Didn't get job of a lifetime - how to feel better about my future?

April 22, 2024 11:52 PM

I'm a university professor, currently at a very mediocre school that doesn't even feature into the top 300 world rankings. I had an interview last week for a top school (think Harvard) in one of the world's only dedicated research centres in my field. I didn't get it, I think I self-sabotaged and now I feel that I might never get over it.

I've been a very longtime AskMeFi lurker and at various points have thought about asking my big questions here but this is the first time I've done it. As above, last week I interviewed for an amazing and very rare job opportunity and didn't get it. I think I self-sabotaged in the interview and am now kicking myself as feel I may never get a similar opportunity again. I'm struggling to get past this and would love any advice.

There is a LOT of context here (But the main question is above so no need to read this wall of text if you don't have time for the details)

I was a rising star earlier in my career and left a previous 'dream job' to be in the same institution as my spouse. That didn't work out - spouse was a workaholic, I was neglected and unhappy, and we separated last year after 20 years together. The separation is probably for the best but it's been traumatic and I am still quite fragile.

After we separated I moved into a rental that I really love. It has lots of not-easily-replicated advantages, including that it is very easy to manage my multiple dogs on my own (off-lead dog walking from the doorstep). While I'm happy in my living environment, my job is a disaster. My institution is in financial freefall, there is a continuous redundancy threat, morale is terrible and the long-term future is precarious. I definitely need to get another job in the next couple of years - it doesn't need to be right now, but without a very significant change in conditions I can't see a long-term future here. I also don't have any friends or family or community in this area. I moved shortly before the pandemic and have never really built a network here so I am very isolated socially. I'm trying to do this now but it's slow.

The job opportunity that came up is very rare and fits precisely with my research interests and expertise. I would have had a lot to offer in the position (objectively). I did a strong written application, had great referees, worked v hard on the job talk and prepared well for the interview. And then when I went into the interview, I blew it. I was deprecating about my research and sounded as though I didn't take it seriously (huge mistake); I talked about my current institution as though I didn't want to leave / didn't have the drive to start somewhere else; when they asked about my vision for the post I said I didn't have one (even though I had thought about that answer for weeks in precisely that language - the first line of my interview notes said "I need to sell them on my vision"!!).

Unsurprisingly, I didn't get it. With reflection I think my sabotaging came from low self-belief after a shitty marriage and separation that made me doubt whether I was really deserving of this opportunity and ambivalence about whether I have the energy to take up a high-stress, high-scrutiny job right now (which I quite possibly don't, but being in a failing institution and having no long-term job security is also extremely stressful).

I can't stop ruminating over it, that this was the opportunity of a lifetime and I threw it away. I'm trying to take positive action but it's been a year of trying to look on the bright side as my life has imploded and I feel like this is the tipping point where my life diverges from the rising star of my early career to washed-up and miserable.

Can anyone offer advice/ hope / positive anecdotes of 'you never know what's round the corner'?

(Sorry this was so long)

posted by surely sorley to Work & Money (25 answers total)

If you were able to get an interview at a place that fancy, you have a decent chance of getting other interviews in the future.

The match may not be as perfect, but you are unhappy where you are so even something imperfect is likely to be much better than where you are.

If you are still in touch with any of your mentors, talk with them and make sure they know you are on the market in general, not just for this perfect fit job. Talk with colleagues, pay attention to job postings in your field, and apply broadly.

Separately, talk to someone about how you feel. It’s ok to ask for help, especially after a perceived loss (I say perceived because no matter how perfect a job seems from the outside, it may not have been the right match for you anyhow).

It’s also a good idea to do some practice interviews, so the next time you get a chance you are more relaxed.
posted by nat at 12:24 AM on April 23 [23 favorites]

" And then when I went into the interview, I blew it. I was deprecating about my research and sounded as though I didn't take it seriously (huge mistake); I talked about my current institution as though I didn't want to leave / didn't have the drive to start somewhere else; when they asked about my vision for the post I said I didn't have one (even though I had thought about that answer for weeks in precisely that language - the first line of my interview notes said "I need to sell them on my vision"!!). "Unsurprisingly, I didn't get it." " this was the opportunity of a lifetime and I threw it away."

