Placement Service
Eric Lewis
Department of Philosophy
eric.lewis@mcgill.ca
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:
a. detailed CV writing assistance, including the creation of
multiple CVs indexed to slightly different jobs
b. 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).
c. Assistance in obtaining, vetting, and editing of letters of
recommendation. (yes, you can ask colleagues to change their
letters!)
d. Assistance in the creation and choice of course syllabuses to
include in the dossier (a VERY important, but often
overlooked, part of a dossier)
e. Insuring that teaching excellence is manifest in the dossier
f. 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).
g. Creating, managing, photocopying, and mailing the dossiers in
a timely manner (very admin. intensive).
h. 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.
i. 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”
j. 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.
k. 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.
l. Assist candidates with job negotiations.
m. 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.