Transcript for Academic Hiring Rituals: Hiring in Australia

Chapter 1: Introduction

Thank you for joining us for our inaugural season of Hiring Rituals, a long-form informational podcast about hiring in Anthropology. In it, we offer an ethnographic lens on how anthropologists with higher degrees get jobs internationally or in units beyond traditional disciplinary departments.

Through this podcast, we work to illuminate what goes on behind the scenes when institutions and departments are making hiring decisions. It probably comes as no surprise to you that every country and institution has different hiring rituals, but you may also not know how, exactly, things differ. As an example: in some countries, committees are composed entirely of external reviewers from other institutions; in others, department members alone make decisions along the way. This podcast will explore these mechanisms, as well as the historical and structural conditions that shape Hiring Committees’ work.

Another of our goals in Hiring Rituals is to help applicants as they navigate an increasingly challenging job market. Basic information on how hiring at particular institutions functions is usually circulated informally—which disadvantages applicants who aren’t already in the necessary networks—and wealthier, private institutions in the US are increasingly providing extensive academic job market information sessions that institutions with fewer resources are not in a position to replicate. We hope to make information about hiring more widely accessible for recent PhDs and even for people looking to change jobs a bit later in their careers.

Hiring Rituals is supported by the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology (APLA) at the American Anthropological Association.

This sixth episode of Hiring Rituals focuses on hiring practices in Australia. We turned to colleagues who elucidate not only the writing of job ads and composition of committees, but also the social processes and the values that bring academic hiring to life. We also learned about something that’s especially important for academic hiring in Australia: the Selection Criteria. Our guests explain what these are, how to navigate answering them, and the role they play at every stage of the hiring process.

Chapter 2: The Job Ad

Josh: We asked our contributors how their departments get approved to do a job search and what goes into writing the job advertisement.

Heather: So, this is actually quite an interesting sort of thing. Often departments or schools—as they’re often constituted in Australia, which are kind of a cluster of departments—schools will actually apply to, in our case, the Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor, they will make a case for having the budget to support the position, and it will often have to go all the way up to the Vice Chancellor for approval for budget lines to continue to open up.

Like a lot of places in the world, there’s a great deal of casualization of teaching in particular, and so a lot of people, a lot of departments or schools, will advertise for casual positions on a kind of ad hoc regular basis. But then there’s also fixed-term positions. So, these will be you know, typically between one to three years where what is being taught, or often in the case of research, what is being researched is quite specific, and they’ll have finite start and end dates. In certain cases, they will have something called a continuing position that’s possible or underlying it, but in other cases, they’re sort of fixed, and you would have to undertake a new contract or apply for a continuing position. A continuing position is much more—we don’t have what’s called tenure here in Australia, but that continuing position is a sort of long-term commitment where you have a start date, but no end date on a particular position. You’re often situated in a particular department or school, and your work is often aligned to a particular department or teaching program. So that’s basically the way that it sort of works, in terms of that sort of description.

Often in terms of who actually writes the job ads. So, it’s often the department Program or School that works with their Dean or Head of School to write this sort of program. Those are typically written around the kind of teaching—or, in the case of some of the things I’ll talk about—research needs of particular projects or departments or schools. So, it might be around having particular areas of expertise. Often in Australia, for a traditional sort of teacher-scholar kind of position, the ads would be sort of written both with the sort of teaching interests, but also a kind of demonstration of research. So, at minimum, most institutions in Australia have 20% research—so one day a week, a kind of research commitment—but you’ll get a range of others that in a traditional, what we call “Group of Eight” university, are 40% teaching/40% research and 20% governance model. So, you have to kind of read quite closely in the ads to see what’s actually on offer, and there are often more fixed term and specific type job advertisements than there are continuing positions.

Yasmine: I write it with all staff involved. So, I have been in work environments where the head writes it themselves, and I always thought that was not very productive, because the heads views one view, and you know, the department is bigger than the head. So, I get my crew together, and then we think through, like, we literally go, “Okay, this is going to be our colleague for the next 20 years or longer, so what kind of person do we want? And what kind of anthropology do we envision for the future?” So, then you kind of have to weigh that up a little bit with immediate teaching needs. So, you go like, “Okay, so we need these holes plugged, but we also want to move things around so that in the future, we can go that way.” And then we go, “So how do we write that up as?”

Kate: In Australia, it can be kind of across the board. So, what we try to do is we make it really clear who we are as a unit, really clear what we’re looking for, and really clear that we have some target areas that the candidate should really pay attention to. We usually frame them as “preferred,” because sometimes you get an amazing applicant that may not fit them perfectly, but upon interviewing, you realize they’re the perfect fit. So, we try to give really clear language about preferences, but not necessarily requirements. So, we do ask candidates to pay attention to them. But we also invite others to come in. If you think you’re wonderful, and you really fit our mission, I think a lot of departments share that belief that, if you think you’re a great fit, tell us why! We want to know.

Matt: I can tell you it’s not like the US season, where it opens in September and by March, all the good jobs are gone. It’s not like that. The Australian academic year basically runs from February to the beginning of November, but hiring processes can take place at any time, depending on how long the lead time is. So, when I was hired—that was back in 2005—the turnaround between the job posting, my application, the interview, and my arrival seem very quick. It was just, you know, maybe half a year. Well, adding in the job advertisement, maybe eight months or so. So, it was very quick. But I know some are much slower, especially with international moves.

Sometimes, people will apply for the job, and usually, there’s a fairly defined and not terribly long window during which you apply. After you apply, it should only be a few weeks before the shortlist is drawn up and you’re notified. And then, after you’re notified of an interview, it should be within the next couple of weeks that you’re interviewed. So, it’s not an extended process. But once the interview takes place, if a job offer is made, then it can be quite variable how long it will be before you take up your job. For one thing, if you’re coming from outside Australia, you’ll need to get a visa to work here, and that can be complicated.

Heather: Something that’s reasonably common in Australia, because it’s quite a small kind of market, there has been, historically—and it’s changing a bit now—something called the ERA [editor’s note: Excellence in Research for Australia], which is a sort of national research evaluation. And oftentimes, there’ll be a bit of movement coming up to the deadline of that, because institutions will try to hire people who have a lot of publications, research funding, high citations, and things like that to kind of raise their profile in this sort of national landscape.

So, there’s a fair bit of movement, I think, compared to a lot of US institutions where people sort of stay for much longer—there is a bit of that—and that opens up vacancies for other people. And other places might have someone who’s a Level II, which is a full Professor, who leaves, and the department or school might decide that they want to replace them with someone who is Level B or Level C. So, Level B is a Lecturer, and that’s basically equivalent to assistant Professor, and then there’s Senior Lecturer, which is a kind of advanced assistant Professor role, and then there is associate Professor or Reader. Depending on the department, it’s mostly Associate Professor these days, which is level D.

So, what you’ll get is that you’ll get this kind of churn of people kind of coming in and out, and that will open up vacancies. And that can happen in July, that can happen in April, that can happen in September. So, you’re kind of always looking for opportunities. So in some ways, you know, it’s not about kind of holding back until the most ideal job turns up, it’s just sort of getting your application out there in a way that sort of makes sense, and doing some work just to find out what people are looking for in the ads, but also any kind of networking you can do to find out what’s happening behind the scenes is always very valuable.

Chapter 3: The Application

Josh: Once you find a job you want to apply for, what’s actually involved in the application? More specifically to Australia: what are the Selection Criteria? And how should an applicant answer them?