This is 90% speculation. The most common reason for not getting a job is not that you "blew it" but that they liked someone else more (for whatever reason). You might have done everything "right" and still not gotten the job (though the stuff about no vision was a mistake). It also might just be that your academic record is not that strong after many years in an unfulfilling job. So, while it sucks to not get it, you have no particular reason to think that the job was yours for the taking. Committees always have preferences that can be any number of things. Getting a fly-out at a Harvard level place at this stage in your career is amazing, it means you are still in the game despite being at a lower ranked Uni. Apply for conferences, etc., and keep trying (but I know that jobs are much fewer at this stage).

Best of luck.
posted by melamakarona at 12:35 AM on April 23 [35 favorites]

You said the job was rare and at a prestigious university, meaning it was probably very competitive. They can only choose one person and at the end of the day it comes down to who was having a good interview day and the personal preferences of the people interviewing. Even if it had gone perfectly, there's no guarantee you would have gotten it.

It sounds like you've positioned yourself really well for the career move that you want. You sound talented, experienced, smart and passionate. And you're not limited to one type of job- is there a related type of job listing that would challenge you but not stress you out? It could be at a university, or outside of academia if you want to try something new. There are so many jobs out there that you could be happy in, and even more remote work options. And the right workplace will feel lucky to have you.
posted by fern at 12:39 AM on April 23 [6 favorites]

Every few years, I get dragged back to an employer who hopes I'm employable now. Last time I was rejected, they suggested I could write a book.
posted by parmanparman at 12:52 AM on April 23 [1 favorite]

It sounds like this just happened. No wonder you feel bummed. Instead of turning to it into blaming yourself, just admit that that you wanted something that sounded really great and you didn't get it and just it absolutely a bummer. Maybe this weekend you can throw yourself a pity party. For breakups, the recommendation is ice cream and weepy movies. I don't know what would work for you, but give yourself this weekend to just be bummed about it.

Then, on Monday, recognize that your only choice is to move forward. Of course, you could get stuck in pity and self-blame but the fact that you asked this question tell me that once you get your balance back, you will be able to figure out how to move forward. As you said in your question, you truly don't know what is around the corner. What if it is wonderful? Will you be ready for it? What life surprised you and doesn't match the expectations of younger you? Can you still focus on getting more of what you like and value most into your life so that it feels good to you.
posted by metahawk at 12:53 AM on April 23 [7 favorites]

I'm an ex-academic (PhD in sociology followed by some research fellowships followed by pivot into project management) so I totally get the feeling of complete devastation at not getting the job. I don't need to tell you that academia is completely broken, every now and then there is a diamond glimmering amongst the rubble and it must be devastating to come so close to the job and not get it. I don't have any advice, I left academia before I even properly started, but even 15 years down the line I get occasional pangs of "what if" and it feels like a very special kind of longing. And whilst others on this thread suggested you may get something else, you probably are realistic enough to know it's very unlikely going to be something else in academia that is the very special kind of unicorn you held for the briefest moments of time.

So no advice whatsoever, just messaging to say that I can hear the grief in your message and I'm sorry you didn't get the job. Take care of yourself whilst you grieve.
posted by coffee_monster at 1:36 AM on April 23 [12 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks so much to everyone that has responded so far (please keep responding!). It's helped to hear some external perspectives and I appreciate the sympathy and kindness in many of your answers.

Several of you have said that there's no guarantee I'd have got it even if everything went perfectly. That's true of course, and I can accept the elements that are outside my control. I'm struggling with the feeling that I messed up elements that WERE within my control and that just maybe if I had presented myself more effectively the outcome would have been different.

But you're all right of course - can't be changed now, so all that remains is to move forward and hope there are other opportunities ahead that can be as fulfilling. And to try to be kind to myself in the meantime.
posted by surely sorley at 1:59 AM on April 23 [3 favorites]

You and I both know that anyone who has any tenure track job won the lottery, and that that's all it is--a lottery. There are so few jobs and so many of us and search committees are fallible and often don't even have the final say in actually choosing the candidate and and and.

Once you've shaken that off, I'd encourage you to do some soul searching about what kind of job would actually make you happy. You talk about institution "rank" in your question but you also talk about not being sure you want that kind of high stress life. Rather than going off of "rank", think about the parts of your job you actually enjoy (teaching undergrads/grad students, mentoring undergrads/grad students, writing papers/grants, dept service, institutional service, national/international service, etc. just lay it all out) and the parts you don't. Then think seriously about different types of institutions and the actual day to day work you would do at them. Make sure that the next jobs you apply for really are the jobs you want and not just the jobs you think you are supposed to want.
posted by hydropsyche at 3:42 AM on April 23 [13 favorites]

Best answer: I'm sorry that you're going through this. It is hard, and everything about academic life compounds to make you feel like you're directly responsible for the outcome, and that makes it harder than it needs to be.

