Electronic Placement and the National Communication Association (NCA)

William F. Eadie
Associate Director of the National Communication Association

The views expressed here are his own and should not
necessarily be taken as a statement of official NCA position.

It is tempting to begin this essay with a "when I was a boy" story. You know the kind: "When I was a boy, we had to walk five miles to school through foot deep snow." Or better yet: "When I was a boy, we had one electronic calculator in my whole doctoral department that could do square root, doing computer analysis meant keeping a pile of cards bundled in exactly the right order, and an analysis of variance
problem took all night to run, if you got the holes in the right columns of the cards."

The second story is true, the first one isn't.

When I was a boy the Internet hadn't been invented yet, though ARPANET, its predecessor, had. Of course, ARPANET was run by the military and was really just open to scientists, so we "humanists and humanistic social scientists" didn't know about it. Copy machines were a new phenomenon, and I had no inkling at that point that e-mail would eventually take over my life.

Before I was a boy in this discipline, there was a time when department chairs would come to the SAA convention (it wasn't even SCA at that point, so you know this was a really long time ago) empowered to make offers to one or two of the best people they could find. This practice was legendary among SCA members (for, by then the word "communication" had been added to our name), and many an erstwhile new Ph.D. hoped in vain that it would return. The closest I got in the year I finished was meeting a former professor at the SCA convention. He had just become a department chair, and he said that he was going to have seven new positions to hire. "And," he whispered to me, "I want you to be one of them."

Never happened. It was all an illusion.

Actually, I finished in a recession year and was hired to replace two people at a university that was losing enrollment rapidly. The job didn't turn up until July. My graduate school colleagues threw a "thank God Bill finally found a job" party. Still, you'd be surprised at how many about-to-be minted Ph.D.s are convinced that, if they can just get an interview with that one great school they can walk away from the convention with job in pocket. In part, that's why behavior at the Placement Service interview area can become pretty obnoxious.

Looking back on those "golden days," however, it is easy to see that they weren't as golden as legend made them. In the main, it was an old boys' network. When one old boy wanted to hire a person in a specific area, he would call up his buddy who specialized in that area and said, "Who you got coming out this year that's good?" The buddy would name one or two names, and those people would get the inside track.

By the time I was a baby Ph.D., a lot of folks had figured out that this method wasn't a fair one. SCA's Placement Service was complicit: it ran job ads every month that only identified the location by state. The old boys knew where the jobs were, but the job-seekers didn't. You needed an "in" to get anywhere. And that meant you had to have come from the "right" school, worked with the "right" people, and did the "right" things while there.

It's not so much that way any more. Yes, you still have to do the right things and know the right people, though knowing "old girls" now helps as much (sometimes more) as knowing the old boys. Job announcements are no longer closely held; in fact, universities are required to demonstrate that they advertised widely and reached a national audience. And, there are Federal regulations in place designed to insure that everyone who is qualified gets a fair chance at being considered for an available position.

Still, applying for an academic job is not the same as searching for a commercial position. Academics like to see themselves as belonging to a more genteel era, where things are doing according to proper rules. Acting too eager for a position violates those rules, as does active campaigning (though, a phone call from one's adviser to a friend in the department advertising the position still counts for a lot). In general, those searching for academic jobs do not take out "position wanted" ads; in most cases these would be considered to be gauche.

So, how does web-site advertising fit into this picture? Clearly, some senior faculty would be offended. They would see such crass efforts as breaking long-established rules. Some would condemn them for other reasons, fearing that web sites would subvert the ability to do a fair search by allowing factors such as age and ethnicity to become apparent and thus give some candidates an unfair advantage. Some would fear that web sites are potentially "too flashy" and would obscure the academic credentials of the candidate.

None of these fears seem to be holding for nonacademic searches. Indeed, high tech companies have robot programs continually scanning the web for key words and phrases in an attempt to identify job candidates for increasingly hard-to-fill positions. Career counselors at colleges and universities are encouraging students to create web pages that feature these key words, as well as to use the web to search for information about companies in which they are interested.

As traditionalists, academic employers have been slow to incorporate multi-media into the job search process. The Chronicle of Higher Education digitized its advertisements and makes them available to subscribers electronically the Friday before they are published in the printed version of the paper. These ads are available to anyone with web access on the Friday after publication.