Yasmine: The application should contain a cover letter, that is really useful for the committee because it kind of sums up the strengths of the candidate and where they see themselves set in the department and in relation to the Selection Criteria. And you know, if you have a lot of applications, when you go through the process again and again, on different levels, you don’t reread the entire application. So, if you just look at the cover letter and you can remember the candidate, that really helps. So, I would always advise people to put a lot of effort and time and labor into the cover letter.

And then because the cover letter isn’t specified, I think it’s just something—because the applications are all electronic, it’s like a field that you could fill—it doesn’t say that you have to fill it, but it’d be really silly not to fill it. And then there is a range of Selection Criteria that traditionally split into a number of categories. So Selection Criteria that address teaching, and address research, that address service, and then health and safety at the end.

Kate: This can be highly variable in Australia, but there’s one set of criteria that’s really important to pay attention to, and it’s explicitly called the “Selection Criteria”—and this is distinct to Australia, so it’s sometimes difficult for some overseas candidates to realize—and they literally will bullet point out the duties, and there’s actually an expectation that candidates respond to each of the criteria. So not necessarily a holistic cover letter, but a separate document that responds specifically to them. It seems a little tick-box-y, but it’s really helpful actually, as a panel member, looking at different candidates to see how they may or may not fit. So that’s one distinct attribute of the Australian hiring process.

Lisa: When I’ve sat on hiring committees—and I’ve sat on a lot—I’ve often noticed that the American applicants produce something that looks very, very different and weird compared to the Australian applicants. That’s because the Australian applicants tend to know that they have to address the specific criteria in their application letter. A job ad will list essential criteria, and it’ll be something like an active research agenda and publishing, track record, and the experience teaching, and so on, and so on. Australian applicant will address those point by point, they’ll say, number one, I have a PhD in anthropology or whatever, number two, I have teaching experience, and here’s my teaching experience, and here’s my teaching philosophy and blah, blah, blah, you know, whereas an American candidate very often thinks that what they’re supposed to do is write a four to five page single-spaced essay that’s very dense in theoretical jargon about their research past and interests, you know, and so it’s like a high level statement of theoretical orientation, and where they see themselves as fitting in the discipline. And so, we hire enough international candidates that we know that’s gonna happen, and we expect it, and you have to read between the lines to figure out the things that we’re asking for, but often it makes them not as competitive as some of the Australian candidates who know that they have to answer specific questions.

So that’s something to keep in mind: if you’re applying to an Australian university and you see a list of essential criteria address those point by point explicitly, don’t just bury it in your dense text about your, you know, theoretical positioning in the discipline, which is going to bore the pants off of the non-anthropologists. It’s going to interest the anthropologists, but it’s not going to interest the physicist.

Heather: Those are really about the kind of details that people need to provide about, tell us about your kind of research, what are the kind of cutting-edge things in your research discipline? What’s your experience with teaching, what’s your experience with governance, whether your kind of leadership qualities? Those sorts of things all require one to two-paragraph responses that are quite detailed, and again, those will kind of reinforce what the search committee is looking for in their applications.

Yasmine: I think the way that you structure it is more important than the length. So, you want to use the first sentence to signal that you understand exactly the verb in the particular Selection Criteria, so if it’s “demonstrate excellence,” then you go like, “I will demonstrate my excellence by…” and say that. You tell us that you understand that this is not where you tell us your philosophy, but you actually have to give us proof, and then you go, “I will do it by A, B, and C,” and bullet-pointing is not a bad thing at all. So, you don’t just thematically structure your answer, but you actually visually structure it. So that’s when we fly over them. When we’re between long-listing and shortlisting, and there’s 15 applications left, you kind of just go like, “Okay, let’s look at teaching.” And then you just want to look at this page with the teaching and go like, “Oh, yeah, that was the one with blah, blah, blah.” You need to see it quickly, so bullet-pointing helps. And then you know, have sections that explain what’s in the bullet points and make it visually easy to read.

Kate: I recommend for ongoing roles, don’t do a Selection Criteria response more than nine pages, even if you’re really senior and you’ve got a lot to say, the guidance tends to be five and six, because you can be quite comprehensive in those. And you can always refer back to your CV, or if you want to attach teaching reviews, you can always just say “See Appendix X.” So that’s kind of how I recommend to try to balance it. Sometimes three to four pages is absolutely fine, and sometimes departments will provide guidance as to how long they want the response to be, so I don’t think anyone frowns upon it per se. I wouldn’t make too much of a big deal.

So, like, say, for example, if a Selection Criteria is for excellence in teaching or demonstrated innovation, you would say “This is how I’ve done it, bracket. I’ve also attached this if you want to see how students responded,” and just kind of leave it there. Other kinds of materials we asked for: my favorite question to ask for is like, “What’s your favorite thing that you’ve written?” Not necessarily your most cited, but what do you think captures the essence of you as a scholar, and I know we are pretty distinct in that respect, but it’s a pattern that we found other departments really like so we share that. A CV is obviously required, and—while it’s not required, I would encourage it—a one-page cover letter. So rather than the traditional North American, sometimes two to three, sometimes four-page cover letter, I usually just recommend one-page. Be succinct: why you’re applying, why you’re interested, why do you want to be with us, because the Selection Criteria will really cover all the wonderful things that you offer.

Matt: The two strongest things to include in an application for an Australian university job are, first, consideration not only of the intellectual and theoretical scope and excellence of your research, but also the practical social impact of your research, because Australian universities are extremely dedicated to proving that their research has real-world results. And the government especially, but also many university administrators work hard to not be ivory towers, you can do sort of pure research, you can do fun, very thought-provoking research for its own sake, but it will always strengthen a job application in Australia if you can say, “Here’s how my research reaches the broader public, here’s the effect it might have on improving social change, affecting public policy, you know, increasing economic opportunity, or addressing social inequality.” To the extent that you can say your research has real-world effects, it will always, always be looked upon positively.

The second thing is that in Australia, the funding landscape—especially for anthropology—is really dominated by a group called the Australian Research Council, which is funded by the federal government and gives out hundreds of millions of dollars of grants every year. The research funding pot is actually quite large and quite generous, but of course, extremely competitive, and it’s the Australian Research Council, or ARC, also drives a lot of this emphasis on research having a social impact. So again, not only will showing how your research has a social impact help you get a job but will also help you get funds when you get a job.

But the important thing for applicants to realize is that, to keep your research project going, it’s very likely you would probably want to be applying for Australian Research Council grants and fellowships, and they’re very specific schemes, and to the extent that you can be informed before you apply, and what kinds of schemes would be relevant for the work you want to do, including that in your cover letter, future plans, your job talk, what you plan to do next in your career would be entirely to your benefit.

Lisa: The other thing they tend to be interested in is your publications. There’s all these ways that publications really, really matter. We know they matter everywhere, but they really, really matter when you’re applying for an Australian position. So, people will be reading your publications and they will also be looking at the sheer number of them. So, we have people all the time applying for postdocs across, let’s say the school or the Faculty of Arts, you know, there might be 10 postdoctoral positions. Where I came from, a postdoc was a chance to get publications, to shore up the stuff that you did in your PhD, write it up, turn it into a set of publications. Here, I don’t think I’ve seen anybody get one of these postdocs who didn’t have like eight journal articles already. It’s so hard to compete for these positions, because everybody knows that publications matter and they’re doing everything they can to make sure they compete in that market.

Kate: In some ways, it’s a little bit overwhelming how straightforward the Australian processes we’ve talked about, like the hidden curriculum and things that aren’t transparent about hiring, so it’s a little bit disarming when it’s so straightforward. In Australia, it really is.

The one thing I guess I would say about Australian job criterias, some research has shown that the expectations of junior levels sometimes look a little daunting, and a junior colleague could be like, “Oh, my gosh, that criteria looks like I should have 10 years of experience,” but I would tell a junior colleague to still respond to it and respond to it, honestly, because just because it looks daunting doesn’t mean it’s as unrealistic as it feels.