It's painful not to get the job, and more painful when you've imagined yourself getting it – the application process for these things takes a lot out of us, and one of the things it asks is for us to project ourselves into the role, and to describe what we'll bring when we're in post, to drum up and perform our excitement and enthusiasm for it. This makes rejection all the more crushing.

My experience of being on hiring committees, being around people who are on hiring committees, talking to people in other universities who are hiring etc. is that the decision has almost nothing at all to do with the interview process or any factors that the candidate could have controlled. Some academics on appointments panels I've met are self-deceived into believing that they have been part of meritocracy-in-action type decision-making, selecting the best overall quality candidate. But they are deluded, they always admit (SAY IT BART, SAY THE LINE) that in the end it came down to some specific subset of criteria that the panel negotiated over and had eventually decided were what was really the most important and decisive thing at stake. If anything, the interview process helped reveal to them what real desires they had for the post, which hadn't been fully clearly in focus enough earlier. The politicking amongst panel members, by which they eventually reach some sort of consensus, rarely has anything to do with any individual candidate's performance or academic merits. There is always a lot more going on, on this side of the process, which no amount of preparation / control / self-belief / positive attitude from the candidates will change.

You are good at what you do, you are known for it, you are respected for it. There will be other jobs, and there are opportunities that you can continue to make for yourself without having to wait for the next job to come along. The network of people who know about who you are and what you do just got a little bigger, the networks of influence and connection surrounding you (which genuinely make a lot of difference to everything in academia) now have more nodes in them. I'm sure you have already thought to follow-up with thank you emails to people on the committee, but if you haven't, take that step and send something sincere and meaningful (because for real being on academic search committees is gruelling, often thankless work), and use the opportunity of thanking people to let some of the pain go. You're not saying goodbye to these committee members forever, far from it, you're acknowledging them as humans who you have spent time with, and that's a step to building an ongoing relationship. And seriously, that's the stuff that matters.
posted by Joeruckus at 3:48 AM on April 23 [19 favorites]

Best answer: As a fellow tenured academic who has wanted to change where I am for various reasons over the years without the opportunity to do so, I empathize a lot. Many of us are feeling trapped in place and it's much harder to get a new job now than we could have known 20 years ago. That said, I really think that:
1. Everyone here is right that the candidate they selected probably was chosen for reasons having nothing to do with your interview mistakes. You know what job searches are like. Even if you'd said everything perfectly, it is very, very likely that whomever was selected was the front-runner from well before the job talk because people with power in the dept simply wanted that person for whatever reasons.
2. OMG you have letters and a job talk ready to go now. I mean - that truly is huge. The jobs most people get aren't perfect matches on paper. I got the job I have 20 years ago that was a bit of an odd match on paper, but I didn't get one that on paper looked totally tailored to my research. It was just the way it goes. Apply to jobs that don't seem perfect bc -- you have letters and a job talk ready to go!
3. I believe you that perhaps you self-sabotaged in your interview, even though it probably isn't the reason they chose someone else. Given everything, this is exactly like saying "I had a fever that day and was kind of out of it." It's a human thing, it happened, it calls for self-empathy. Unlike a fever though, you can use this experience to prepare a more scripted self performance for next time.
Til then, enjoy your amazing dog-friendly walking area and know that academics all over the world are feeling they can't move easily, that if you looked at it from a distance you'd agree that your saying this or that in an interview doesn't change that, and go for the next imperfectly matched opportunity. Everyone is right, if you got a job talk at Amazing Place you are a good candidate and you'll get more chances down the line. This was the perfect practice run.
posted by ojocaliente at 3:55 AM on April 23 [16 favorites]

I'm struggling with the feeling that I messed up elements that WERE within my control and that just maybe if I had presented myself more effectively the outcome would have been different.

I have this feeling a lot about things I did in the past and I have to keep reminding myself that there were reasons that I did things the way I did them; that even if I could go back in time with the knowledge I have now, those reasons and factors would still exist and I would still either have to find some way to work through them, or find some way to work around them, or accept that the way I did things was the best that I could do given those circumstances and not blame myself given that fact.

