OK, I have to share this. There is a new style of interviewing people for jobs. You fly, say, 15 people in. You meet them all at the airport, interview them there for 2 hours, select the 3 you like and drive them to your facilities for a visit and the rest of the interview.
The unlucky 12 are put on the plane back right there at the airport.
If you want to ask why Skype isn’t used instead, I’m as puzzled as you are.
This is actually being done at my university right now. If anybody has any explanations, please share.
Clarissa's Blog 
What the devil? This sounds like something that would happen in a pulpy business-intrigue novel.
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My colleague who reads this blog will correct me if I haven’t reported it correctly. He won’t, though, because we both just heard it at a meeting.
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This is beyond weird. Are they all at the airport together? If so, maybe the idea is to see how they fare with real-time competitive stress. It seems really expensive, but if universities have more money than they can figure out how to spend…
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I know quite a few ways we could spend money instead. But who’ll listen?
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What sort of job is it? This might make more sense with administrator positions than with faculty. It also sounds British: they typically invite all the candidates to campus together, so everyone knows who the competition is.
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Yes, it’s an administrator we are looking for. But it’s still weird to interview people at the airport, isn’t it? How uncomfortable is that?
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Maybe you guys are saving on hotel costs? But why not then save on airfare as well and use skype?
“Interviewing them all at once” reminds of me of interviews in science and engineering departments at European universities. Apparently faculty interviews there involve putting 20 people in a room together, while the committee asks them oral questions!
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“Apparently faculty interviews there involve putting 20 people in a room together, while the committee asks them oral questions!”
– Jesus. Don’t they understand that the person who will win is the one who is the most comfortable speaking over everybody else and being the center of attention while more reserved, quiet, shy people will lose? I know I’d do great at such an interview (autism) but that’s hardly fair.
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I have been on the interviewing side of airport-hotel interviews. This is how it works: for an administrative position, there is no equivalent of the MLA as a clearing-house for initial interviews. If you’re looking for a dean, this person could be in the humanities, the hard sciences, or the social sciences (assuming a liberal arts & sciences dean); for provost, you might also be considering people from a business school or other college. So in their disciplines, they’re all on a different hiring cycle. Thus, you pick a couple of days when you can get the hiring committee together and get the candidates to come to a reasonably large near-by airport hotel.
You get a conference room for the actual interviews, one with multiple entrances and preferably a sort of suite so there’s a waiting room for the next candidate up, and the one who just finished can go out the back door so they don’t cross paths. Your candidates do not necessarily stay in the same hotel, though this may depend on the size of your airport. They are not supposed to meet, though there’s no way to prevent them hanging around in the hotel bar trying to size up the competition. But that’s up to them; they know the score. It does surprise me that the top three would come to campus at the same time. In my experience, that would not normally be the case.
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But how do they automatically get flights out? Is this more or less expensive than sending a committee to the MLA to interview?
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I don’t think this is a money issue. This is a very major search and nobody would be pinching pennies. There must be some other rationale behind it.
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