In the communication discipline, national advertising has traditionally been defined as appearing in the Chronicle, plus advertising in Spectra, NCA's monthly printed newsletter, and perhaps in ICA News, which appears quarterly. CommJobs, a service of CIOS, has been making online ads available to CIOS institutional and individual members for some time. And, CRTNET News, of which I am the managing editor, has been providing free position listings for its more than 2500 readers.

All of these developments potentially undermine the NCA's Placement Service, whose member fees support half of a staff person's time. The Placement Service provides a standard résumé form and some standard forms for recommendations. The completed forms are stored at the NCA National Office. Placement Service members can request that their credentials be sent to individuals of their choice, and their annual fee allows for a certain number of those requests to be made; requests over that initial number may be made for an additional fee. Placement Service members also receive Spectra, NCA's monthly printed newsletter, via first-class mail, instead of by bulk shipment.

The Placement Service also operates an interviewing service at NCA's annual convention. Employers, for a fee, can list a position and can reserve an interview site for a set period of time. For a good deal of time, the interview sites were single tables with chairs on either side; in the last couple of years the tables have been enclosed on three sides by curtains to allow for some privacy. After the employers have been processed, the center is opened to Placement Service members, who sign up for interview slots. The Placement Service members are told that the interviews are informational in nature and are designed to allow them to learn about the employer and for the employer to meet them. Gone are the days where employers have offers in their hands, but the Placement Service members typically regard this opportunity as an essential one, so much so that each year there are reports of individuals who try to skirt the rules in one way or another. Placement Service staff have responded to concerns with tightening controls on interview sign-ups; Placement Service members may sign up for only a limited number of interviews initially and may sign-up for additional interviews only after everyone has had a chance to make their picks. Some positions do close their interview slots quickly, however, either because they have a plethora of applications or because some institutions do not schedule many slots for interviewing.

The convention placement service has been seen as a "rite of passage" for graduate students, and most everyone in the discipline has stories of going through the "meat market." It does not work so well for those who are already in positions and looking for other work, because it does not provide, despite the additional of curtained interview areas, the privacy that some applicants need. Some employers do not like the system of allowing anyone to sign up for a fifteen-minute interview; they would rather collect applications in advance and use the NCA annual convention to interview those in whom they are most interested. Some employers want to have entire search committees participate in each interview, but NCA limits the number of institutional representatives per Placement Service table. So, a fair amount of interviewing goes on outside of the NCA Placement Service room.

There have been proposals each year for reforming the process, and some of those, such as the curtains, have been adopted. Others, like changing the structure of the service to spend some time providing information about positions and institutions in a "job fair" setting before scheduling the individual interviews, represent fundamental changes in how the system has worked and may or may not be adopted.

As positions become more easily accessible electronically, NCA's Placement Service is in danger of becoming obsolete. It is possible that the service should be allowed to die; after all, the market place seems to be moving around it at a fair clip. Nevertheless, I believe that the Placement Service could continue as a valuable resource, assuming that it goes electronic.

Here's my reasoning: the two main values of the service currently are (1) having a set of authenticated credentials housed in one place and available to be sent on demand, and (2) having a place where applicants and employers can discover each other in ways that are not apparent in written material. In a way, this service is more valuable to employers than it is to applicants, because employers can be assured that material they receive was submitted for the purpose of several job searches.

So, NCA could create an electronic form that would allow Placement Service members to respond to standard questions and to have a standardized résumé created from the responses. Letters of recommendation could be submitted on letterhead and be scanned into PDF files that could not be altered. The résumés could be searchable and employers could find potential candidates for their positions by entering keywords. In addition, position announcements could be stored on the Placement Service site, including links to departmental and university web pages. Position announcements would be searchable by candidates so that they could determine where they would like to apply. Recommendations could be made available electronically at the request of the applicant. Placement Service résumés could also be accessible to automated candidate-search software so that those individuals could potentially hear about non-academic opportunities as
well.

It seems to me that "going electronic" would continue to keep the NCA Placement Service a valuable resource for its members. Not doing so would probably doom the Placement Service as we know it.

Maybe thirty years from now, senior faculty in the communication discipline will be able to say, "When I was a young Ph.D., NCA changed the way it had been running its Placement Service. They made it electronic, and all of a sudden it was a lot easier to match up applicants and eventual employers. I ended up getting a great job, and I've been here ever since."