Since for you this feeling is not about things that happened a long time ago but about something very recent, you basically are like the time traveler who now knows - as opposed to the you of a week ago - that this is how you might act in that kind of situation, and now has to figure out a way through or around the factors that made you act that way in order to find a different path for the future. You have more information, and maybe more motivation, than you did last week; maybe you can also figure out more about the factors that were blocking you. Either way, you're in a stronger position now than you were before.

It might also help to remember that even in the very worst case where you don't ever get a better position, that doesn't need to mean "washed up and miserable". You're can still do important work, and you can also have enormous happiness that isn't tied to your work or professional status.
posted by trig at 4:07 AM on April 23 [4 favorites]

In the book Failosophy Elizabeth Day introduces two sorts of failure. There are apparently two Dutch words which mean "I booted my driving test by mounting the pavement while reversing round a corner" = fale and "My father was killed when a block of frozen urine crashed through his Heathrow-adjacent greenhouse" = pech. You can imagine yourself learning from the former; from the latter, not so much. I suggest that not getting tenure at Harvard is more pech, but has elements of fale because the interview opportunity allows you to prepare to ace an interview at Middletown SU.

I never got tenure nowhere but I did labour for 40 years in academic science. Including at one time in one of the hottest hotshot labs in this [small] country. When the money ran out after the 2008 crash, I snatched at a job [any job] teaching in a Technical Institute, for less money and much less kudos. The external pressure to perform was cranked down some notches. I gave it socks and that paid off. My students were much more diverse than in Hot U. I learned a lot and had to adjust my judgments about "value" and "quality" and it got to be the best fun.
posted by BobTheScientist at 4:18 AM on April 23 [11 favorites]

If you were able to get an interview at a place that fancy, you have a decent chance of getting other interviews in the future.

[...]

You said the job was rare and at a prestigious university, meaning it was probably very competitive.

Very much agree with both of these sentiments. I have some good friends who succeeded at a broadly similar institutional transition. It was not immediate, and along the way they applied to many jobs, across a spectrum of prestige. It sounds like you applied selectively this round. But if you can make the shortlist at a top place, you can likely make the shortlist at many places, and probably get a job that is better than your current one, even if it isn't that perfect place. And then, if you so choose, you may be able to keep going. Of course, this could entail being on the academic job market in a concerted way over a relatively long range of time, which is definitely not what everyone wants to do. But definitely believe it is possible for you to move up based on what you've said here.
posted by advil at 6:08 AM on April 23 [3 favorites]

Faculty applications are a numbers game. I trust that you are applying to every job in your field that you would accept if offered rather than staying at your current institution? If not, this is what you need to start doing if you are serious about jumping ship. The fact that you got an interview at a top school in one of the world's only dedicated research centres in your field means that you are actually, objectively, hot stuff. Even if you'd aced the interview, there's still a good chance that you wouldn't have gotten the job because typically the short-list for jobs like that is of 3 to 6 candidates.

That being said, your evaluation of your interview performance is probably accurate. BUT. The way to think about this is that this interview was your practice run for the next ones (ones plural, because again, the odds of getting hired at the very next place you interview are slim). Now that you've been through this once, how would you talk about your research? What is your vision for a post at a more research-intensive university? Why do you want to leave your current institution, and how is a position at the institution you're applying to a better fit to your career objectives?
posted by heatherlogan at 6:15 AM on April 23 [4 favorites]

This isn't specific to academia, so YMMV, but... I recently did a round of job hunting, and came to the conclusion that the concept of a lone perfect job is somewhat illusory.

The first job that I applied for, I was CERTAIN this was 'my' job - it was so perfect, working in my area of expertise but a larger organisation, with more responsibility. I'd worked on partnership projects with the new org, I knew I would at least get an interview and figured I'd likely be in with a decent chance of the job. Couldn't believe I'd been so lucky that this job came up right when I was hunting. I didn't even get an interview.

I felt very despondent, but had nothing to do but keep looking. Then another 'perfect' job came up, except the pay was less than I could afford to live on, so I had to pass that up. Finally, a third one came up, I got it, and I'm really enjoying it. I'm now really relieved that I didn't get the first one, which would have been more stressful, more commuting, and the organisation had its funding slashed shortly after I'd been through that round of applications.