So, data has shown that the descriptions do look a little bit more robust than perhaps where you might see in Europe or the United States, but just be really honest. So, for example, one thing will say, “We want excellent teaching across undergraduate and postgraduate,” you may not have the postgraduate, but you might have a lot of undergraduate experience, and you might do really well at it. So, I would say, “Look, I have this, I know I do this well, and this is why, or, I’ve worked on improving it, and this is why, and the skills from this undergraduate experience can translate into the postgraduate experience.” So, I wouldn’t shy away from something that looks daunting.

Chapter 4: The Long List

Josh: We also asked what the process of assessing these applications looks like from the inside.

Lisa: The people who are on the hiring committee will just sit down with all of the applications and lots of times a lot of them can just be eliminated immediately because they don’t meet the essential criteria. You’ll have a geographer who’s applying for the job, but we already said we’re hiring a PhD in anthropology, or there’ll be somebody who doesn’t have their PhD, so you just automatically strike off those.

Then you start looking at how people meet the desirable criteria, so you’re evaluating things like how many publications they have, what fields they work in, stuff like that, you know, how interesting is the research topic? To what extent does it look like they’ve got an exciting future direction that goes beyond their PhD if you’re hiring at a junior level? If you’re hiring at a senior level, they’re really going to be looking at track record and getting grants, that matters a lot to universities here—as it does in most places, I suppose. And that’s a hard one for anthropologists, because I hear a lot of anthropologists say, “Look, if I have a limited amount of time, I could write a grant application, or I could write an article. And considering that it doesn’t cost me much to do my research, it just takes time, and time is what I’m short on, I’m just gonna write that article.” And I always tell them, you know, “Write the grant application, because then that will buy you teaching relief. So, you can have the time to write that article and more.” But in particular, that’s what you need to be thinking about. If you’re going on the job market, you want to show a track record of getting grants, even if it’s just small internal grants, but it shows that you’re able and willing to write grant applications, they want evidence of that.

Kate: There’s a lot of HR rules around this, and the search committee is actually not just members of the department or the school. So, in Australia, there’s a really firm commitment to having a gender balance. So, you can’t have all women you can’t have all men, that’s typically the way that rule is written. You need to have a group within the school, so someone from within the school would chair the panel, but it also must have people outside our university or college. So, there’s going to be an outsider in there, not just a group of insiders, and I think a lot of candidates don’t appreciate that. So, you might pitch yourself very narrowly to the unit, which is great. But there’s also that external person who may not be as familiar.

Everyone on the panel will be more senior than the person applying, which is also an HR requirement, and that can be a little daunting for junior candidates who may not be expecting that. It’s usually only three to four people at the junior levels, but at the higher level as it can be many more people involved, up to seven in fact.

Heather: A search committee is really constituted individually with each search, so it typically will have someone with the kind of disciplinary expertise in that area. Say I want to hire an anthropologist who researches religion, for example, you know, I might have someone at our institution who is a kind of either specialist in that or teaches in a way that they know what the kind of current issues are, that they can actually assess whether this person you know, how versed this person is in literature, what their teaching materials or other things should look like.

You then will typically have someone like a sort of Dean or Head of School, there’s only certain people who are kind of qualified to chair search committees and they have to kind of undertake stuff, there will be training to do that, then they tend to chair these. And then there’ll be one other person who’s typically in the department or institution like mine, where we have schools, but also institutes, which are the kind of research arm of the university. I will often join a search committee for a school, and that’s really to assess the kind of viability of their sort of research, evaluating the type and quality of publications that they’re doing, evaluating their potential for applying for research funding, and those sorts of things.

And typically, on positions which say, “Indigenous only to apply,” those committees will also have to be 50% indigenous academics, and they will also have to have the 50% gender balance. So, there’s a lot of focus on equity and making sure that there’s not a great deal of gender or other kinds of structural bias in these search committees, but they’re not always just the people in the department. They might include other people from other parts of the university because of the nature of the position.

Kate: Everyone definitely reviews everything, which is, I think, a real strength of the process. In other places, that’s not necessarily what happens. Usually, the panel reads everything on their own, and then chats about what might be a longlist. Or if you’re able to get to a shortlist immediately, great. But it’s usually a longlist these days, because you get so many wonderful applicants, and it really helps to get to know them a little bit before you make the final shortlist.

Everyone reads everything. I’d say what we’re looking for is, you know, everyone says “departmental fit.” But that is a vague term that isn’t always crystal clear. And so, what we try to do in our hiring ads is make it really clear what our composition is—in our case, we’re very interdisciplinary—what our values are, and to please communicate that to us, and if you have those shared values and commitments. So, in our school, we’re a really research intensive unit that doesn’t do as much teaching as other units. So, we want to know, are you going to collaborate with us? Are you going to be a collaborative researcher? Because we like to have a collaborative ethos. So, we usually have targeted criteria around that.

The other thing is, like, do you have a clear research agenda, we usually asked for that, so that we can get a sense of it. So those are the types of things will be looking for. But they are very concrete. So, you know, because sometimes “departmental fit” is vague, we try to make it as concrete as possible for people to understand. And that’s usually around research culture. And do you want to be in the building with us and have a collaborative relationship? That usually gets people into the longlist, because not everyone wants to do that, and everyone becomes an academic for different reasons.

Heather: There’re basically three kinds of core criteria that most universities use to evaluate candidates. The first is contribution to teaching. And so that can be undergraduate teaching, postgraduate teaching, or HDR, higher degree by research, PhD supervisions. So that’s sort of one area. And obviously, in the case of undergraduate teaching, there would be things like kind of formal evaluation metrics and surveys and things like that, that would be attached to that. And you know, when you’re applying for an academic job in Australia, if you have that kind of criteria to reference, your sort of teaching, or the evaluation of teaching, it’s always good to kind of mention those things and offer those up in your application, particularly when you’re discussing your Selection Criteria. You might mention you have them and talk about them, but they might ask you for those in hardcopy down the track.

A second area is leadership, governance, engagement. For a Lecturer position, you typically wouldn’t be expected to have a lot of kind of leadership or governance, but anything you did as a PhD student—whether it’s getting involved in the grad student association, leading a conference panel, co-chairing, or organizing a conference panel—those are things that you can mention, and the expectations around those ramp up as you become more senior.

And then there’s research. So, research is, in many ways, it’s about publications, and the quality of your publications. And there’s more and more reference to things like Google Scholar, H-index, citation scores, and things like that, making sure you’re publishing at least a certain percentage of your work in what they term “quartile-one journals.” But one of the real differences in Australia is that there is a kind of expectation around applying for funding. For many social science and humanities scholars, including anthropologists, there is a kind of expectation that you might try to get funding through something like the Australian Research Council, there is an expectation that you will apply for grants and hopefully receive grants throughout the kind of course of your career.

Kate: There’s a formal meeting—usually with an HR rep present to document the process—to get to the longlist, every applicant must meet the criteria. So that’s why it’s really helpful to make sure people respond to those criteria directly. And it’s kind of the external person’s job to make sure it’s a fair and equitable process that candidates are evaluated holistically. You know, preferences aren’t brought in based on you know, one’s particular area, or the fact that you might know the supervisor, you might know the person. So that’s kind of the role of both the HR rep and the external person, I’ve never seen that issue come up. I think everyone takes that commitment really seriously.

