While I typically follow the job market vicariously through friends who are experiencing it, once in a while I get pulled back into the Rumor Mill again. One person posted a link to a recent Chronicle article about “Why your last hire was a freakin’ disaster” that looks at the job market from the perspective of outcomes. Berlinerblau (is that a real name?) even indulges in my recent pastime of making up numbers to state that: “For every 10 hires, I would estimate, 2.2 are ultimately “keepers”; three are “indiscretions”; as regards the other 4.5, well, the less said the better. (As for the remaining three-tenths, they failed to apprise you of their actual visa status and never made it back to the States).”
I’m not sure if those on the job market will, as the original poster states, find it comforting that the practices of search committees are so random or if they will simply use this as another data point to conclude that they were, in fact, better than the candidate who eventually got the job (though in some cases, they were clearly not).
Memoirs of a SLACer 