Thank you for joining us for our inaugural season of Hiring Rituals, a new long-form informational podcast about hiring in Anthropology. In it, we offer an ethnographic lens on how anthropologists with higher degrees get hired internationally or in other units beyond traditional disciplinary departments.
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 fifth episode of Hiring Rituals focuses on hiring practices in South Africa. We turned to colleagues who elucidate the composition of committees, the social processes, the legislation, and the values that bring academic hiring to life.
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.
Hylton: Right now, we get to line when someone resigns or retires. We have to apply for the renewal of that line.
Divine: Because of funding—what is called soft funding here, which is external funding—and sometimes also colleagues, if they go on sabbatical, we can make positions also available. So quite often, it’s dependent on whether this is a department that is on the general operating budget or on soft funding.
Hylton: We have some special circumstances occasionally. So, for instance, people are often brought into the university into higher executive positions or targeted professorial appointments, and they’re appointed at a higher level than department level, but then they will be allocated to a department. But that’s specific to them. It’s not a department line. So, for instance, we have somebody in our department right now who was hired by the university specifically to teach on questions around race, and that person is currently in our department.
Divine: Job ads are posted throughout the year. Job hires happen through committees, through recruitment committees. Once this position has been approved the department, usually the head of department has put together, or requests to the dean and through HR, proposes a list of people to be on that committee, and then the dean will make a decision or provide oversight and appoint members into that committee. And it’s the committee’s responsibility to deliberate, have that recruitment, draft the job ad ,and then proceed with lots of other things. So, job ads are written by committees and approved by committees.
Hylton: It has to be very carefully coordinated with HR. It’s very regulated. So, there’s certain language that has to be very specific, and there’s certain requirements which are faculty-wide, and we can’t adjust those. On occasion, we might want to put in language asking for people with particular specializations, for instance, or trying to emphasize something that we want like a particular proof of teaching competence, you know, around the edges like that, things can be changed, but the basic wording remains the same.
Chapter 3: The Application and the Short List
Josh: Once you find a job you want to apply for, what’s actually involved in the application? And what makes the candidate’s initial application sink or swim?
Hylton: The application consists of a cover letter, a CV, an example of a course, and names of referees. It is only from the shortlist of candidates that we would ask for publications, letters of recommendation, and other materials that might be considered.
Divine: We just did a hire now in which we requested some of the applicants to submit short videos presenting themselves, because you know, virtual work and online communication. And then there’s a form which candidates have to fill which provides a kind of a bio data. Then depending on whether they decide to move to give a public talk, we sometimes might ask for a course, maybe a course sample for them to design a course, sometimes I might ask them to write an essay on a particular subject, sometimes you might ask them to make a presentation on a given topic.
Josh: We also asked what the process of assessing these applications looks like from the inside, and how the committee actually decides who gets on the shortlist.
Hylton: For entry-level and mid-level appointments, there’s a search committee which has a standard composition. And this is all laid down by university and faculty regulations. So, we don’t have a say in the overall template for the composition. So, the composition would be the committee would be chaired by the Head of School, or what you would call perhaps a head of division. So, it would be the Head of the School of Social Sciences—not the head of department, but the department chair. It would be chaired by the Head of School, and then it would have three representatives from the department, and that would be the department chair, or what we call head of departments, and then two others who broadly represent the spread of the departments. So preferably someone senior and someone junior, that would be the ideal, but that can’t always be the case in the small department. And then we also don’t want the same people sitting on committees time after time. But the ideal is that, for instance, it would be people at a higher level and people at a more entry-level.
And then on the other hand, there would be three external representatives. And so that would be normally one representative from the School of Social Sciences, but not anthropology; one representative from the Faculty of Humanities, in general it could be another person from the School of Social Sciences, but someone who will represent the faculty’s voice in a sense; and then someone from our Transformation Office. The Transformation Office is an office specifically dedicated to ensuring employment equity, and particularly on questions of race and gender more broadly than that, but particularly with an emphasis on questions of race and gender.
So, what you’ll notice from that is that members of the department are in a minority on the search committee, we make up three out of the total of seven. But normally these would be people who have some sense of the qualitative social sciences and are able to understand somebody who has a very narrow specialization, and a very narrowly specialized subfield of anthropology is very unlikely to be able to be appointed to a job in South Africa, because we are in small departments. And that means we have to be able to teach widely, and we also are engaging with large undergraduate classes, many of whom are first-generation students. And so, people need to be able to teach those kinds of students, which means that they need to be able to have a broad, broadly anthropological outlook and not go down a very particular garden path that’s not going to be followed by other people.
