interviews are clustered on a single day, especially at a conference, the interviewers are getting better and better at what they do as they move from interviewee one to two to three to four. So they are actually learning and getting better at their job along the way. Now what does this mean? Well, some would interpret this as advice that you don't necessarily want to be the very first person in the door. Now, oftentimes, you have no control over that. You don't know whether or not there's going to be a time slot before you or after you. Sometimes you may be the only interview for that day. But the fact of the matter remains is that the interviewers are actually honing their craft as the broader process of interviewing candidates goes on. A second and related point is that committees often divvy up the responsibilities amongst themselves. So it's not uncommon at all before the interviewee enters the room or comes on Zoom that the committee decides, okay, Jennifer, how about you handle first book or dissertation? And Frank, maybe you could cover teaching. Chun, could you deal with second book project? And then I'll deal with community involvement and service and ask if the candidate has any additional questions. Now, this is not always true. But when it is, the reason that you want to know this is because you can get a sense of how the interview is going in terms of momentum as you are passed from one person to the next. So in a certain sense, if one person begins by saying, tell me about your research or tell me about your dissertation, and then you move through a discussion and then at some point there is a kind of awkward segue to another interviewer. Well, that kind of signals that that part of the discussion is over because you're moving from designated person one to designated person two within the interview process. The reason that committees often do this is because they want to make sure that they cover all the bases and that in the process of them being anxious about this experience, they don't want to forget and let the applicant leave the room and then think to themselves, oh shit, we forgot to ask them about their second book. Or, oh man, we forgot to ask them whether or not they had questions for us. Now, a related part of this is that as the day of interviews goes on, the process becomes more and more rote, less extemporaneous, less improvised, less fresh. So not only is one person designated to be the first book person or the teaching person, but often the very way that they phrase their questions is becoming identical. Now, this is not unexpected, but there is an element at that sort of psychological level where these questions are becoming somewhat desensitized to the committee. So, if the earlier advice might suggest you don't want to go too early in the interview process because things are still being ironed out, there's also some who would say you don't want to be too late in the interview process because by that point the committee members are getting tired, but they're also getting somewhat rote in the process. They're somewhat desensitized as compared to their highly alert state in the early parts of the interviews. Now, this brings us to a third point, which is kind of an extension of the second. There is a moment in the interview process when people can become a little bit loopy, can start to get a kind of cabin fever. I experienced this firsthand when part of a first round interview committee at the American Historical Association where the committee was basically locked in a room for about five hours straight with a break and then another three or four hours. You know, it was a fun experience, but you lock a group of people in a room for that long and have them work intensively, all sorts of things start to emerge. Inside jokes, a kind of strange camaraderie, just a general loss of orientation, let's say. And so what this means is that if you're the third or fourth or fifth or sixth interviewee in a day, you're walking into a kind of strange dynamic that's not of your making, but also a dynamic that you can't really blame the committee for experiencing because, again, they're human beings in human bodies locked in a hotel room or a hotel conference room and just doing one interview after the next after the next. This brings us to a fourth point, which is really important, and this is what I would describe as interview blur. Many times these interviews are back to back to back, so they might last 30 minutes, they might last 45 minutes, but the window of time in between these interviews can be as short as 10 minutes, 15 minutes, five minutes. I remember personally walking past the other interviewee in the hallway when I was an applicant. What this means is that for the committee itself, there is no time to take notes. It's certainly nothing extensive, and so what you end up doing is you have this pad of paper with these cryptic mnemonic notes where you're trying to remember what interviewee three or four said that, you know, that you remembered, and you're trying to remember who said what. It can get very jumbled very fast, and again, this is not something that the committee can be blamed for. It's just that they're trying to manage an overwhelming amount of information in a small amount of time. The other part of this is that there is really no time to prep for the next person. I often see applicants walk into a room, and you can tell that they think you have their CV like loaded into your brain like Neo in the Matrix, and they're very fearful about repeating themselves or saying something you already know. Don't assume any of that. Assume that they can't even remember what your dissertation is about, what university you're from, anything. It basically starts from zero when you walk into the room, and again, that's not because these are shitty people or disrespectful or they don't care about their fellow colleagues. It is quite literally that they had about five to ten minutes to have a drink of water, take these mad notes about the previous candidate, try to figure out who you are as you walk into the room the next one, and then compose themselves, because they too are trying to put a good foot forward, a good face forward for their department, their institution, their committee. At least any place you want to work involves committee members who are trying to put a good face forward. So where does this leave us? What are the practical takeaways that I want you to think about when you are getting ready for a first round interview? First, you need to do everything in your power not to be a kind of undifferentiated mass of oatmeal, by which I mean the phenomenon of the first round interview itself is such that it erases memory. Basically, the kind of tendency or the way that that structure is built is that it erases memory, it makes things unmemorable, it makes things hard to recall, and you don't want to contribute to that. You don't want to be an unmemorable candidate, because then by the end of that cabin fever eight-hour day, no one is going to remember you. They're going to have to go back over their notes and say, oh yeah, now I remember that person from University of X, because basically the interview was a sort of tepid room temperature glass of water. So when you are preparing, just know that there are some obvious key elements, there are some obvious key themes that you are going to be asked to address, such as, you know, your current research, future research, your teaching experience, any service or sort of broader involvement with the academic community, and then any questions you have for us. Those are like bread and butter. What you want to do is make sure that you have a key set of three, four, or five tight, well-rehearsed talking points for each of those elements. Now you're not going to have time probably to hit all five of them, and you can prepare more if