Academic

More Thoughts on the Lateral Market

By Jacqueline Lipton

As many of us Loungers have remarked before, the lateral market is a strange beast with less clearly defined rules/norms than the entry level market.  So to add to the mix, here's a bunch of issues to ponder about lateral moves both from the potential candidate's point of view and the recruiting school's point of view.  I don't have clear answers for these issues, and there may not be clear answers, but I'd be interested in what others think.

Lateral hiring issues beneath the fold...                

1/ If and when you get the call from a school interested in recruiting you - and there may well be less of those calls in this economy - what factors determine whether you should accept an interview day?  One colleague advised me once that if you think there is at least a 10-15% chance that you may be interested in the school, you should seriously consider accepting the invitation.  But of course, even if this is a good rule of thumb, what factors should you consider to get to 10-15%?  Location of the school?  Ranking of the school?  People on the faculty you may like to work with? Gossip about the school on the blogs?  (And one of my personal favorites - I always like to consider whether the school is imminently about to go into dean search mode for any reason because I generally like to have a few years working with the person who recruited me as dean, and to have a chance to avoid the stress and anxiety of a dean search so soon after a move.)

2/ For the recruiting school, is it reasonable to consider that everyone is effectively on the market all the time and you just have to find the right offer to coax the person you want to come over to your school?  Or are there rules of thumb that you need to take into account particularly in terms of matching prospective candidates with your geographical location?  Is it true that most young and carefree single folks won't want to end up in small college towns, for example?

3/ Should recruiting schools take the "long view" and be prepared to spend several years working on particular lateral possibilities eg initial contact and perhaps a faculty workshop invitation one year, work up to a semester-long visit the next year, and then make an offer?  If so, doesn't this become difficult if the appointments committee membership changes every year and people lose track of where they were in multi-year discussions with potential lateral candidates?  Has anyone got good strategies for avoiding these kinds of problems?

4/ What are the best strategies for a recruiting school to use to target candidates it may want?  For example, if you're trying to fill a curricular need with a lateral, and you don't already have faculty in that area, what is the best way to find people who you might want and who might be interested in you in that area?  For example, if I want to hire an IP person, I know who to talk to in the field to make recommendations about good candidates, but if I wanted to hire a critical race theorist, I'd probably be completely lost even in finding leaders in the field who could recommend good potential prospects.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on July 07, 2009 (boomark / email).