ARC: Connections: ELMAR: Posting

As I read the post on recruiting etiquettes, I could easily relate to it as I had been an applicant at the job fair held at the 2006 Summer Educators’ Conference in Chicago. Apart from the universities that called me for the interview and never responded back, there was a business school that had called me for an interview at around 6 pm one day. At exactly 6 pm the recruiting professor wanted to meet with some colleagues so I waited. I got to meet with him at around 7pm. The moment I entered the room, the first thing he said was "Oh Gosh, I still have another one to go". I had hardly seated myself and the second thing he said was, "I am not very sure whether we can keep you or not as we are applying for accreditation this year and it won’t be possible for us to show why we have recruited an Indian candidate instead of an American and we don’t want to jeopardize our accreditation process". “Although your credentials are good, I don’t know, how we are going to explain if anyone asks us as to why we have recruited you”. He also said, “I’m not sure what to do”. This was said and done with in the first 2-3 minutes. I sat there smiling trying to be polite thinking to myself – why the hell did you call me for an interview then? We did chat on for about 45 minutes talking of life in India (not academic or business of course).

The next day there were three other interviews where I wasn’t even asked a single question and had to listen to for about 20-30 minutes each to what the school had to offer. I had no idea why this was being done because I wasn’t asked anything about the subjects taught, papers published, my performance ratings or anything else whatsoever. I believe, they had called me for interviews after going through my CV. Did they just take one look at me and decide that they didn’t want to ask any questions? I have not been able to figure out till date why that happened? Any thoughts on that may please be emailed to me.

About the comment on applying for inactive jobs or those that do not exist anymore, I agree that applicants need to be more aware. But I also believe that it’s not always that potential candidates apply to jobs that are not active because they are not careful enough but at times do so because they have this ray of hope in their heart that maybe their application will be considered at some time. Or maybe the eternally optimist think their great application will suddenly produce a vacancy for a job (pun intended).

Just for the record, I am not an applicant for any active/inactive jobs. I am only relating a past experience.