I know it might be different in academia where fields of expertise can be so specific. But I also think there's something about the job application process that makes our brains decide that this job is so perfect for us that it's the only job that'll ever feel that perfect, and we'll never get another one so good. The way you have to spend days or weeks hyperfocussed on the job and organisation, moulding your own experience to their desires, learning everything you possibly can about how great you'd be at the job. Once I'd been forced to move on from the first one, and kept looking for a few weeks more, it turned out there were lots of different values for 'my perfect job'. And after all, your perfect job is ultimately the one where they want to employ you, for whatever reason.

One thing that did help in the meantime was talking with a friend who was up for being a cheerleader and bigging me up to myself. They also had a lot of experience in hiring and could tell me with some authority that I had skillset they would have loved to employ. They could put in some broader context, reassure me that I wasn't in fact unemployable even if I felt downcast, and helped me recognise my strengths and how to position myself for future jobs. So find a cheerleader if you can, whether on a personal or professional level.
posted by penguin pie at 6:37 AM on April 23 [5 favorites]

Best answer: Not much advice here, but a lot of sympathy. I ended up leaving a whole academic field in the wake of a very long-term relationship breaking up. That combination is so hard. It's like you have two relationships that are not going well at the same time. (To me, an academic job or field of interest is more like a relationship than just a job.) It's hard to know which to focus on, and each one can make it hard to deal effectively with the other.

I don't know, I'm tempted to list all the things my friends have done in this kind of situation that were still in academia or academia-adjacent, but your field is probably different from mine and you probably already know what the possibilities are in yours. I have a feeling people are aware you are under-placed in your current institution and your next job will probably come from someone reaching out to offer you something you didn't know about. But for that to happen, you probably need to keep interviewing.

When shit started hitting the fan for me, I did some travel and kept notes of things to possibly do in the future. Some of those ideas were just silly, and some I have actually done.
Good luck with all this!
posted by BibiRose at 7:34 AM on April 23 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Oh, god. Before I left academia I was flown out for an interview for a split faculty/research center job I thought I'd really like to have, and my arrival coincided with the onset of an atrocious migraine. I wasn't physically able to go to the dinner with faculty that night, and while I was able to deliver my job talk the next day, I did so immediately after vomiting in a trash can and was unable to focus on anything anyone else was saying afterwards.

I didn't get the job, and the 'if only' speculation of it all was an extra layer of difficulty. Of course it's impossible to know, but it's true that sometimes you don't perform to the level you know you're capable of, and it's reasonable to have regrets about that. Of course you would.

There are so many unknowns, though. You're imagining you took yourself out of the running for what would've been a dream job. It is equally possible that you saved yourself from a different kind of nightmare. During the wait to hear about my disastrous interview I received a series of really creepy anonymous postcards from the city I'd interviewed in, and while I couldn't see it at the time I have other reasons to believe that it would have been a difficult working environment despite the surface-level prestige. Sometimes life protects you in ways that look like the opposite. You just never know.

And, friend. A year out from the end of a 20-year marriage. Please hold yourself gently. I think you're absolutely right to be connecting the dots between your general well-earned feelings of fragility and the intensity of your disappointment and self-recrimination here. I can't know exactly what the connections are, but if it were me I think there would be elements of feeling like the job was my one big chance to fix the workplace and community problems, and maybe to kind of undo or rewrite some of the losses that came from sacrificing for the marriage. In any case it makes lots of sense to me that you'd be having big feelings here, and I hope you're just able to have them.

You had a lot to offer here and you'll have a lot to offer the next place that feels like a good possibility. With the conditions of your current job I suppose it's best to keep an eye out, but also, to the extent that you can, allow yourself whatever time you need to heal and get your feet back under you. Those invisible processes are easy to try to brush aside, but they're real and what they need from you is real, and if you can bring care to yourself within this massive life change you're going through you will get to a point where you are solid and ready for the next thing. All the best to you then and in the meantime.
posted by wormtales at 8:15 AM on April 23 [11 favorites]

Hi there. Ph.D dropout (long ago) and accidental academic (first librarian, now full-time non-tenure-track instructor) whose 20-year marriage ended five years ago.

Please try to find a way to forgive yourself. If I had to guess why you self-sabotaged (I'm not attaching a value judgment to this; it's just a thing that happened) in that interview, it's that you're dealing with unresolved feelings about your former marriage. I get it; I was feeling plenty of guilt and self-blame at the time, and now and then I still do.