But I think it is a credit to the HR process that’s built in, at least for where I’ve worked in Australia. So, if someone’s from out of town, or isn’t known, they are taken—at least on the panels I’ve chaired and served on—just as seriously as someone who we might know who did a PhD with someone we might know, for example. So that’s the starting point. Sometimes they go straight to a shortlist like they figured out three to four, sometimes five people that they just immediately want to interview. What we’ve tended to see is a longer list of about seven to eight, where we do an informal interview, usually through Zoom, to get to know some targeted things about them or ask some follow-up questions from the application that may or may not have been clear.

Heather: Typically, the applications are managed by an HR department, they collect and collate all the applications. There’s usually one person named as a person to contact if you have questions, and you are more than welcome to do that. They’re typically someone who knows a bit more about the position in the department or is the chair of the search committee. So, you can ask questions, and they’re usually pretty good about responding to the queries when they can do it. What happens is you receive the applications and each of those search committee members goes separately. There’s a form that we are asked to fill out where we rank according to the Selection Criteria. But if there’re seven Selection Criteria, we mark whether or not the people have achieved it and might make some notes as to how good, or relatively good, or a good fit they are for the kind of position. So, people will go away.

Often we might spend a week or two reviewing those, we kind of tried to keep interviews down to five or six or less, because ultimately, we’re hiring for one position. So that’s a really critical time, depending on the position you can have anywhere from 50, 60 applications, 200-something applications. I think the one thing that’s probably different about Australia also is it’s not like people are saying, you know, I’ve applied for 100 positions, there just aren’t 100 positions advertised, these are sort of very ad hoc, they pop up when they come up. And so, you’ll get a range, but I would say probably anywhere from 70 to 100 is fairly common for a continuing position.

Chapter 5: The Shortlist

Josh: So then, how do you actually decide who gets on the shortlist?

Matt: Pretty quickly, it gets down to the list of the final four or five candidates that you really want to interview. And it will be based on the usual balance of things like are they doing interesting research? Do you have a future research plan? Do you have a sense of how you would fund your research? Would your research have any social impact beyond purely intellectual impact? And then do you seem to be collegial? Do you seem to present yourself in a way that indicates you’ll be a good colleague and people will enjoy getting along with you? I mean, that’s probably obvious. But I have to tell you that collegiality comes up a lot in discussions of shortlist.

Kate: I think it’s safe to say that we use the longlist as a way to answer things that may not have been clear in what was submitted. So sometimes it’s like, what’s your research agenda? Where do you actually want to go with it?

Sometimes we’ve used this as an opportunity to refine our understanding of people’s teaching experience. So, everyone writes, and teaching, you know, I really valued teaching, and I take this type of approach. It’s consultative, I really care about students. And you know, I’m sure everyone believes that it’s awesome to know, but it doesn’t always give us enough information. So, we and some other units sometimes ask for a short, 10-minute video of, what is your approach to teaching something in particular, or if you are going to do like professional education, how would you approach it, or some places asked for like a short demo. Like if you were to teach your area of expertise, how would you go about it to this audience? Give us like, the five-minute intro, and then explain it to us. And those things are actually really revealing. And the other thing I like about it is it gives the candidate some space to figure it out for themselves rather than be put on the spot immediately, because interviews can be scary even if you’re a really nice interviewer. So that gives them some space.

So, we’ve done that and then we’ve used it as a follow-up discussion about their philosophy, further pedagogy, and we found those really, really illuminating, and sometimes they’re just not the right fit, but they’re amazing for somewhere else. And you know, they might fit somewhere in another place. So, we refer them on or make recommendations. So yeah, we use that kind of to get more information, decide who might actually really fit what we’re looking for in a specified role.

Matt: You should mention your interest in teaching, the kinds of courses you would like to teach, being able to stretch in teaching is usually very valuable. Because if you come here, especially if you’re coming here from outside of Australia, even if you’re coming from elsewhere within Australia, you might well begin by teaching other people’s classes. So, you have to stretch. I mean, I know when I first moved to Australia in 2005, I was teaching all sorts of courses that I had not designed and had no say over. And it worked out. Okay. But yeah, enthusiasm for teaching is an indication of what you would love to teach, but also a willingness to stretch and maybe teach things for the first few semesters that you hadn’t taught before is a good idea.

Lisa: One thing they’re not interested in is a list of papers in progress. Often we’ll see that on CVs, people will include a whole list of fantasy papers that they plan to write, or that they’re in the middle of writing. And I know that some departments might like to see that because they say, “Oh, you know, this person has like a lot of great ideas they’re working with,” but here, everybody’s like, “Oh, my gosh, why did they include these things? That’s so irrelevant. All we care about is what you’ve actually done.”

So anyway, everybody just kind of battles it out until you come up with a shortlist. And these shortlists tend to be three to five people. And then after that, you would start scheduling the interviews.

Chapter 6: The Job Talk and Interview

Josh: Let’s say you’re selected for an interview…What does that entail, exactly?

Lisa: Those interviews tend to be short, they might be, in my case, 20 minutes, but I think that was unusually short. They’re typically maybe 30 to 60 minutes. That’s it. I know that a lot of people in the United States, in North America in general, will be brought in to do job talks. No, we don’t do that.

Matt: What’s been happening here lately is you give two presentations. One is a short presentation of your research. It’s kind of the classic job talk. But it might not be especially long, you know, maybe within an hour for everything, including the talk and questions and answers and everything. And you would also be asked to give a short class, again, not the full length of a class, but a kind of demonstration of how you would teach on a particular topic. And you would probably be told what topic to teach on so that we could sense like, “Oh, we really need somebody who can teach in both Anthropology and History,” then they would be assigned a topic where they could show their skills in doing that.

So probably you would give two talks, one about your own research and one teaching trial. And then you would also have an interview with the four committee members. And the questions they would ask are going to tend to be fairly predictable. You know, “Tell us about yourself, tell us about the research you’ve done and what you plan.: Next, they might ask you about funding plans, like “What kinds of grants or fellowships do you see yourself applying for?” Because that’s always big on the Australian radar. You’ll be asked probably about collegiality, you’ll definitely be asked about teaching, there might be some follow-up questions based on the trial lecture that you gave.

Kate: It’s funny, because when I first started working in Australia, which is over a decade ago, everyone would comment on these notorious US job talks and how grueling they were and how unfair they were. And that we would never do that in Australia. But we do like to get to know people. So, it’s shifted over time. So, I would say, of course, we want to meet someone in person before hiring them. So that tends to be the norm though, with the pandemic a lot has taken place through electronic means. And I know lots of other places have adapted in that way and tried to replicate that in-person experience through Zoom, usually very awkwardly, but sometimes very well. But in our case, I’d say the norm across Australia is you usually have a job talk, usually 30 minutes, and then an interview that’s 30 minutes to an hour. And that’s technically what’s required from the process.

Increasingly departments have added visits, they have like a small focus group with members of the department or have a lunch, but it’s very rarely the whole 8am to 8pm dinner thing, it’s usually within working hours, usually never more than a day or a day-and-a-half. It’s quite simple. It’s not it’s not grueling. I mean, I’m sure it’s a lot to manage. I’ve done quite a few. But that tends to be the norm, and they can still take a lot out of you, but it’s not that full 12 hours of performance. It’s usually, we’ll fly you in, we’ll give you some time, we’ll let you sleep the night before, usually doesn’t start anywhere before nine o’clock. It’s usually after nine so you have some time, and then it would certainly in by five o’clock.

We tend to ask for a video, and then we scheduled about a 30-minute conversation. So, if I were the chair of the panel, I would email them, and I would say, “Look, this was great. As you know, a key component of this job is, say, for example, teaching to a particular group, or we get, for example, on our unit, quite a few government and policymaker people as students. So, we’d like to know how you would teach this particular cohort of students, could you do a 10-minute discussion of what you would do in terms of teaching your area?” After you submit that by next deadline, we’ll schedule a meeting. The meeting will be at this time, we’ll schedule it for 30 minutes, and we’ll ask you these questions. So, we’d like to make it really transparent.