And it’s all completely confidential. The people, for instance, the members of the department, who are on the committee are not allowed to discuss this at any point with other people in the department. So once that shortlisting meeting happens, until the final candidate is appointed, there’s absolutely no communication about the search process with the rest of the department. The search committee meets, and they go through the files one by one and see which candidates are eligible for shortlisting. It normally goes through a process of ranking. There are certain people who don’t meet the requirements, even for a lecturer-level position, you have to have PhD in hand in South Africa. Now, it’s not even having passed, you actually have to have graduated. So, there’s a winnowing process, which takes up people who suddenly you know, just by sheer objective measure don’t meet the requirements for being considered for the position. And then from those who remain, there would be a process of selecting the three to five candidates who would be most suitable to interview.
Divine: There’s a set of requirements that are in the job ads. The first thing is just to see what people meet up with those requirements. I like to look at a motivation letter and see how the candidate has responded to this requirement or try to also see whether the candidate has really understood the space they’re coming into, to see how the candidate has presented themselves and also their scholarship. It’s really important to see what kind of contribution they’re going to bring to the department what kind of synergies they’re going to build.
I also want to know networks that they have, because you should not forget that academic life is about social networks. So, I want to see what social capital or cultural capital the candidate is bringing on board, because they’re coming to enrich the space. And sometimes you want to know if there’s somebody who is going to bring in funds. You want to know also the teaching, teaching portfolio, sometimes if there are teaching evaluations, that’s also really important, what they’ve taught, what they’re going to bring you as a teacher. Then supervision is also really important because graduate programs are also quite large and growing. So, you also want to know if this person’s got experience. Also depending on levels, sometimes if it’s a junior high, you also want to see promise, and it differs. At the end, you really want a good scholar, but you also want a really good colleague.
Elena: If you’re an international doctoral graduate in this part of the world at the moment, you might get shortlisted for a job and you might get the job, but there are employment legislation directives that require us to look at South-African Africans first.
Hylton: We’re really interested right now in the ability to teach a new generation of South African students in a post-apartheid context. Universities in South Africa are part of a dramatic process of social transformation. Universities like the one where I teach were whites-only universities until the 1980s. They had very small quotas of people who were not white who were allowed to study at the university. Our student body is now 80%, Black, and most of them are first-generation students. So, there are very particular skills required and profiles required to be able to teach in a dynamic way to those students. And they might not line up with what would be considered the makings of a good anthropology career in the United States. The research profile and teaching competence are taken into account across the board, but a dynamic teaching profile is very important to us.
And also, it’s very important to us to make sure that we change the profile of the academic staff at the university, which is a process well underway, but needs to be consolidated and deepened. South African universities used to be staffed almost entirely by white South African academics and small numbers of European and other northern white academics. And so that’s no longer the case, our department is majority and has been for some time. But when you’re a small department, if you lose somebody, every loss of a colleague can start to unravel that. And so, we’re particularly looking at very promising Black candidates, that is a legal preference, that’s imposed on us by law. And so that’s an argument within universities how to balance the demand to be an African university versus the demand for equity and restitution and redress in the aftermath of apartheid, which specifically affected Black South Africans. We’re particularly looking for evidence of ability to engage with our students, first-generation students, 80% Black South African at this point, or Black. And so, people have to be able to show an ability to excite people who are not coming from privileged backgrounds, and who are really involved in radical life changes when they’re at university, the bureaucratic regulation becomes quite paradoxical.
You’re not allowed to make these considerations at the stage of shortlisting, you’re only allowed to make these considerations at a later stage. After the interviews, there’s a decision about which candidates are considered appointable on the basis of their performance interview process. And only once you’ve got the list of appointable candidates do you take other considerations like nationality, equity, status, things like that. That’s when that’s supposed to come in. Now obviously, these things are in the background, but these discussions are all recorded. All the recordings are kept by HR, they can be reviewed by the dean.
Chapter 4: The Job Talk and Interview
Josh: Let’s say you’re selected for an interview…What does that entail, exactly?
Divine: Once you’ve compared the candidates and rank the candidate, the committee will deliberate and will do a shortlist of candidates they would like to interview, and then after they’ve done that, they will move to the next step.
The next step is about conducting the interviews. My experience is usually that you want the candidates to come for an interview, you want the candidate to give a public talk—because sometimes the talk is just within a committee—they should present their research. Sometimes you ask them to teach a class, to present in front of students, and you can then evaluate also how they teach.
