By Carl Yerger, Chair, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Davidson College

The job market in mathematics can be an overwhelming place on both sides of the interview table. There are significantly more job seekers than jobs available, applications for a single position can reach multiple hundreds. Additionally, there may be external pressures placed on the search committee by a vocal group of students or administrators with initiatives. And that’s in “normal times.” Now, we need to do all of this remotely — quite possibly for the first time. Given a rash of retirements and an explosion of student interest on our computer science side, Davidson College’s Math and Computer Science Department has already completed two tenure-track searches and two visitor searches during this pandemic, and I’d like to share my experiences and thoughts with you from these adventures.

How do you do it? First, remember that even in “normal” times, no search was perfect — search committee members were unavailable for meetings, signals were crossed in coordinating the details of a visit, flights were cancelled due to a snowstorm, positions suddenly disappeared — I’m sure you have other stories to tell like this. In any event, the show must go on, and it is important despite the frustrations to acknowledge and be grateful for even the opportunity to hire in the middle of a period of great financial uncertainty.

For the rest of this article, I want to focus on the “virtual campus interview” phase of the hiring process. Even institutions who conducted first-round interviews online or via phone in the past likely still had top candidates visit campus for individual meetings and some sort of research/teaching presentation.

Ideally the main parts of the virtual visit should last for no more than two days and not drag on for an extended period of time. Top candidates may be interviewing at multiple institutions, and tension is often very high. One silver lining of virtual interviews is that administrative visits, say for the dean or the president, can be moved to another day outside of the two-day main visit, so that the candidate and the committee have more choices over the timing of the interview. Perhaps institutions will be more open to this type of flexibility when schedules don’t match up moving forward. We have found that online polling sites, such as doodle.com, can be helpful for scheduling small group meetings with the candidate. Our institutional best practice is for there to be pairs of colleagues meeting with candidates. In addition, consider inviting the candidate to be part of the process and ask if there are particular members of the campus community outside the department for whom they would be interested in meeting.

Student interaction can happen at a virtual lunch, or a set informal time after a talk that is reserved only for them to meet their new potential professor. It’s also important to recruit some student thought leaders or work closely with student organizations so that there is some consistency among the visits and so that the organizer has a couple of students who agree to meet all of the candidates. It is also possible to signal institutional commitments to diversity and inclusion by scheduling times with departmental or affinity-based student groups as part of the interview. Be careful that these students aren’t being overused or tokenized. Also, make sure to schedule breaks so that the candidate has time to breathe and process the discussions. How did we recruit students to attend zoom meetings? There are some students who were genuinely interested in learning about each candidate. However, that number was on the lower end, especially given rising levels of “zoom fatigue.” That being said, the tried-and-true method of extra credit and other course-based incentives seem to work well in recruiting a broad audience. 

One question to consider is how to create more informal moments that used to take place at meals, coffee breaks, or walks between meetings. We tried a virtual happy hour with each of our candidates, and this tended to work well. It is important to set ground rules for everyone to know it is okay to discuss personal interests, non-mathematical topics, and to encourage conversations typically had at a meal with colleagues. It was often a fun moment to see a search committee member crack open a beer or a soda or make a toast with a glass of wine. One unresolved issue was how to gracefully end the happy hour. When is it time to go? Because of the pandemic, you likely won’t be going anywhere after the happy hour ends.

Here are some other hopefully useful tips:

• Tech fails will happen. Be sure to get back-up phone numbers for the candidates and selected colleagues.

• Markers of good teaching can be found throughout a zoom talk. How does a candidate respond to and initiate questions? How organized are they? Are there ways in which they reach out to participants? How do they deal with tech fails or unexpected troubles? Although a zoom talk is not the same as an in-person presentation, many of the same attributes of a candidate can be observed. However, norms for teaching-related interactions aren’t fully settled, so the search committee should be more open to different engagement techniques and factor in students’ unfamiliarity with a particular technique. 

• You will never create the perfect visit. Most likely being department chair/organizer is not your only role in your job, which is just part of your life.

• There is the continued risk of blurring boundaries of work and home, so try to set boundaries in your communications.

Despite the challenges with virtual visits, there are some silver linings: old norms about what is part of an interview can be reconsidered: there are no travel days for candidates who are far away, there is institutional cost savings on travel and dinners, the committee (chair) doesn’t have to reserve space on campus, there are fewer flight or weather delays, and with a candidate’s consent, talks can be recorded for students and faculty with conflicts.

Overall, I believe that our department was able to get a good sense of each of our candidates before having to make a decision. In some ways our process didn’t change that much at all. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are aspects of this virtual interview that we will want to keep moving forward.