And that tends to be the norm in Australia, to make it really clear what is going to be asked of you. In our school, we like to make sure people can meet others in the department. They may not meet everyone, but they will meet some. Our preference is to have the job talk open to the school. Not all departments do that, sometimes it’s only to the selection panel. The norm is definitely a job talk of 30 to 40 minutes, max with Q&A. It’s never more than an hour total.

Heather: I should also mention that there’s usually very little notice and a lot of flexibility around the interview date itself, because they are trying to cram in four or five people all in the same day. Typically, it’s usually you may get a week or two notice. I think they legally have to give you a week’s notice. But it might be, you know, two weeks is a generous period before you actually do the interview. So, it goes very, very quickly.

Matt: The teaching trial, this trial lecture has to be—or it doesn’t have to be, but it ought to be—really engaging, in the sense of, you want students to be excited, you want people listening to say, “I would love to take this class,” because student numbers are a big deal in Australia as they are in most universities. I know if you can draw students into larger classes, this will always be looked upon positively by administrators and university management. And of course, the bigger and healthier your department is in terms of student numbers, the easier it is to justify future requests for future jobs. So, “We’ve got a strong teaching program going, we need to keep this up” is a good case to make. So, when you’re giving a teaching trial, it’s both to show that you’re a good teacher, you have a good pedagogy, but it’s also to show that you’re relatable, and people are simply going to enjoy being in the classroom with you.

Lisa: If they’re doing an interview with an Australian university, I wouldn’t spend a lot of time thinking about all the classes that you could hypothetically teach and fantasize about teaching. I would see if I could figure out what classes they’re going to want you to teach. And often that’s in the job ad. And then, you know, think about how you teach that, be prepared to answer that question. So, for me, for example, being raised in the American system, when I was doing my job applications, I had like all of these fantasy syllabi that I would show people when I was being interviewed, and I think the Australians were just like, “Oh, dear, whatever.” Like it was just irrelevant to their world. So, it’s good to know these things.

Matt: This is a very tricky balancing act to pull off. I think you want to talk about what excites you, intellectually what excites you, theoretically, but you have to be confident you’re smart enough for the job. So, you don’t have to dazzle people with your latest disquisition on Deleuze. Like, don’t worry about that so much. I mean, you can give us any something you’re passionate about, yes, give it and explain it. But accessibility is huge. Showing that you can talk to a broad audience is huge, showing that you’ve thought about how your research is going to live outside the classroom and outside the university is huge. So, accessibility and relatability are absolutely enormous. Because we know you’re smart. I know you’re very, you’re very, very accomplished. You’ve just got your PhD, this is fantastic. But now make it relatable now be as accessible as possible. And not simplistic.

You can tell us what interests you theoretically, of course, of course, but I would say maybe being more engaging, thinking more carefully about how you can reach people across a wide range of disciplinary interests that may not be full on interested in what you do, but are interested in hearing how what you do might change the way they think about what they do.

Heather: So, the interviews in many ways, they actually really mirror the Selection Criteria questions. So typically, the interview questions will vary depending on the position and that sort of thing. But for a typical continuing position or role, would start out with a question about, “Can you tell me a little bit about yourself and your research and why you’re interested in this position?” Second question might be, depending on if it’s more teaching or research focused, “Tell me about your research, what are the kinds of key debates and things like that your work intervenes in and what difference has it made?” Third question might be around teaching, particularly key to the kind of students that are at your institution. So, at my institution, it’s one of the fastest-growing urban areas in Australia, and very, very multicultural, a lot of migrants, a lot of refugees, a lot of that sort of thing. So, experience teaching in those particular communities and populations is something that we might be looking for, for example, whereas the other universities, the Group of Eight universities—the kind of University, they’re not quite Ivy, but they’re more like land grant—there’s an expectation that’s, you know, many students have gone to private schools, they have perhaps more robust academic backgrounds doing that. But there’s also a significant number of international students.

So, in one of the departments that I used to work at, at University of Sydney, for example, in their master’s program, 90% of the students were from China. And in Australia, there’s a real kind of focus on recruiting international students. At one point, it was 20% of Australia’s GDP coming from international students. So, it’s a very, very different context, in terms of, you know, actually, in your job, being very aware of the kind of particular populations that you’re serving in your jobs and things. So, in teaching, that’s one of the things I would draw attention to, I think there’s usually a question around kind of governance or leadership sort of activities. And I think people are looking for a kind of willingness to take on roles at the right time as discipline leads in a department convening a course, that sort of thing, there is hope that people are receptive to taking on governance roles, and that they’re a kind of collegial person.

So, any concrete examples that you can give about working with other people, developing things, changing things, is usually a question alongside this about your capacity to manage difficult situations. And then there’s usually then a question, there might be one or two questions that are key to the jobs. And this is particularly in those fixed-term research fellowships. So, it’s often around project management, it’s often around experience with ethics applications and working with particular kinds of populations, it’s often around collaborative writing and working together. And then there’s usually just the open questions at the end for things that they want to ask.

So, it goes very quickly, it’s about five minutes a question, a different person typically asked each question, they want to kind of rotate around it so that people can kind of listen.

Yasmine: We actually designed the questions so that, after the presentations—this is the one bit of regulation that we do have—the questions can only refer to things that people had in their application, or the Selection Criteria, you can’t come up with a question out of left field that wasn’t anything raised during the process so far, but we can tweak them so that we can give applicants a chance to expand more on something that we thought was really interesting, but didn’t get mentioned or explain, something that we weren’t quite clear what they meant with it.

And then of course, the questions have to be the same for all applicants. So that’s when you kind of go, “Okay, we definitely need to know more about this aspect of teaching from that applicant, but how do we formulate that into a generic question that works for all applicants?” And then people suggest questions, and as a team, we tweak them until they’re good.

Lisa: It’s the hiring committee that will come up with the questions. Some of them may be suggested to us by HR, human resources, and some of those questions will be about showing that people meet the essential criteria. So, they’ll just replicate the questions that they already answered in their applications. So really, it’s just a chance for the hiring committee to see how they present themselves and how good they are talking. And so, they’ll be thinking about okay, does this person seem engaging? Are they good at explaining themselves? Because they’re thinking about how that’ll translate into teaching.

And then there will always be a few off-the-wall questions that the hiring committee comes up with on their own. So, I don’t know, once I was on a hiring committee, and the external person who wasn’t an anthropologist was like, “We need an asshole question like a question that winnows out the assholes, we need a question that basically, you know, asks people”— I can’t remember, let’s see, what was the question? It was maybe something along the lines of, “Tell me about a situation where somebody was behaving really badly, and how you dealt with it,” or something like that. They’re questions that are designed to elicit a sense of the person’s collegiality and what they would do in a conflict situation. So, they can take you by surprise.

But if you are doing the standard kind of preparation that you would do for an interview process, you should be fairly well prepared to answer these questions, like, don’t talk too much shit about the current job you’re in, even if you totally hate it, because you don’t want the people to think that their prospect is somebody who’s perpetually disgruntled. I mean, you could be in a really, genuinely terrible situation, we’ve hired people who were like, wanted to come to Macquarie to get out of a really terrible department they were in or whatever. But you know, you shouldn’t say that too obviously in the interview, you just want to represent yourself as a really positive person who wants to contribute to the department and be a good colleague, and get stuff done and pursue interesting research on your own.