And then after the interviews, you know, committee is going to deliberate and make its decision. And then we will then make those recommendations to the faculty, to the dean, who will make an unofficial and recommendation, and then it will go up to the university management. And then if at that level it’s approved, then there will then be some kind of an offer that is made to the candidate. Times have changed and shifted now, COVID has redefined how a lot of these interactions are happening. But in the past, I think once you had come for your interview, it was usually I think a two-day or sometimes three-days visit. And during that time, you had enough time to visit the campus, to meet with faculty, to give the public talk to students, and then sometimes colleagues will take you out to just have a conversation with you.
Some committees will require that they might give a public talk on the research, some committees might actually ask them to do this presentation to the committee only, other committees might ask that it is done to the department and students only. So, it can be a public talk on the research, it can be a public talk on teaching, sometimes they will pose a question, and candidates who do a public talk will respond to that question. And other times, they might need to do a public talk that combines their teaching, their research, and their public engagement, or what’s called social responsiveness. It would be seminar time, so a one- to one-and-a-half-hour seminar. They sometimes might ask to do a 15-minute presentation, and then lots of questions. But the structure is very simple. The candidate gives a talk and the audience ask questions, and then there is a kind of a conversation to and fro so we understand research and we understand the project.
Hylton: Each candidate is interviewed for about an hour. The committee meets at the start before any candidate is interviewed and agrees on the questions that will be asked of each candidate, but those are fairly standard because they are also governed by precedent and by regulations about the extent to which you can vary from a template. There might be some variation from this, but normally, the first question would be asked by the Head of School, and it would be about why the person has applied for this position and wants to be at fits at our university. And that’s important, because given the academic job markets, people are often applying for every job they possibly can. But we ideally can’t afford to have somebody come for three years and then get a job in another country, we need to consolidate our departments and institutions. So, we’re looking for somebody with a long-term commitment, and being from the continent or from the country is obviously a sign of that.
Then, there would be questions about people’s research, and that could be divided up into past, present, future, or it could be consolidated depending on the level of the position and the number of people on the committee. And then there would be questions about teaching experience, about graduate supervision, either experience or approach to it. There would be a question about the candidates’ attitude towards academic citizenship and academic governance, participation in committee work, because there’s a lot of that. And then there would be a question on the candidates’ understanding of what it means, to what the project of transformation or change is in South African universities, where we should be going and especially where we should be going in terms of allocation on the continent on questions of race, on the constitution of the curriculum, and how they would contribute to that process, how their appointment would contribute to that process. And that’s a very important question. That’s asked by the person who comes from the Transformation Office.
So, when those questions are gone through, there’s room for follow-up by other members of the committee or by the person who asked the question, and that’s where you can get into a more individuated line of questioning because it can follow up on how someone responded because the questions that are posed have to be pretty much exactly the same to every candidate. And that’s an HR regulation and a legal requirement. So, you can’t adjust questions or come up with particular questions for particular candidates, it would violate the HR process.
But also, during that time, there would be time for the candidate themselves to engage in conversation, and at the end, they are given explicitly a space for asking any questions that remain for them. In all my experience, it’s genuinely the case that we want to know if there’s something that candidate wants to know, and I’ve never heard that moment being taken as an “aha, we gotcha!” kind of thing, you know, “you didn’t ask the right kind of question of us.” I’ve never experienced that. So, candidates do ask a whole range of things. It normally comes down to questions around, if I were to get this job, what room would they be for negotiation around start dates, workload, what is the teaching load like in the department, what are the expectations? People normally ask very concrete, forward-looking things.
Divine: When I’m hiring, or if I’m in a committee and an applicant comes to campus, they should really be curious to see where they’re coming to and who they want to work with. I’m hoping that if, in the end, they were offered the position, they should be able to make an informed decision about their colleagues and ask questions about their colleagues about classes.
I like candidates who also ask questions just about social life and the place: where to stay, where to live, what to do, how much time it takes to come out, ask questions about cost of living in that place, ask questions about social mobility and reward systems within the place, about access to funding, the right opportunities, about grad students and how postgraduate school works, about how undergraduate works. I really like somebody who can show a genuine interest that they really want to be a person grounded in that place and also be a colleague in that space.
I like somebody who brings something new, who helps me to learn and helps me to grow, that’s really important. I really like somebody who is grounded in what they are doing but also in the field. They have a good grasp of concepts, they have a good grasp of the history of the discipline, they have a very good grasp of theory and methods, you know, that’s really good.
I like people who really have exciting research that points to new dimensions. I like colleagues who are good team players, colleagues who like to think with others, who are collaborators, that they can show that they really collaborate. For me, these are really great colleagues, colleagues who are really invested in teaching and growing people. Because if you hire somebody who is going to come in and do more teaching work, that’s also a challenge, so growing young people, growing young minds, bringing new minds, I think that’s really, really key. I like colleagues will bring in innovative techniques and strategies to deal with some of the difficulties that we have, I like colleagues will bring in new money to the space, and then a colleague who will just put you at ease.