But in practical terms, you've given yourself another thing to beat yourself up over now. You don't deserve to hurt yourself like this, it's obviously not moving you toward what you want and need, and I think you may need more help than the green can offer to find your way to forgiving yourself.

Back in the day, I needed (and fortunately got) a short course of therapy and a lot of journaling to get me past the failed Ph.D attempt. Various forms of writing (not just journaling; some of it was journal-adjacent) got me past my librarian career blowing up. Support from kind friends got me through the divorce.

There are any number of ways to process what's happened and find peace for yourself. Please try one, and move to another if the first doesn't do the job for you. I wish you the best.
posted by humbug at 8:58 AM on April 23 [2 favorites]

Best answer: One thing that helps me in these situations (feeling like I didn't do my best) is to count the people in my shoes. Like you'd count sheep at night, spend ten minutes imagining all the different people in the world who, right now, are thinking similar things and wishing they'd done better. They're all shapes and sizes. Imagine what they're wearing, what they look like. Some of them have a clear path ahead (retake the exam...start prepping for next year's competition...ditch the project and start a new one). Some have made mistakes that resulted in irreparable damage (humans or animals were hurt...kids were traumatized...a spouse left). And some, like you, made mistakes that don't have a clear result. They don't know what this fork in the road actually means, and it's really hard to be in that situation.

Spend some time dreaming. No matter how small your field, this is absolutely not the only dream job out there for you. You will find a job. You'll meet people at that job, and you'll learn things, and eventually, because humans are resilient and like happy endings, you'll look back and feel grateful that you didn't get this job.

Some food for thought: A year after experiencing loss like you have, many people are prone to idealizing. They also might be less able to handle change and more irritable/sensitive/vulnerable than usual. So, maybe it's not even quite the right time for a new job? Any chance you built this one up in your mind because you're yearning for an adventure or an escape from difficult feelings? Is it possible that, upon starting with this new job, you would have found out you're overwhelmed and burning out? Maybe it's okay to give yourself some more time, since you aren't in any immediate danger of losing your current job? Of course, keep an eye out for a better position. But maybe also use the remaining time with a low-stakes job to let yourself do some more healing.
posted by toucan at 9:14 AM on April 23 [8 favorites]

Academic interviews are their own thing, and everyone is right that a lot of factors go into the final say and only so many of them are under your control. There only needs to be one person in the world who is judged to be a better fit for a position, regardless of how good you are at doing what you want to do. It sucks. The good news is that, as has been said above, it's a game of both numbers and of practice and revision. You now have all your basic materials ready — and you know they were good enough to get you in the door at a great place. You know the types of questions you need to practice answering and you have a sense of the flow of the interview and the concerns that people might have from outside that you need to get ahead of. That's great, the next round of applications will be SO MUCH easier! I totally feel you about these perfect departments, but at the end of the day a lot of places are great and might draw new aspects out of your interests than you had realized before.

As someone with a good research record but who also struggles with self doubt, one of the things that helps me is to do enough practice to get the self-doubt exposed and confronted early. Feel it all, like a week or so before the big days, and then force myself to just assume I can do it. I don't need to solve every doubt, but it helps me recognize what my doubts are and to have a sense of the first couple of steps I would take. It's so important for me that the first time I feel these things isn't on the interview, but in a couple of days of despair a week or two before the interview itself.
posted by Schismatic at 10:28 AM on April 23 [3 favorites]

I'm here to emphasize a lot of what has been said before:
1) it's not you it's them
2) if you got an interview at what is viewed as a prestigious university, that suggests you have a pretty competitive vita
3) If you want to move, apply for as many jobs that you find that fit your criteria.
4) see 3.

best of luck. as others have said, academia isn't what it used to be (and are you sure that you want to go to this or some other similarly prestigious university where your workload will maybe double or more?).
posted by bluesky43 at 12:41 PM on April 23 [1 favorite]

I’ve been in all sides of academic hiring — as a candidate, search committee member, search committee chair, formal decider. I have participated in hiring staff, faculty, and upper administrators. I’m sure I have not seen it all, but I’ve seen a lot. I’ve had interviews where I was gutted that I was not selected and a few where I would have left halfway through, if I could. Some where I realized I was a bad fit; some where I realized a candidate would be a bad fit. A number where I would have hired each finalist if I had the resources. A few failed searches.

