Who Are You Searching For? Looking beyond the CV in Academic Hiring

I’ve been on enough academic search committees to know that something is broken in how hiring happens at the college level. If you’ve been through this process, on either end, I suspect you agree. But my issue isn’t with bloated HR policies or entrenched systems or the hundreds of equally credentialed candidates that answer every open call. What I’m worried about is that, often when we’re hiring, we look at the candidates before we’ve really looked at ourselves.