Chapter 5: The Decision
Josh: After you’ve had candidates give their job talk and interview with you, tell us about the deliberations, offers, and negotiation.
Hylton: So, the Head of School goes into bureaucratic mode at this point, and shepherds this process through the HR regulations. So, the first question is, which of the candidates who were interviewed are appointable to the position, and appointable to the position means having gone through the full process, they clearly meet the requirements, that they could be eligible as people who are appointed to this position. So, there might be certain things that exclude them from that. So, for instance, if it turns out that a candidate has absolutely no teaching experience and has shown no ability in the interview to give an indication of how they would teach.
The second step is to rank the candidates into groups, and it normally goes as sort of 1-2-3. So, one is, “these are the people we really think were very impressive, and we’d really like to look at more closely.” Three is “people that we feel are not really on the card, so we’re going to put them to the side,” even though they may be appointable. And two would be the ones where there’s some wavering or disagreement amongst the committee. And then we look at the numbers and whether there needs to be further discussion.
And now obviously, this ranking is not just done by poll, 1-2-3. It’s a discussion, which goes back to all of these questions: research, teaching, supervision, transformation committee work. What the Head of School will do is ask each committee member at every stage in this process, to go around and ask every committee member to put in a statement about you know, what was your impression of this person, of this person or this person on these questions. And that will go around and around and around until there’s some consensus.
Somebody who’s one year out of PhD might have a very different CV than someone who’s five years out of PhD, but then it would be okay. But you’ve got to manage, you’ve got to compare them given where they are as individuals, right, how are they performing at five years? And what how does that compare to where this person’s performing at one year, you know, and if it’s the case that there are two people who have roughly comparable CVS, the law is that the white candidate cannot be appointed, it must be the Black candidate who is appointed.
And so, if the dean has a feeling that that hasn’t been done, that you have a White candidate and the candidate with comparable CVs and the white candidate has been appointed, then the committee will be made to reconvene. Otherwise, once the Head of School has approval from the faculty, the dean, the faculty, HR, etc., then the Head of School will reach out to the first candidate and negotiate, there’s a week or two for doing that. And then if an agreement isn’t reached, then the first candidate is withdrawn, and the Head of School will reach out to the second candidate until there’s a contract signed.
I think at a higher level for professorial appointments, there’s probably much more room for negotiation. With entry-level positions, there’s very little in my experience, the salaries are pretty much set. There used to be a lot of salary inequity, particularly by gender, and our union filed a Freedom of Information process about 10 years ago that discovered that and it was corrected, and we build up our own research accounts through publication. So, there’s no negotiation around research allowances. Coming from outside of South Africa, there’s a relocation allowance, but that’s standard if you come from outside South Africa, and it’s not available if you’re close, so there’s very little to negotiate.
Divine: It’s very transparent. So, when a position is advertised, the salary scale—which is standard—is advertised with it and it is actually on the HR page of the university. That’s also all before the interview, you actually can understand what percentile you will be at, you know the range within which you will be paid. So, there is very little room for negotiation, but you can have a conversation or discussion and departments are flexible, sometimes there may be courses, maybe there might be decisions about when to start and lots of other things. I think most departments is a very open and generous, but salaries are standard, and if candidates go on to the university side the HR page, they can see what everyone earns.
Josh: Do you have any final tips for job seekers interested in positions in South Africa?
Elena: I definitely think I and our colleagues are more than happy to talk about this. It’s not it’s not a secret. And I don’t think anyone wants this to be kind of some version of elitist ways of keeping people out and exclusion. Obviously, it’s easier for people on the ground here—whether that’s in Cape Town, whether it’s in Joburg, doesn’t matter where it is—to begin to talk to people at seminars or gatherings, along the corridors that you bump into, or you might have some connection with. So, if you’re an international graduate, I do think you need to start engaging. These days, it’s a bit a little bit easier because a lot of seminars are still online and there is a way in through virtual communities, but you do need to start engaging and getting to know them, especially if your work and your area of expertise is not aligned to that department’s broader interests.
So you do need to start getting to know, well what is going on in this department? Who’s doing what? What are their kind of seminars or what is their teaching about, who’s teaching what and why. Following on from that, it is possible to start reaching out to people, needless to say, whether it’s just through getting involved, maybe it’s a seminar, maybe offering to give a seminar on your work that you think is directly relatable to the context and to the department or a particular audience. And that’s one way of beginning to start these conversations of who you are, what you’re doing, what you’re working on, most importantly, what the connections are to some other work that is relevant and is similar to the work that you’re doing, that you can make these connections. And I think people are very keen to hear about this.
