What do search committees really read in a CV during initial screening for a faculty position?

Question

Faculty positions are very competitive, and each advertisement should roughly receive hundreds of applications.

I think search committees cannot spend more than 1 min reading each CV during the initial screening (correct me if I'm wrong).

CVs are usually 10-20 pages documented in different formats, and it is not easy to capture potentials of a person in 1 min.

Owing to the fact that not all committee members are fully familiar with the journals in which applicant has published, his/her research impact, his/her universities of education, or the importance of his unusual achievements.

Then, how does a search committee shortlist the candidates during the initial screening? What do they quickly look for in a CV to keep the candidate?

NOTE: My assumption for 1 min for each CV was based on a simple math. If a job ad receives 400 applications, each member should spend almost 7 hours to review only CVs (not looking at other documents). If my assumption was somehow wrong, please forgive me. Your answer can clarify the issue anyway.

Answer 1

I'm serving on a hiring committee this year that received roughly 180 applications for a tenure track position in mathematics. All of the members of the committee reviewed all of the applications. Most could be very easily eliminated from consideration (PhD not completed yet, PhD in a field other than mathematics, wrong area, etc.) Although I got through some of these easy applications in a minute, the better applications took considerably more time to review, and I ended up spending about 15 hours reviewing applications for the first round or an average of about 5 minutes per application.

When the committee met, we wrote down our top 20 lists, and it was relatively easy to select phone interview candidates, since only 18 candidates were on the top 20 lists of at least two of the committee members. We offered phone interviews to 18 candidates and had 14 candidates who agreed to phone interview.

I don't blame applicants for submitting to lots of places, but the reality in mathematics today is that nearly all institutions will be able to find enough applicants to phone interview that meet all of their requirements, are in the preferred area of specialization, and have some post PhD experience (post-doc, VAP, or both.) If you don't have these qualities, then you're not likely to get through the first round of screening.

Answer 2

Let me make a few points with regards to to your solution of this Fermi problem.

Hiring committees have more than one member. The more applications received, the more members the committee usually has. Moreover, it is highly unlikely that every committee member looks at every application in the first round. Exactly what is done must depend strongly on the department, but I can describe my own experience. In my department -- mathematics, UGA -- we do usually get 300-400 applications for a tenure-track job opening (sometimes for two or three positions at once, but that doesn't help any!). The applications are processed by subject area. In fact in my department the "hiring committee" consists of all tenure-track faculty, so initially I look at applications in my field -- number theory -- and closely related fields. This usually gives me about 50 applications to look at. I look at them as they come in, not all at once at the end, so in the first phase I probably spend something like half an hour a day over the course of several weeks looking at applications. This gives me more like 10 minutes per application, on average.

Another point is that CVs can be 10-20 pages in length, but this is usually for people towards the end of an academic career who insist on putting every talk they ever gave and class they ever taught on their CV. For applicants for an assistant professor position, I would expect CVs to be in the 2-6 page range. (I am a 2003 PhD. My CV is holding steady at 8 pages.) Anyway, it is important to organize your CV carefully and put the information in the places that people are expecting to find it.

Finally, I want to say that amount of time spent on each application is far from uniform. I said above that I spend about 10 minutes per application on each of 50 applications. But most applications I am spending either more than 10 minutes on -- it takes more like half an hour to read an entire application, no matter how quickly -- or much less. I do try to read every application in my field however briefly, but "however briefly" can be awfully brief. Hundreds of applications can, and must, be eliminated essentially immediately.

Added: I see that I didn't fully answer the question asked. In a quick first pass on applications, I look at more than just the CV. Our applications come to us in a very convenient online format via the MathJobs service, so that one click brings to a screen where we see the candidate's basic information (name, date of PhD, PhD institution, PhD advisor, current institution) and can click on various documents they (and/or others) have uploaded, which generally include:

• cover letter
• CV
• research statement
• teaching statement
• publication list (sometimes)
• multiple recommendation letters

I usually look first at when, where and from whom they got their PhD, and then I click on the CV to see their background and their publication list. If I really don't like what I see -- e.g. no PhD, PhD is not in mathematics or something very closely related, clearly insufficient publications -- then I stop right there. This is maybe 20% of the applications. The next thing I do is to quickly read the advisor's letter and the research statement. Based on that information I decide whether to read on. (Maybe I've eliminated 50% of the applications at this point.) I next read the other letters and start to look more carefully at the candidate's research.

Answer 3

If faced with 200+ applicants, the committee would probably perform an "initial cull" where each of the about 5 members would select maybe 10 candidates to look at more closely. That would eliminate numerous applicants who clearly didn't fit the description (wrong specialization, no publications if the position is research-intensive, no teaching experience if that really matters for the post, not-appropriate alma mater i.e. that place is a degree-mill or on the wrong side of a political divide). In anticipation of a large applicant pool, I've known departments to request a 1-page essentials-vita as well as the full CV (highest degree, major employment, publications, conferences and grants), which makes it easy to home in on the half-dozen who might make the cut. The committee will probably miss out on some great candidates with significant latent potential.

Answer 4

I have been on faculty search committees at an R1 math department, where our search was targeted to a research area somewhat close to mine. It generally takes a minute to find out the answers to the following questions:

1. Has the candidate produced a substantial number of papers, and published at least some of them in high-quality journals? Alternatively, has the candidate published at least a couple of papers in extremely good journals? (Our candidates are required to submit a publication list, so finding out this information is immediate.)

2. Is the candidate doing research in a subject area that I am particularly interested in?

3. Are any of the letter writers people I know and trust, such that I would be especially inclined to interview someone whom they recommended?

4. Skimming the thesis advisor's letter and one or two more, does the writer have anything credible and strongly positive to say about the applicant's work?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, I give the application a more careful reading.

Answer 5

The last time I did this the piles were divided so that every application was seen by two members of the committee during the first round (described as a "well, duh!" sort), and needed an up-check from both to survive. We were looking for easy reasons to reject an application.

I read the cover-letter and scanned the CV and looked to see that the other documents were present.

Things I used to reject packets

• Documents given generic filenames (i.e. "CV", "TeachingStatement") instead of containing the applicant's name (thereby forcing me to rename them) was something I could overlook but it was a useful channel marker.
• Generic cover-letter (or on two occasions a letter intended for a different institution).
• Lack of suitable experience (we're an all-undergrad teaching-heavy department, so that means ditch application with neither teaching experience nor signs of interest in teaching). I was also interested to see that the candidate has some publications, but it was just an existence check.
• Multiple and blatant errors in spelling and basic grammar. I was prepared to be tolerant on this front for applications from foreign parts, but there was no need.
• Missing parts of the packet with no reasonable explanation given in the cover letter.

The surprise to me was how many this culled. These are the same things that every placement councilor in the known world harps on about. I'd have thought people applying to be professors would have that bit down cold.

In the second round everyone looked at them and we actually sorted into "great", "good", "maybe" and "no".

Then we started calling references for the two highest ranked piles, before a final cull down to a short list.

Answer 6

In economics, for assistant prof position, they read which university the PhD is from, the quality and number of publications or number of working papers. This is from the CV at a glance, 20 seconds.

In addition, the main advisor's recommendation letter contains a sentence like "I recommend this candidate to all universities outside the top n" or "I recommend this candidate to all universities without exception". The larger n, the worse the candidate. Finding this sentence in the reference letter takes less than 30 seconds on average.

Overall, the initial evaluation fits in one minute.