Tuesday, June 6, 2017

Is there a correlation between the number of applications to faculty positions and phone interviews?

If there is one, it's not a big one. 

10 comments:

  1. I didn't look through the raw data, but did the number of interviews account for ones that were turned down due to recently made/accepted offers?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Great work Chemjobber! To me this graph looks just about as expected. There are the superstars, who get an interview for almost every application submitted. On the other side there are a bunch of candidates who get 0 or 1 interviews regardless of how many applications submitted. In the middle there is a trend of about 1 interview for about every 6 applications.

    A general question for any search committee members. What is the approximate ratio of phone interviews to onsite interviews? Five to one? Ten to one?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Our phone:onsite ratio was probably 5 to 1, and our total applicant:phone interview ratio was probably 10:1. It's just one data point, though.

      Delete
  3. Provide the standard deviation for the slope and we will have the answer to your question.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Unsure those points lie on a line, but I think we can agree they lie on a plane.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Of course, it's only as good as the data put in. May be some over inflating on the survey answers that skew one way or another. Who threw out 87 applications - were there 88 opportunities within a discipline/sub-discipline? That would be hard to believe, which again seems to skew the numbers.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The person probably has a mixed degree/experience like materials which could argue for a polymer, inorganic, or organic-based position.

      I would feel bad having spent the time putting together all materials for ~90 applications only to get 3 interviews... Unless he or she just used one generic package for virtually every application, which would then make sense why they had so many apps and so little call-backs.

      Delete
  6. several of my on-site interviews which led to offers had no phone or skype interview, just email contact

    ReplyDelete
  7. I also wonder if there's a correlation between institute type (i.e. R1 vs R2 vs PUI). Are there community college stats included here as well?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. my experiences have been as follows:

      international schools: two direct invites to interview by email, two asked to skype first
      R1 schools: some had skype interview (very casual) and others had email invite for on-site with no phone or skype
      R2 schools: very rigorous phone interview, then skype interview, then on-site

      I guess this makes sense because I would guess with a small department and a smaller budget, you want to do as much of your screening as possible before committing money to bringing someone in.

      Delete

looks like Blogger doesn't work with anonymous comments from Chrome browsers at the moment - works in Microsoft Edge, or from Chrome with a Blogger account - sorry! CJ 3/21/20