How I Prepared for a Job Interview
Grad students and other professionals often ask me “how did you prepare for a job interview?” In this write up, I will detail how I prepared for the job interview for the Associate Dean position that I held at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
In mid August 2014, I was approached by an executive firm asking if I would be interested in the position of Associate Dean of the College of Computing and Informatics at UNCC. They said that the College of Computing and Informatics was looking for someone that could connect the diversity initiatives in the college with the national conversation about broadening participation in computing. Clearly, I was the person for the job.
The call came at a time when my wife was teaching Spanish in a middle school, my daughter was in her first year of college, my son was in 7th grade, and I had just stepped down from Assistant Chair of the CS Department at Virginia Tech. I was already several years removed from Tenure and was starting to look like Full Professor was evaporating in my current job. This was an important goal for me in my career and it was time to get serious about it and stop doing administrative jobs — having already served as Associate Dean of the Graduate School and Assistant Chair of the CS Department. The department had just said “more research, more grants, more professional service in HCI”. Clearly I was looking at 2–3 more years of work to make the promotion.
Little did I know that there was another way to achieve Full Professor: get a new job that includes promotion as part of the hiring. When I got the call, I must admit that the promotion to Full Professor was definitely a perk. I quickly went into research mode. Contacted people I knew that had been at UNCC. Spoke with 3 professors, all gave me feedback about the institution. All three of them are people I respect, some further ahead than me professionally, others younger and at earlier points in their careers. From an academic perspective, I had enough information to think “let’s try this.” I also must admit that I looked at the salaries available on the web. For most state institutions, salaries are public record and often available online. So, I checked the salary of Department Chairs, and Associate Deans in the college. Financially speaking, this job change would be a really good option for my family.
From a family perspective, Charlotte was a really interesting option. We traveled to the Queen City a lot, as it was only 2.5 hours away from Blacksburg. It was the largest city near us, so we would come to Concord Mills to buy school clothing for the kids, we would come to Carrowinds for short summer vacation, and we would regularly fly from Charlotte Douglas International airport to Puerto Rico. In addition, we had come to a few concerts in Charlotte, including seeing Fall Out Boy and Paramore the summer of 2014, just weeks before I got the call from the executive firm. I then checked cost of living and turns out that houses are cheaper in Charlotte than in Blacksburg. Time to take this seriously.
So, I applied for the position and they called me back for the first round of interviews. The process starts with what is called the “Airport Interview.” The first round of interviews is “secret” often taking place at a hotel near the airport, hence the name. You don’t visit campus to keep your candidacy a secret. Even people on the new campus don’t know that you are interviewing, just the search committee and possibly a couple of administrators.
I didn’t mind if VT found out, I have never been one to do things in the shadows. As a matter of fact, two years before this happened, I had interviewed at another university and gotten the job offer. My department matched the salary and I decided to stay at VT.
I contacted one of my professional colleagues at CCI and told her I was interviewing for the job. I asked to meet with her and she gave me a tour of campus the day before my “airport interview.” We walked around the building (Woodward), walked around campus, talked about workload, students, research, family (she was pregnant at the time), family health insurance, etc. She gave me a perspective about the job that I didn’t have and that made me feel more comfortable about becoming a Niner.
Next morning I had my “airport interview.” I knew one person in the search committee, the rest were all new acquaintances. It went well enough, I thought. I remember it being early in the morning. When I was done, I simply put things in my car and drove back to Blacksburg. I was home by mid afternoon.
A few weeks later, I got a call that they wanted to invite me for an on campus interview in late October/early November. We worked out the dates, schedule of visit, etc.
Three things needed to happen at this point. One is you prepare for the interview; two, the situation is getting serious, so you possibly want to let your department chair know. And three, you have a long conversation with your family, this is now a real possibility. You don’t get to this point in the interview without being really serious about moving.
Preparing for the interview. At this point is when you have to prepare a presentation, provide your view of the future of the college, etc. I know, you are thinking “I don’t know your college, how can I say what your future would be?” But you have to provide a vision. So, my task was to read every published document for the college I could get my hands on. I even called the head of the search and asked if they had a strategic planning document that might not be on the web. They did.
I proceeded to do what any good HCI person would do. I did an Affinity Diagram (also know as KJ diagram) of all the material I found on the website, the promotional flyers I had been handed in the airport interview, the strategic document and other few pieces of info I knew about them.
I wrote on post-its short notes about things I found in their materials. Names of degrees, names of people, awards, courses, programs, etc. As I wrote them, I would paste them up on the wall — I was doing this in the basement of our house that had these large chalkboards. I would reorganize the notes after I finished reading each document. I left them up for about a week or so as I prepared for the interview.
The picture below shows the outcome once I had sorted out the notes by areas. The areas are not that surprising, as any college would have the typical undergraduate, graduate, research, certificates, service activities, etc.
The value of this activity was to help me sort out the information captured and pair that information with my experience. For example, UNCC had a strong HCI group, my background was HCI so I found ways I could connect my background with their strengths.
Also, I knew they were interested in developing an undergraduate research program, and I had directed multiple undergraduate research programs, so I made a note to highlight things I can contribute to their mission.
Diversity was a big focus for the college. One of the few initial BPC Alliances from NSF was housed there (STARS). I had been co-pi of one of the other Alliances (CRA-W/CDC), so we clearly had things in common. I made a point of highlighting this. Imagine, two PIs of BPC alliances (at the time there were only 8 Alliances in the nation) at the same institution. Anybody who cared about diversity would drool over this. Not to mention that at the time, there were less than 30 (if I remember correctly) Latinos Full Professors in the US/Canada (according to the Taulbee Survey). So, if UNCC was serious about diversity, they were getting a bargain.
Finally, I searched friends-of-friends. I looked for collaborators of mine that had colleagues there. You have to be ready when someone says “Hey, I know Joe” and you need to be able to say “Oh, Joe is doing great, he says hello and looks forward to seeing you in the spring at the next conference.” It shows you have done your homework. A good way to do this is through citation/author graphs. Microsoft used to have an academic alliance tool that you could put two names into their site and it would show connections through co-authors. I did this for a few key people and identified people I could connect with on a more personal way, and was also ready to answer questions about friends of friends. It also gave some some trivia details. For example, CCI@UNCC and CS@VT both had a lot of people from Ga Tech. I could ask those questions like “I see you graduated from Ga Tech, did you know x when you were there?”
With that as a background, I was ready to present myself in a very positive light, showing how deeply connected to the job I already was, and give the search committee the confidence that I was a good fit for the position and their college.
Needless to say, I got the job, moved to Charlotte and as they say the rest is history. Stay tune and in about 5 years, I will tell you the story of why I quit that position.
