I remind readers that the below describes the process for an institution in general and does not specifically refer to the process at George Mason University.
As short-listed candidates are brought in for their job talks, a lot more goes on than just the job talk itself. Typically visits are booked for an entire day and involve individual meetings with departmental faculty members, the search committee as a whole, students and postdocs, the department chairman (or institute director) and now, more commonly, a mock class lecture.
Crucially, the search committee takes feedback from all interested parties into account (in addition to their own discussions). On occasion, intense negative input from faculty members and students not serving on the search committee can knock the leading scientific candidate out of contention.
Thus, the successful short-listed job candidate will need to successfully negotiate all of the above meetings in addition to having a knock-em dead job seminar in order to stay competitive for a position.
Ultimately however, the search committee (for scientific tenure-line jobs) is going to be looking at scientific substance (as measured by publications in high impact journals and grants) as the key criteria (even for junior positions such as assistant professor). A second important factor will be the potential for the candidate to successfully collaborate or at least interact with other members of the faculty. Finally, teaching is given consideration.
Following all of the visits of the short-listed candidates, the search committee convenes and ranks the applicants (typically using some of the above described criteria). Academic politics plays an important role at this crucial juncture since individual members of the search committee may represent a larger agenda or constituency at the discussion. Strange arguments may come into play (e.g.–she is too good for us–we have no chance to attract her to our department, hence lets offer the job to our second ranked applicant since he will definitely accept our offer…or alternatively: let’s offer the job to X because his startup package will be considerably less).
Which brings us to the topic of the offer itself. That will be covered in the next blog posting.
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 