There are definitely cultural differences. So for one thing, everybody knows that letters of recommendation, everyone in Australia knows that letters of recommendation that are written by Brits or Australians will be fairly modest, and letters of recommendation written by Americans will be bombastic and exaggerated, you know, you’ll get a letter, say, you’ve got the same person writing a letter of recommendation for two candidates, and that person will say about each candidate that they are the best PhD student they’ve ever had, you know, you’re looking at these letters side by side and thinking, something just isn’t right here. So, people know that, and they tend to take it into account.

And they tend to know that Americans are less modest, and feel more that they have to sell themselves. It’s good if you can show a little modesty and humility in the interview, that will definitely go a long way. But I think people here in Australia understand these cultural differences. So, for example, we had somebody apply for the job here in Australia, who had a tenured position, and he was applying for a fairly junior position here at Macquarie. And we’re all asking ourselves, “Why is he applying, there must be something really wrong there, and I wonder if the thing that’s really wrong is him? Or is the thing that’s really wrong?” Well, we ended up hiring the person, and it became clear that the thing that was wrong was the department, not him. He’s wonderful. But I remember when we asked him that question, you know, we said, “You’ve got tenure at a good university. So why are you applying for this position?” And he said, “Because my kid just started kindergarten, and they were doing a live-shooter drill. And I would like to move to a country where my children are not going to be shot in school.” And we’re like, “Oh, yeah, okay, we can relate to that, that makes total sense.” So, you know, have a good explanation for why you want to go to that university and show that you’ve done your research, and you have a sense of who you’d be joining what you’d be doing what you could contribute. Everybody wants to see that you’re not spamming everybody with 100 job applications. Even if you are—and realistically, everybody knows they kind of have to—but you have to show that you’ve done your research, and try to show people that you actually really want this particular job you’re applying to, not that you’re just looking to get hired by anybody.

Chapter 7: The Decision

Josh: After you’ve had candidates give their job talk and interview with you, tell us about the deliberations.

Kate: The formal evaluation comes from the hiring committee, if that’s helpful to know. So obviously, we take the feedback on board from colleagues, they have a say, but they’re not making the final decision. And they’re not part of the interview. So, they don’t actually know what the responses are. And that can be a determining factor, that people in the department just don’t see and therefore can’t weigh on it.

So, what we tend to do is we really prefer having group discussions rather than one-on-one, sometimes one-on-one happens in other parts of Australia where I’ve either interviewed or worked, small groups tend to be the norm as well, so everyone gets together and can understand each other and bounce ideas off each other.

Yasmine: If there’s a very clear first choice that everyone agrees on, that person should hear very quickly. If you don’t hear very quickly, it’s because that person can’t tell the others that that person was chosen until they’ve accepted, and there’s something in writing, because if they don’t accept for some reason, then it goes to the next person unless you actually make a decision as a panel that it’s only one of them that you want and you don’t want any of the others, or you can go like, “That’s our first choice, if they don’t take it, that would be our second choice,” and you don’t want people to know that they were the second choice. So basically, the first choice should hear fairly quickly and then once they have accepted, then everybody else should hear very quickly that they didn’t get it, but then it can be that the first choice goes on and on, and then eventually says “No,” and then it gets really stretched out.

Something like that happen to me once, I and a friend of mine both applied for the same job, and they shortlisted us kind of equally at the top, and then tried to get both of us, they said, “We tried to double the position and actually turn it into two positions.” So, there was a lot of interim but we didn’t know, and we were just not hearing, and then everyday going, “Have you heard anything? No? Have you heard?” We weren’t getting any feedback. And anyway, so in the end, one of us heard and then told the other one, and the other one was told very quickly, but the waiting kind of goes hand-in-hand with an understanding of “Oh my god, maybe I didn’t get that job that I thought was the best job for me ever.” And then one of us got it in the end anyways, and we waited equal amounts of time.

So, if you don’t hear straight away, there can be all sorts of things, it can be some HR hang-up. So, if you just finished your interview and your interview went brilliantly you think and you don’t hear, it’s just a horrible time. Any advice? I don’t know, listen to audiobooks, go running, do something, but you know, it’s not gonna get out of your mind for more than three seconds, which is also why we try and let people know as quickly as possible, because we know how hard it is. And you just want to know, even knowing that you didn’t get it is better than waiting. But yeah, it’s horrible.

Kate: In Australia, there’s also the option to have a verbal letter of reference, not just a written one. And to be honest, as someone who hires people, I like to be able to talk to the referees, as well, and ask them some follow up. And to be honest, especially North American referees, because when you get lots of glowing letters, you actually want to talk to them about real things, not just the glowing letter. So sometimes that can take a little bit of time to schedule. So, we let candidates know that.

And the other thing that might delay it, say, beyond a week, is making sure we have the proper supervisory support for someone, especially if they’re junior. So, in Australia, everyone has a supervisor—again, very HR, it’s usually a senior member of staff, usually Head of School—but we like to make sure that you know, if they need a special mentor, like in their discipline that we can line that up. So, we like to kind of at least as a committee discuss those types of things before we make an offer, just to know that we have the infrastructure in place to support someone if they do accept.

Usually, we can make a decision within a week and get back to a candidate in a week. it requires preparation of a report to HR, that’s pretty straightforward, too. It shouldn’t delay a process. But we can usually make a formal verbal offer within a week pending those other things. So definitely within two weeks.

Matt: It can be complicated, there may be disagreement over who the best person is. In some cases, no: in some cases, everybody says “Wow, that candidate was so stellar, we have to hire her.” But in some cases, there might be disagreement. And it can just take a lot of patient, diplomatic talking about relative strength, relative weaknesses. The people who are within the hiring department will have more say than the person from the outside department, because they will know best what they need the most and how they see this person fitting most immediately with their own colleagues.

So, I think there’ll be some deference to the local Head of Schools opinion in this or and the Dean, if the Dean has a very strong view, that’s obviously got to be considered because the Dean is the real power broker.

So, all the committees I’ve worked on have been very professional and have gotten along well, but I would say not every member is equal, some will stand back and defer to other people’s opinions. Others will want to argue more forcefully for their position, but it kind of depends on how close you’ll be to working with the prospective hire. And in the end, it comes down to what the department feels they need the most, who will be a good teacher who does interesting research, who has thought about how they’re going to get research funding and who’s going to be a good colleague, and to the extent that those four things are brought together, that’s the person they will probably choose.

Chapter 8: Negotiating the Job Offer

Josh: If you receive an offer, what’s possible to negotiate?

Lisa: Once you get the offer, some things you can and some things you can’t negotiate. So, I told you that we don’t have a tenure system here. So, you know, in North America, you’ve got assistant Professor, associate Professor, and Professor, right? Here, Australia, we have a five-tier system. So, it’s associate Lecturer, Lecturer, Senior Lecturer. I’d say Senior Lecturer is more or less the equivalent of associate Professor in the United States. Then you have Associate Professor, which I would argue is like the equivalent of a Professor in the United States and then you have Professor and that’s a really senior position. A lot of people retire without ever achieving that status. So, when you are hiring somebody you’re hiring somebody at Okay, so we call the associate Lecture level a lecture is Level B, Senior Lecturer is Level C, associate Professors level D, and Professor is Level II, I think that’s standard across Australia. So, we might be hiring somebody at the B level lecture.

Oh, and by the way, because we’re public universities, your salary will be publicly available, and you can figure out exactly what you’re going to be paid. I mean, it will probably say it in the job app. But even if it didn’t say, even if you’re wondering about what your colleague makes, you can actually look that up, you can look up what the enterprise agreement that’s like the contract, basically, the employment contract of everybody at that university that’s been negotiated between the university and the union, universities are unionized here, almost universally unionized. And so, you can look up the enterprise agreement at any individual University, and it will tell you exactly what people make at different levels. But within each level, A-B-C-D-E, there are different steps. So, you might say that you’re hiring somebody for a level B, step four position, and I think there may be like six or eight steps within level B, so say they’re hiring it before, what you could negotiate is for a slightly higher salary at like B six. So that’s how you could negotiate a little higher salary.

Now, what you can’t do is say, like, they offer you a position at level B, and then you say, “Yeah, but I’m actually like a Professor in my department here at wherever, so this is not commensurate with my status, you should hire me at the level of Professor or associate Professor,” and the university will come back to you and say, “No, because we were advertising at the level B position. So, we got a set of candidates that were level B, aspiring candidates, if we wanted to hire somebody at Associate Professor than we would have advertised Associate Professor and you would have been competing against a completely different field.” So generally, you cannot shift level you can later once you get to the university, you can apply for promotion, usually within like three years or something. You can negotiate step, but you can’t negotiate level. And so that really limits the degree to which you can negotiate your salary. It’s all within what’s publicly available in the enterprise agreement, within that level that they’re hiring you at, you might be able to negotiate other things like funds to bring, if you’re coming internationally, funds to move yourself and your family to relocate things like that. You might be able to negotiate when the position begins, if you want to finish out your semester at your current university, or if you want to take a vacation first, but usually you can’t negotiate to start more than six months later than when they want you to start. And that’s simply because the department or discipline will be worried that they’re going to lose the line, that the funding will disappear within a year or something. And it may and it may not. But anyway, that’s just something you probably won’t get a lot of traction on.

What you probably can’t negotiate much is what you’re going to teach, because they hired you to teach specific things, that’s something you would negotiate once you start getting to the department, and every year, there’ll be some sort of curriculum meeting where the department decides who’s going to teach what you could negotiate them, but you won’t be able to negotiate it for your job.

Matt: You could also ask for startup funds. I think you can always ask for startup funds, it’s a perfectly appropriate question. And you may, in fact, be offered some but you might not be. But it’s certainly worth asking about, “If I’m to come there, it’s a big change, can I get a bit of money to keep my research going in the first instance, until I applied to the Australian Research Council, or just to help me, you know, help me get started, help me set up what I want to do?”

Heather: The startup costs, it’ll usually say what is standard, the startup things vary significantly, you’ll usually get the computer, you’ll usually get that sort of thing. But depending on the nature of your position, there may be other things. So, if it’s a research-intensive position, you might actually be offered funding to bring a postdoc or PhD students in there, if it’s a more kind of standard entry-level kind of position, you might get a little bit of money just to kind of to ramp up your kind of research before you’re eligible for funding, and that sort of thing. And some departments and institutions have a lot of kind of funding in there.

And those are all things that you can ask about. You typically don’t have much time in an interview, but those are things that you could ask about in terms of those long-term conditions and what kind of conference travel and that sort of thing that you typically would have access to. So those are things that you can ask about, but the kind of packages that people receive are pretty standard, and not a lot of room to negotiate. And typically, they want you to ask those things before you even get an offer letter.

So, there might be a period where you’re told you are the preferred candidate, and they might then say, “Can you let me know if there’s anything you need to ask about? What is your anticipated start date?” Those sorts of things. So, you have to be ready for those things. Even though, once you get to a point that you’re an interviewee, you need to line all of those questions up before that we’re thinking about, but I wouldn’t invest a ton of time until you get to that kind of interview, or any sort of indication that your application is moving to the next stage of things.

I think, aside from that, I would just say I’ve described a lot of things that are quite different. And perhaps I think that certainly the funding landscape is quite a bit different, and the expectations around that are quite different. But I think that one of the things that I found with Australia, there’s two things: one, there’s a lot of things that are quite standardized. So they have things like with your work plan, the people in teaching and research positions, what’s their work plan, or whether it’s at some of the institutions that I know, it is a kind of 40/40/20 split, what you wouldn’t recognize from a US context, other institutions have a kind of calculator, a kind of Excel spreadsheet, where they calculate your workload and have it broken down into how much convening a course is, how much a tutorial is, and these really vary by schools or departments in university. So that’s one thing.

Lisa: You may be able to negotiate for teaching release, or for like a reduced load in the beginning if say, you’re being brought in to teach something that’s a bit out of your area of expertise. Now, of course, in the higher, you’re going to make an argument that yeah, sure, I can teach that I can teach anything, right.

Heather: One thing that probably is worth looking at in the application, when you read it, is whether or not you already have to have more credit, or if the institution will sponsor a visa, because if you’re not an Australian citizen, you’ll need to have the university sort of support you in getting a visa, if you have work rights, or if they’re willing to navigate work rights for you, which is going to take some time. That’s kind of a possibility there.

I think the other thing, before I move into this, what I probably should have mentioned is that often, whereas in the US you’re applying for the following year—you’re applying in September 2022 for September 2023 usually as a start date—in Australia, you might interview in May 2022 and start in July of 2022. So, the start dates are negotiable, but they’re often quite keen to get people in and on the books as quickly as possible, just want to integrate people in faster. But also, so you don’t lose the position while waiting a year or two for someone to get here.

So, it’s, again, a much faster process. So that’s probably something and they will ask you typically for a start date—sometimes in the interview, sometimes in your application—they’ll be interested to know when that’s possible. I think for research fellow positions, they’re very keen that usually people start within three months of signing the letter of offer. In teaching, sometimes they’ll have to wait for a semester to finish for the kind of more natural transition.

Josh: Do you have any final tips for job seekers interested in positions in Australia?

Yasmine: Definitely look up the people that you would be working with, look up their research interests and strengths, maybe read a few papers that have been produced by the department if you haven’t already, like you really want to know who’s in the department and what kind of anthropology the department as a whole practices, and you really want to very strongly relate your application to how you would fit into that. Each department is so different, and you know, they’ve got different orientations. It’s not like each of them has like a specialist on religion and a specialist on the economy and a specialist on this, and the specialists, what are their areas-studies overlaps and gaps, and you want to go, “Okay, so they’ve got a very heavy Southeast Asian anthropology of development focus that is totally different from a focus on Africa and economy.” You want to know what they do, and they want to know how you relate to that and how you fit into that. So, I would always think that is the main way in which you address all the Selection Criteria. Let’s have that at the back of your mind.

Matt: The two things are, first, apply as widely as possible—unless you really need to stay in a particular place, you know, for family reasons, or if there’s a reason you need to limit your job search, then absolutely limit your job search. But if you’re young and free, apply to every job in the world, because you never know it will hit. I’m thrilled that I came to Australia. But I did not have any plan to come to Australia. I enjoy working here very much. But it was never part of a grand plan. It was because I needed a job. And I applied everywhere. I applied everywhere. And I got an offer in Australia. And I took it. And I’m glad I did. But you can’t predict.

I mean, I know this can sound depressing to job applicants. But the job that sounds absolutely perfect and tailor-made for you is likely the one you won’t get. I know that sounds awful. I’m sorry, I’m not trying to make people sad and depressed. But there’s a positive side, there’s a huge silver lining to that cloud, which is all those vaguely-worded job ads where you’re not clear what they’re looking for means they’re not clear what they’re looking for. And so, when they read your application, they say, “Aha, she’s exactly what we need. We just didn’t know it.” So, it’s not in the job ad yet. So, if you can, applying as widely as possible is definitely the way to go.