A good place is just start introducing yourself, be it to the head of department, the postgraduate administrator, maybe to a scholar that you already know, and that way you can get connected. And I do think there are ways for different types of folks who want different things in an academic career. I think those possibilities are out there, but it is tricky, and you need to be talking to people who know the landscape a bit better. And that is my take-home message: to get involved, to talk to people, to know the landscape, and then make your choices.
Divine: Every context has its issues, questions, and challenges that candidates should investigate, it is important to understand the country and its history, it is important to understand the university and its history. If you’re going to be working on the side of the world in the South African University, I think it’s important that you really invest in understanding postcolonial thinking, to understand decolonial and decolonization work, because that’s really the key to a lot the work that’s happening here. And I think understanding what is meant here as “transformation” and also “equity” is really key, because there are lots of candidates who come in and really do not know how to articulate this. What does this country mean by transforming the university? What does this country mean by transforming discipline, transforming workspace, just trying to see where the university is trying to go? Because universities have visions and strategies as faculties, our visions and strategies, it’s important to understand those and also just to see what the department really is aiming to do. The candidates will come in and they really haven’t invested in understanding the department and also seeing how they fit within the department, how they are going to build synergies with other colleagues in the department? I think it’s really important that candidates are invested in this, and I think here we also like to build networks on the continent. How are candidates planning to take work to the continent to do synergies with institutions and other investors in the continent is really key.
Josh: Thanks for listening to this episode of Hiring Rituals. Till next time…
Biographies
Divine Fuh is Director of the Institute for Humanities Africa (HUMA) at the University of Cape Town, where he is also a lecturer in social anthropology. Before that, he was Head of the Publications and Dissemination Programme at the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa CODESRIA from 2017–19. He joined UCT in 2012 from the University of Basel where he was a Researcher in the Chair for Research and Methodology at the Institute for Sociology. He taught briefly at the Universities of Basel, Cape Town, Western Cape, and Stellenbosch, and has been visiting lecturer at the Universities of Brasilia, Tokyo, and Gaston Berger. His research focuses on the politics of suffering and smiling, particularly on how urban youth seek ways of smiling in the midst of their suffering. He has researched Botswana, Cameroon, South Africa and Senegal, and his current work focuses on the political economy of Pan-African knowledge production. He was educated at the Universities of Buea, Botswana and Basel. He has been a visiting fellow at the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies in Berlin (ZMO) and guest at the African Studies Centre Leiden. Divine is Founding Managing Editor of Langaa Research and Publishing and has been Chair of the Council of Management of the Africa Book Collective. He is also current Co-Chair of the Global Africa Group of the World Universities Council.
Elena Moore is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cape Town. She is a sociologist specializing the sociology of the family with a Master’s degree in Applied Social Research and a PhD from Trinity College Dublin. Elena is currently working on a project on intergenerational relationships in South Africa. She recently authored a book on Divorce, Families and Emotion Work and co-authored a book in 2015 on customary marriage, divorce, and intestate succession. Her work has appeared in The Journal of Family Issues, Gender & Society, Families, Relationships and Societies, and The Journal of Southern African Studies. Her principal research interests lie in the field of personal life, kinship, gender, intergenerational relations, customary law, family law and policy, feminist theories, biographical methods, and mixed methods.
Hylton White is a social anthropologist with interests in critical theory, the anthropology of value, and the ethnography and history of social relations in southeast Africa. Hylton is currently a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology, University of the Witwatersrand. He has conducted ethnographic research for more than twenty years in northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, focusing on the ways that people in rural communities make and think about social ties, especially in the context of their households and families. This has led him to publish work on issues such as kinship, the life course, architecture, ritual, customary law, and political authority. He is currently completing a book that examines how Zulu South Africans have navigated the complex ethics of keeping up proper relationships with ancestors in a post-apartheid context of far-reaching sociocultural change and profound economic insecurity. Hylton studied sociocultural anthropology at the University of Cape Town (BA Honours 1992) and at the University of Chicago (PhD 2001), then taught at the University of Chicago and at the New School for Social Research before joining the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 2010. At Wits, he currently teaches courses in general anthropology and sociocultural theory, but has also taught on ritual, kinship, and economic anthropology. Hylton has served three terms as the Secretary of the Council for Anthropology Southern Africa, from 2011–16. He has served in the editorial boards of Anthropology Southern Africa, Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropologist, and Critical Historical Inquiry. He is currently editor at HAU Books.
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology 