job descriptions

[Sibelan Forrester]

I used to snort at some of the job descriptions -- until I wound up on the
other side, trying to write one of them.  Imagine that you're at a small
college -- you don't have the luxury of saying you want someone who does,
say, generative grammar or 20th century Romanian poetry -- how do you give
a good general idea of what you want without either excluding people who
might be great for the job, or raising false hopes in people too close in
expertise to the ones you already have?  If you're applying for jobs this
year, don't think that an action-packed job description meanas that "they"
already have someone in mind, or that they want to hire based on
qualifications that can't be legally advertised -- though that must be
sometimes true.  They probably had a committee of 6 putting together the
job description; the senior person in the French section does some work
with street theater in 1968 so wouldn't it be fun if this person did too,
and the new guy in the theater department just spent a year in Prague, so
wouldn't it be fun if this person could also connect with the Czech angle
and maybe eventually team teach....

The people on the hiring end wish they had jobs for 20 people in all sorts
of subfields.

My real motivation , picking up this thread, is to invite those of you
who'd like to be on the other side of the process to volunteer to play the
roles of interviewing committee in the mock interview at the AATSEEL
pre-convention workshop, sponsored by AWSS.  You can put the job
description together too (though it would be hard to beat Veronica
Shapovalov's from 1994 -- at Paradise State U.).  Think of it as street
theater even though you can use it as a line on your cv.  If you're
interested please contact me (<SFORRES1 at swarthmore.edu>) or Jonathan Ludwig
(<ludwig1 at ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>) -- Jonathan will be running or maybe
co-running the workshop this year.

Sibelan