you like, but the key here is these are unforgettable, precise, well-crafted talking points that you have just kind of baked into your bones at this point, having practiced so much. And when you are in, say, the section of the interview about your research or about teaching, you're listening to the questions to be sure, but what you're really doing is trying to figure out which of the five anecdotes that you've already prepared, A, B, C, D, E, can be linked or routed to the question you are being asked. So this is something that, for example, I don't know, press secretaries in the White House know how to do, and certainly politicians think about a lot, but also anyone that has any experience going on broadcast news. You know, they've got two minutes. They can't just blah blah the way I'm doing here on YouTube. They've got to bring every question to something quite precise that is almost like their kill zone, something that they have down, and if you walk into that trap, boy, you're going to get a fantastic story, a fantastic, insightful statement, something about you that they need to know that they'll never forget having heard it. And you want to have five or six of these just in your mind, and you're listening to the question, and part of your brain is saying, okay, I can route that question to anecdote B or to D or to E and then deliver that. And then another question comes up, maybe a follow-up, and maybe you just continue down that route, or you think to yourself, I could route that question to anecdote A or E. You see what I'm getting here? The goal is that at the end of those few minutes that are dedicated, say, to your research, you want to make sure that you have said at least half of the anecdotes that you have crafted in advance, and the same thing for the section on the second book project, whatever and whatever, because then you know that when you leave those 30 minutes, you have given them 10, 15 unforgettable, insightful little morsels about your broader research and teaching and academic profile. By contrast, and you see this quite a lot, the interviewees who basically let the ocean tide of the question just sort of toss them about like a boat that's unmoored. And the problem is, is that if you do that, chances are you're going to say a whole lot of unforgettable, time-filling stuff. Just unflavored Cheerios, like, yep, it's edible, and I guess it's got vitamins in it, but I don't remember it right as soon as I'm done. So you need to take control. You need to take some sort of initiative by, again, trying to prepare in advance some things that you want them to know and that you have a chance to route them to. Another key sort of takeaway from this is more of a cognitive one, more of an emotional one, but it is a very different thing when you walk into a room and you have somewhere in your mind the idea that these are like robots, or I don't know, the Council of Elders, the Jedi Council, and you are there, and they are kind of this, these emotionless sages, like up in the mountains that you're visiting, and you're just this lowly applicant and so forth. They're transcendent. That's scenario A. Scenario B is one in which, I don't know, one of the interviewers is going through a divorce, the other one is worrying about whether or not their kid will get placed in this school or that school, the third one might be thinking of the eBay purchase they just made, and the other one is worrying about what everybody else in the room is thinking of them, meaning these are human beings with sinews and bones and blood and sweat. They're just like you. It's an asymmetric power relationship, no doubt, but they are human beings, and you are walking into a situation that is more stressful for you, but it's also really strange for them. And so, and this is going to sound strange the way I put it, but I'm going to just say it this way. If you, in some sense, leave them feeling alleviated from this strange cabin fever, awkward scenario that they are in, they're going to remember you, and more than that, they're going to think about how wonderful it might be to have you around all the time, i.e. to be a colleague. So if an applicant comes into the room, and through their conduct and through their interview style, they make the situation heavier and weirder than it already is, unfortunately that does contribute to a sense, I think, in most interviewers' minds of their research is great, they seem like a perfectly, you know, good person. Maybe it's hard to imagine being colleagues with them for 30 years, 40 years, versus someone who walks into this scenario, and through a mixture of their composure, their brevity, their humor, their intelligence, everything about them, something about their presence lightened and alleviated the bizarre nature of this interview process. That's the kind of person that people want to have as colleagues, because we want colleagues who make our worlds lighter, brighter, more interesting, inspiring, challenging. Deep, deep down inside, that's not on any website, I don't think, but I think deep, deep, deep down inside, that is something that people do think of when they think, do I want to live with this person and work with this person for 30 more years, you know, inshallah. The last thing that I want to point out, and this is something that I'm going to talk about probably in future videos as well, brings us back to the point I made about the different ranks of the interviewers. There are senior scholars who have done this 15 times or more, and then there are first-year, second-year assistant professors who literally, the last time they were in an interview, they were the interviewee. The key point to remember here is I would bet you a good amount of money, I don't know if you're allowed to say that on YouTube, I'm not betting anyone, but it's an expression. I would bet that the first-year assistant professor who is in that committee, you know what they're worried about when they're in that interview? They are not worried about you. They're worried about how they look and sound to their senior colleagues. Seven times out of ten, something along those lines is going through the minds of a junior colleague, and it makes perfect sense. They're not safe yet, they don't have tenure, they are suffering from imposter syndrome as we speak. They're in front of an interviewee who is, in their own minds, way better than they are, and they're thinking to themselves, wow, I bet my senior colleagues are wondering why why did we hire this one? Why, you know, we should have waited this one out, and look how amazing the scholars are that programs are producing these days. All sorts of stuff is going through the minds of junior faculty in that interview room, and that can come out in some awkward ways. In my experience, sometimes the more aggressive party in an interview situation can be the more junior people, in a certain sense because they're trying to strut their stuff a bit in front of colleagues who they are trying to impress. There's a weird dynamic that happens. That also happens in job talks, by the way, during the Q&A. So you're trying to impress everybody, but someone on the committee is trying to impress somebody else. That can get complex. Okay, well that's all I have for you today. I just wanted to reflect out loud about what the interview process looks like for the interviewers themselves, so that you can strategize how to prepare for this event, not as some sort of robot in this robotic environment, but as one human being that is going to be sitting and talking with a group of other human beings who have all of their foibles, all of their imperfections, all of their hang-ups as well. Please subscribe to this channel. Please leave a comment, if you would, about your own interview process and how you're preparing, and give the video a like if so inspired. I will see you in the next video.