Getting an in-person interview is great! It means you were selected over dozens, maybe hundreds of candidates. Even if you think you know you did something wrong, that probably wasn’t the reason. Another candidate might have been slightly stronger in some area; there may have been an internal candidate with an advantage; it could be a lot of things, and you will never know. Not being able to answer the vision question is a problem and something to work on, but you don’t know how close you actually came.

I once said something in an interview that suggested I didn’t want to do part of the job; as the words were coming out of my mouth, I looked over to the person I would have been doing that for and said “and by that, I mean I get hung up on this, but I like and am good at [other aspects of that part of the position]. The person, a fierce old woman narrowed her eyes at me and said “good save.” As it turns out, they would have offered me the position, but it got cut in a massive budget debacle. Later, I figured out that I probably would not have been happy there, but that’s a different story.
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:58 PM on April 23 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thank you so much to everyone who has taken the time to respond. Every answer helped, and even knowing that so many people were willing to take the time to help make me feel better helped. Collectively you have shifted my projected recovery time for this from "never" to "maybe soon". No mean feat. Thanks MetaFilter!

There was so much wisdom on the miseries and mysteries of academic job-searching that every answer was a best answer but I highlighted those that most helped me see something that I'd been missing. Thanks joeruckus for pointing out that I was getting trapped in the cognitive dissonance of academic meritocracy. My failure to perform sufficient enthusiasm was one of the things I'd been berating myself for but I can see that was also self-preservation. Thanks ojocaliente and everyone else who pointed out the both/and framing (yes, I probably did sabotage myself a bit, and that probably didn't have anything effect on the final decision).

Also huge thanks to the later posters that picked up on my personal situation. It's true. I do need to take more time and space to heal and from that perspective maybe I'm actually in the right place for now if not for ever. Wormtales, your phrase that "sometimes life protects you in ways that look like the opposite" really hit home for some reason. I wasn't being naive about the fact that every dream job has its downsides but somehow that phrase made me realise that if it really hadn't worked out, it might actually have broken me. (Right now, but not once I'm stronger again).

The 'what ifs' will still sting for a while but I hear & appreciate all the comments about viewing this interview not as a catastrophe but as a positive sign that I'm still attractive at that recruitment level and as a trial run to learn from when another opportunity comes along. Thanks so much everyone.
posted by surely sorley at 1:09 PM on April 23 [10 favorites]

I am an academic. You have no idea why you didn't get the job; maybe half the search committee wanted you, half wanted someone else, and they hired the third person no one really wanted to keep peace in the department.

Even if you made a few blunders during the interview, as I am sure you know applicants are evaluated holistically. It sounds like you did a lot more right than wrong.

Where I definitely see your low self-belief manifesting is in your narrative that you didn't get the job because you self-sabotaged.

I agree with what someone posted above. If you got this interview, and you got to the campus visit stage, you likely will get other interviews at places better than your current job. I don't know how scarce the jobs are in your field, of course, but it definitely sounds like you are competitive, and -- like you said -- you never know what's around the corner.
posted by virve at 1:33 PM on April 23 [1 favorite]

I once failed to get what I thought at the time was my dream job. I was short listed - they called me in before other people and had someone much more senior interview me - and somehow the moment the interview began I realised they had cooled on me. I didn't even get a no thank you, or a we'll call you you and let you know. They went through the interview process by rote and pushed me out the door.

Rather later I found out more about the situation. The reason I got pushed out was that I would be interacting with customers and I had the wrong accent. They wanted accent neutral, and my accent slanted British. I was ruled out the moment I said, "I'm pleased to meet you."

The other thing I found out was that the position I would have gotten would have resulted me working under a department head who was so very toxic that people who worked under them think of that time as a nightmare interlude in their life. If I had gotten the job it would have been a disaster for me - I had small kids, and I wouldn't have been able to afford to be unemployed, nor have had time to look for any other work with my second shift doing childcare. I'd have been trapped in a situation that was miserable, just because of one or two other employees.

So there is that. You may indeed have longed to work for that organization and the salary and benefits and the work you were to do may have all been ideal - and yet your happiness, your quality of life and your mental health might have tanked if you got that job. You never know. Jobs are like marriages. The personalities make the biggest difference. It looks like you had a chance at the most fantastic career opportunity you could imagine - but you never know. And like me one day you might find out you dodged a bullet.
posted by Jane the Brown at 3:08 PM on April 23 [1 favorite]