Betteridge’s Law of Headlines applies.* For details that I’m guessing most of you don’t need, but that perhaps a few of you might find useful, read on. At the end there’s a short postscript on whether it’s every savvy to “read between the lines” of a faculty job ad.
As an ecology faculty job applicant, you might sometimes feel tempted to provide additional material beyond that explicitly requested in the ad.
For instance, here’s an example based on something that came up in a recent ecoevojobs.net thread. Perhaps the ad doesn’t ask for a DEI statement. It just asks for a cv, and research and teaching statements. But let’s say you already have a DEI statement written, and that other language in the ad indicates that DEI considerations will be relevant to the search. Maybe you should just submit a DEI statement, even though the ad doesn’t ask for one? After all, why not give the search committee information they want, in a way that’s convenient for you as an applicant?
A second, hypothetical example: the ad asks you to submit two sample publications, but you’re having trouble picking just two. You have a diversified research program comprised of several lines of research. So maybe you should go ahead and submit three publications? After all, both you and the search committee want your application packet to give the search committee the full picture of your research program.
A third, hypothetical example: you know that the typical length of a research statement is a couple of pages. Maybe three pages at most. But you’re finding it really difficult to cut yours down to fewer than five pages. Should you just go ahead and submit a five-page research statement, even though that greatly exceeds the typical length? After all, it’s not as if the ad explicitly specifies a length limit. And surely the search committee is going to do its job and read whatever materials you submit, right?
I tried to phrase those examples so as to make clear that it really can be tempting to submit extra materials when applying for a faculty position. It sometimes seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do! But speaking as someone who’s sat on several faculty search committees at a research university in Canada, including recently, here’s my advice: only submit the materials requested in the ad. Never submit extra material that’s not explicitly requested, even if it seems like you have a good reason to do so. And if there’s an unwritten norm about how much material to submit (as in the third example above), adhere to it, even if it’s a bit of a fuzzy norm.
I give this advice for four reasons. First, in my anecdotal-but-not-inconsiderable experience, almost all ecology faculty job applicants adhere to this advice already (which is why I’m guessing that most of you don’t need it). You’ll stand out from the crowd if you submit unrequested materials, and not necessarily in a good way. Second, you don’t want to come off as someone who can’t follow directions, or who is unfamiliar with (or can’t be bothered to conform to) professional norms. Third, if you give the search committee extra materials, the committee might well have to ignore those materials, due to HR rules intended to ensure that all applicants are evaluated on the same basis. Fourth, the search committee is likely to have many applications to read. Don’t give them extra work by providing materials they didn’t request, or by giving them much lengthier statements than applicants typically provide. You’ll try their patience.
p.s. You should follow this advice, even if you think you have some savvy reason not to. It’s never savvy to try to read between the lines in a job ad, in an attempt to divine what the search committee “really” wants. If they wanted (say) a separate DEI statement, they’d have said so in the ad. If they wanted three sample publications rather than two, they’d have said so in the ad. Etc. It’s a faculty job ad, not Proust. There are no hidden meanings or secret desires in it, that only savvy readers can discover! Ok, I’m exaggerating for effect here, I know that nobody ever tries to give a faculty job ad a Straussian reading. But as an ecology faculty job applicant, try not to let your understandable anxiety about the hiring process cause you to overthink things. Try not to spend any of your limited mental and emotional bandwidth wondering whether job X “really” requires other materials besides those requested, or is “really” only for people in a particular subfield, or is “really” intended for an internal candidate, or whatever. The uncertainty of the faculty hiring process is going to be uncomfortable for you; there’s no two ways about it (sorry). But you can’t reduce the uncertainty by trying to be “savvy.” There’s no hidden information you can discover, that will reduce your uncertainty about whether you’re going to get the job. The good news is that the sources of uncertainty don’t include job ads. As an applicant, you can just read the ad literally, confident that you’ve gleaned from it all the information there is to glean from it. What the ad “really” says is what it literally says.
*Yes, I know I need to come up with a new joke with which to open posts like this one. Sorry.