And then the second thing is something that Ilana Gershon says, the essence of what she says, is that hiring committees are taken over by a kind of spirit possession, where the ghosts of their departments’ past and political conflicts and personalities kind of take over and produce a result. That’s very weird. And you’d have to really be deep into tea-leaf reading to understand how it came about. Now, having said that, it doesn’t mean that bad decisions are made. But the way those decisions get made can be very confusing. So, to some extent, when you apply, you have to realize that there’s a huge amount of chance and contingency and an enormous amount of things that are outside of your control. And again, that sounds daunting, it could even sound depressing, but it can also work in your favor.

So, apply widely, be collegial, be accessible, tell people about why you love doing anthropology, and then you’re in as good a position as anyone to get the job. And if you apply for five jobs, you might get one.

Lisa: The most important thing is publications. If you have a choice between writing a really lengthy application that lays out all of the unique qualities of your theoretical approach to the discipline or publishing an article that applies those unique theoretical angles, get the publication. That’s what they really care about here. And like I said, it is an artifact of the no-tenure system, the fact that your publications matter so much in Australian universities, there’s a complicated way that it shapes the kinds of funding you get from the government for the universities. So, publications really matter. And when they hire somebody, especially if they’re hiring somebody who’s new out of their PhD, they want to make sure they get somebody who will publish and not somebody who’s going to freeze up and not do anything. So that’s the best way that you can prove that you are worthy of getting this essentially tenured position is by showing that you’re already there in terms of publications.

Heather: I think, one, looking for who you already might know, and most people based in Australia are pretty open and willing to kind of talk even if you’ve maybe only met them very, very briefly at a conference or have been involved in something together, you definitely want to reach out and see what they think of that position, do they know anything about the department? Are there other things that should be taken into consideration, etc. So, I think, one, generally just reach out, and you can cold call, because the academic networks in Australia are relatively small. More than likely one person is one degree removed from someone who knows that, or knows someone who lives in that city, or knows someone who knows the institution. So, it’s, it’s well worth just doing your homework sort of there. I do think it’s worth reaching out to the person who’s named on the chair things if you have quite specific questions that you would like answered, and HR also can help to answer some of those things in terms of clarifying, for example, whether or not this position includes the university supporting you for work rights, or whether or not you have to have them already, etc., that those are things that you want to do your homework and make sure that you’ve got it right so that you don’t, you know, basically waste your time on an application that you won’t be eligible for applying for.

So, I think that those things are quite important, and making sure that you have a sense of what kind of community is sort of there. So, it’s worth kind of being a bit more open-minded in terms of where you sort of set your sights because there just aren’t that many anthropology departments in Australia. So just in terms of looking out for where the interesting work is happening and where the kind of colleagues are, that’s quite important. I think you need to kind of think quite strategically about the kind of networks that you’ll be embedding yourself in because that makes a difference for the kind of community that you enter into.

But also, one of the things with the funding advice in Australia is that you do have to do projects that are in the quote-unquote, “national interest.” So, when I moved to Australia, I moved from working in the Caribbean to working in the Pacific region for a variety of reasons. But in part, it was because I knew part of my job as a research-only academic was to apply for and receive funding. So it’s sort of understanding those dynamics and what’s expected of you that’s really important and making sure that you land in a place, or at least in a city where you will have other people who you’ll have some sort of affinity or connection to so that you don’t feel isolated as things get tough departments can be those places, but I would look to other support networks around you to kind of make sense of things as well. We’ve been able to do things in Australia and do things much more kind of creatively here than I might have been able to do in other kinds of academic contexts. So, I think it’s one of those things, if you’re willing to kind of take a leap and really enter into a kind of different system, you know, where new things are kind of possible. We’ve created new research centers, we’ve created new kinds of research areas, we’ve been able to really, really kind of shape the research environment in a way that I don’t think would have been possible in other kinds of contexts.

So, I think there’s definitely been a kind of new possibilities that have come up through learning a kind of new system or a different system from the US which I was familiar with, and even the UK and so you know, there’s always risks and always thinks it’s really exciting new things that have come through that. So, it’s worth thinking about if you’re agnostic about where, where you want to be in the world.

Josh: Thanks for listening to this episode of Hiring Rituals. Till next time…

Guest Biographies

Professor Kate Henne is the Director of RegNet, the Australia National University’s School of Regulation and Global Governance, and leads the Justice and Technoscience Lab (JusTech). She is also a Chief Investigator on the ANU Humanising Machine Intelligence Grand Challenge project and a member of the ANU Gender Institute. Before commencing as RegNet’s Director, she held a Canada Research Chair at the University of Waterloo, where she was also a Fellow of the Balsillie School of International Affairs. Her research is concerned with how science and technology influence regulation and governance, focusing on the implications for health, public safety, and well-being. Her publications span issues of automated decision-making, biomedicalization, data governance, gender-based regulation, human enhancement, policing technologies, and sport. Her work has been funded by the Australian Research Council, Canada Foundation for Innovation, Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation, Olympic Studies Centre, Ontario Research Fund, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and World Anti-Doping Agency, as well as by government partners.

Professor Heather A. Horst is the Director of the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. A sociocultural anthropologist by training, she researches material culture and the mediation of social relations through digital media and technology. Her books focused upon these themes include The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (Horst and Miller, 2006); Hanging Around, Messing Around and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (Ito, et. Al 2010); Digital Anthropology (Horst and Miller, eds. 2012); Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practices (Pink, Horst, et. Al. 2015); The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography (Hjorth, Horst, Galloway and Bell, Eds. 2016); The Moral Economy of Mobile Phones: Pacific Island Perspectives (Foster and Horst, eds. 2018) and Location Technologies in International Context (Wilken, Goggin and Horst, eds. 2019). Her current research, part of an Australia Research Council’s Linkage Project, led by Dr. Denis Crowdy with the Wontok Foundation and Further Arts Vanuatu, examines the circulation of music in Melanesia through mobile technologies. She is also developing new work examining the Fijian fashion system as well as Automated Decision Making.

Associate Professor Yasmine Musharbash is Senior Lecturer and Head of Discipline, Anthropology in the College of Arts and Social Sciences at Australia National University. Ethnographically, her work is located in central Australia and mostly centered on Yuendumu, an Aboriginal community about three hours northwest of Alice Springs. She has been conducting fieldwork there annually since 1994, originally focusing on everyday life as it unfolds in Warlpiri homes and country.

Matt Tomlinson is Associate Professor in the School of Culture, History & Language at Australia National University. Matt is a sociocultural anthropologist who studies the relationship between language, politics, and religious ritual. At the heart of his work is the question of how people organize themselves to communicate with “extrahuman” figures (including God, ancestors, and spirits) and what social effects such ritual communication has. After completing a PhD in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002, he have taught at Bowdoin College, Monash University, the University of Oslo, and ANU (since 2012).

Lisa L. Wynn is Professor in the School of Social Sciences (Discipline of Anthropology) at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She received her PhD in 2003 from Princeton University’s Anthropology Department, then subsequently held two postdoctoral research positions at Princeton’s Office of Population Research and Center for Health and Wellbeing. Her research has been supported by grants from the Social Science Research Council, the Australian government’s Office of Learning and Teaching, and the Australian Research Council, and she has won both the Vice Chancellor’s Teaching Excellence Award from Macquarie University and a national teaching award from the Australian Office of Learning and Teaching. She has conducted fieldwork in Egypt since 1998, with a focus on tourism, gender, reproductive health technologies, sexuality, and religion. She also conducts research in Australia on ethics review bureaucracies and on lay understandings of infectious disease. She has served on the editorial boards of Maternal and Child Health Journal and Contraception, and is Associate Editor of the journal American Ethnologist starting in 2022. She has served as President of the Australian Anthropological Society (2020) and on the AAS Executive Committee (2018-2021). She is the author of 2 monographs, the co-editor of 3 edited books, and has published several dozen book chapters and journal articles.