Placement Service

Eric Lewis

Department of Philosophy

398-6054

An effective placement service should have the following features:

  1. be fully integrated into your graduate program
  2. be run wholly by your department
  3. be indexed to your profession’s culture, history and rules of hiring
  4. be international in reach
  5. be multi-component

I will briefly consider each of the above (there is much to say on each). I will then discuss the costs and benefits of establishing such a service, and make some policy suggestions.

  1. Placement begins with attempts to recruit new graduate students, continues throughout a graduate student’s tenure, and does not end until a student finally secures a tenure track job to their liking. A department’s placement record, and the placement services it offers, are very effective recruitment tools (see the section below on “benefits” for more on this). Departments should be concerned with placement from a student’s first term in the department. For example, one should consider the courses a student undertakes with an eye to how those courses will help to demonstrate expertise and/or competence in certain sub-fields that the job market prioritizes. Opportunities to T.A. and teach should be assigned with a view to helping a student’s dossier. C.V.s need to be created in the first year and updated constantly, with assistance. Teaching letters from faculty need to be written, and updated regularly. It is a mistake to turn one’s attention to placement only at the end of a student’s program. The job market often lags behind new trends in research, and students doing cutting edge research in new developing sub-fields need to be hirable. Remember, not every student will end up teaching at a first-tier research intensive graduate program—they need to be able to evince their ability to be an effective colleague at a range of institution-types (this affects many aspects of the placement service). The timing of the completion of a student’s degree is very important, and requires much long range planning. Ideally, when a student is on the job market s/he has submitted his/her thesis so that his/her letters of support can both indicate that the thesis is completed and speak to its qualities. This requires many months of thinking ahead. Also, and often crucially, the external examiner of a Ph.D. thesis is a very important potential letter-writer for a job candidate, as an uninterested third party. A dossier with such a letter is much stronger than one without one. In general, the rules of one’s graduate program must be created with placement in mind; this is how one has a professional graduate program.
  2. Placement must be run in-house, and not by a centralized placement service. The reason for this is that placement, when done well, is highly personalized and subtly indexed to a given profession. For example, students in philosophy will often have three slightly different dossiers for jobs with slightly different descriptions. The dossiers are often “tweaked” for individual jobs, and updated continually. Different, but overlapping, sets of letters may accompany a dossier for different types of jobs. A job dossier, particularly for students just completing their degrees, is a constantly evolving thing, and must be available in the department for instantaneous updating. Also, increasingly institutions want overlapping, but distinct, information from candidates (e.g. Job A wants a detailed description of a candidate’s teaching philosophy, but only one writing sample; Job B wants two writing samples, but no description of a candidate’s teaching philosophy), and often accept it in differing forms (paper, fax, electronically, and so on). All this is best handled by a departmental placement officer, with assistance from an administrator. I will often make small changes in a student’s file, for particular jobs, upon learning something about the job. It might be something as small as placing a certain course syllabus first, upon learning that an institution needs courses in that area covered, or adding or subtracting a letter of reference, if I learn that the individual letter writer has a certain “reputation” at a given institution.
  3. Each profession has distinct hiring practices, and each placement service must be created with these in mind. Does your profession have a centralized hiring conference? If so, the placement service must be indexed to when and where this is, including planning to attend the conference with your cohort. What sort of CV does your discipline expect? What sorts of interviews are undertaken? Do your candidates need to prepare a lecture or a class presentation? Do they need to have publications, teaching experience, something else? What do closely related disciplines expect, since many jobs these days are interdisciplinary, and may be cross appointments? Some of this will be discussed under 5.
  4. You must be prepared to assist students in a worldwide context. This requires knowledge of hiring practices in a number of countries, and ability to access job ads worldwide, and the ability to act very quickly.
  5. A placement service needs to include at least the following:
  6. detailed CV writing assistance, including the creation of multiple CVs indexed to slightly different jobs
  7. assistance in choosing and creating the writing sample(s) for the dossier, which, in most cases, needs to be custom written for this purpose (and is very difficult to do correctly).
  8. Assistance in obtaining, vetting, and editing of letters of recommendation. (yes, you can ask colleagues to change their letters!)
  9. Assistance in the creation and choice of course syllabuses to include in the dossier (a VERY important, but often overlooked, part of a dossier)
  10. Insuring that teaching excellence is manifest in the dossier
  11. Collecting information on jobs available, and advising candidates where they should apply (they often do not know how to read job ads, which are often just a frozen moment in a department’s ongoing attempt to figure out what they want—see below).
  12. Creating, managing, photocopying, and mailing the dossiers in a timely manner (very admin. intensive).
  13. Conducting mock interviews of candidates. A research intensive university expects different things from a candidate then does a liberal arts college, or a community college. All candidates should receive at least a couple of mock interviews, done completely as if they are real interviews, and then they need to be de-briefed. Mock interviews always go badly, so the first real interview does not! You should role-play as if you are one sort of institution, and then another. These are VERY useful.
  14. Accompany candidates to job conventions, both to offer moral support, practical assistance, and to find out how interviews are going, and conduct last minute “damage control”
  15. Follow up with institutions that have interviews your candidates, find out how they went, what their worries are, what their time table is, and so on.
  16. Network and work the phones non-stop. It is surprising how much information you can get from departments, both about their job and your candidates, if you ask. There are many effective techniques for obtaining such information, and for using it to leverage your candidates.
  17. Assist candidates with job negotiations.
  18. NEVER lie. If you learn something about a job that makes your candidate less appropriate, say so.

There is much more to say about all of the above, particularly about the nuanced ways one can custom-make a dossier for a given job, how to keep your candidates in play throughout the process, how to direct candidates to “win” their job interviews, how to discover how your candidates are doing, and so on. Information gathering is essential, and building long-term relationships with other departments, and, crucially, their administrative staff, is important.

Costs and benefits

An effective and active placement service is useful to all components of the University. First, it is a great recruitment tool. Second, it gives graduate students a sense that your program has a purpose—that if they do what you ask of them, you will do something for them in return (this improves graduate student mood considerably). Third, it shortens time to completion, since students know they will receive assistance in obtaining a post. Fourth, it saves the university and your department money, since by attracting better graduate students, you attract students more likely to obtain scholarships. Fifth, with time it helps itself—by placing your students in the profession soon they are making hiring decisions, and your program gains a reputation as producing job-ready graduates. Lastly, it is, of course, what we SHOULD be doing; producing scholars, and assisting them in obtaining a position so they can pursue their research and teaching.

There are costs. First you must have a dedicated placement officer, who receives a course reduction for the vast amount of work they must undertake (and someone needs to be willing and able to do the job). This costs your department in terms of replacement teaching costs. Second, the cost of photocopying and mailing all the dossiers for each candidate can cost up to $300. If you have a main hiring conference, you need to send the placement officer there, at a cost, say, of $1000 (transport, room and board). If possible, you should subsidize the costs of your candidates attending this conference. There is also substantial admin. costs related with placement, as there are times of the year when one administrative aid must dedicate themselves to placement almost exclusively (particularly if you have a large number of candidates). For a department the size of Philosophy, the costs per year are about $15000, but the return is very much worth it!

Some proposals

I believe that departments that undertake a full placement service should be given funds for this purpose. It is very much in line with our function as a graduate research faculty, it helps improve the quality of our graduates (it also, in the mid to long run helps recruit new faculty), and it ultimately saves money via having graduates with far better chances of obtaining external funding.

I would be happy to discuss any of this further, with any of you.