The E-word

I am currently applying for jobs as a teacher.  I am I hold Secondary English/Language Arts licensure (at least provisionally) in three states and am applying to every position I can find in at least a substantial portion of each.  I started searching in early February, shortly after finishing student teaching and graduating in January.

I have submitted 82 applications to date.  I have only missed 8 application deadlines that I know of, half of which were in the last week; between the increased number of positions, and my need to take time away from applications for interviews and (starting next week) working full-time at my summer job, it's now more or less unfeasible to apply to every application that comes along.  That also doesn't count job postings that have no deadline; I'm usually so busy trying to keep ahead of deadlines that those without get pushed to the back of the line, and I'm sure many of the open-deadline positions on my list have been filled for weeks.  Until the rate of postings starts to slow down (and it may have, although I haven't checked my job boards for close to a week), there's only so much I can do.

I have had 7 interviews.  One of those was for a position that I actually had not applied for; my resume came into consideration because the district had it from a job fair.  Another district scheduled me for an interview, but then unscheduled me in favor of someone else.  Yeah.  Classy, I know.  Of the 7 interviews I have had, 4 have notified me of having selected another candidate, one has not contacted me but can be safely assumed to be a bust, and one is still a possibility but is several days past their intended timeframe of reply, from which I deduce that they have offered to another candidate and are waiting to see if he/she accepts and is approved by their board; the only way they will offer it to me is if every more favored candidate turns them down.  Not holding my breath.  The seventh interview was this afternoon; they expect to be contacting candidates with their decision on Wednesday.

I have received confirmed rejections for 31 of the applications I have sent, counting the unsuccessful interviews.

I am so, so very sick of job applications.




The most unpleasant thing about a prolonged job search like this, I am finding, is not the rejection.  That certainly sucks - getting confirmed or implied rejections from two interviews was a considerable drag this last weekend - but that's not the worst of it.  The worst part is not knowing why you are being unsuccessful.  Very few of the rejections I have received have made any sort of specific mention as to why one candidate succeeded where others failed, or what I personally could have done differently.  All I know is that someone else's application and/or interview presentation was more impressive and desireable than mine.

This leaves me in a dilemma.  Am I sending out substandard applications?  If so, sending out more is a waste of my time; I should focus my efforts on revising and fiddling with my cover letter template, resume, references and other materials in an attempt to get the perfect combo together.  On the other hand, am I just being outclassed by other candidates?  If so, no amount of resume rejiggering is going to help me; my only hope is to spam enough districts with applications that eventually, I wind up on the top of the heap.  If I guess wrong, all of my work will likely be for naught.

Unfortunately, my choice is no choice at all, because I cannot for the life of me think of what else I can do to improve my resume and whatnot.  If they aren't good enough, I'm sunk.  So I get all the stress of wondering if I'm making the right decision, without ever having had the agency of making a decision in the first place.  Lovely.

What little feedback I've had from districts, however, supports this hypothesis.  Three of the districts with whom I have interviewed were gracious enough to tell me why I was not chosen for the position(s) in question (I could do a whole blog post about my appreciation for a few very classy school administrators who have been outstandingly gracious in rejecting my applications, and a few examples from the other extreme as well) and have all said the same thing.  They all said that I had solid credentials and had given good interviews, but that they had wound up giving the position to a candidate with more experience.

I'm starting to think of experience as the E-word.  It's my newest profanity.

The problem, as I see it, is this.  The state of public education, in Wisconsin in particular and nationwide in general, is causing a lot of mobility in the teaching profession.  Many jobs are being cut for budgetary reasons.  Other positions are staying, but are being so eviscerated in salary and benefits that the experienced teachers in them are leaving to seek greener pastures.  Probably there are a few cases of teachers leaving just due to the sheer ill-will that the Wisconsin political situation has created.  All of these factors are added to the normal influx of new graduates and teachers moving for personal reasons to create a huge body of teaching candidates, especially in popular licensure areas such as English.  And a great many of these candidates have 3, 5, 10 years of teaching experience on their resumes.

Suppose a district posts a vacancy and gets 10 applications.  (Which is a pretty conservative estimate; several rejection form letters have mentioned the number of applications received, and the figures have ranged from 12 to 40.)  If they're lucky, they can discard 2 or 3 out of hand, either for inadequate qualifications or glaring errors.  Now they have 7.  They cull out 3 more that either don't match the specific skillset they're looking for or have less impressive credentials and references.  They decide to give the last 4 interviews.  One interviews poorly and is discarded.  Another seems like a solid teacher, but not a good fit for the specific school and position.  Of the last two, one is a bright new graduate, just out of student teaching, and the other is a 5-year classroom veteran with a solid portfolio of classes and lessons taught.

If I were the hiring official, I'd probably go for the veteran.  The newcomer may interview well, have strong recommendations, and be able to talk the talk with the best of them, but when you get down to it, there's no way to know how well they'll be able to walk the walk.  Honestly, even they probably don't know how well they will do until they get a chance to do it.  With the experienced teacher, you have all the fruits of a solid interview and credentials, and an assurance that this teacher has experience and will require much less on-the-job training and assistance.  Principals want to hire teachers who will make their jobs easier, and even the best rookie teacher will need more support (in fact, state law probably dictates that you give them more mentoring and supervision, whether they need it or not) than someone with a few years under their belt.

Sure, the rookie will be a bit cheaper to pay for the first few years, and will probably have an easier time adapting to whatever district-specific programs you have running, but there's also the chance that they'll go to pieces halfway through the first year.  You pays your money and you takes your choice.

Perhaps I have an overly pessimistic perspective, as I enter my 4th month of concentrated job searching (and yes, I know that many people have been hunting for far longer.  They probably also don't have a specific hiring season that will draw down to a trickle in a month or two), but the fact remains that I have a difficult time imagining myself as the most qualified applicant for any of the positions on my list.  As frustrating as it is to come up short time and again, and as unpleasant as the prospect of sitting out a year and trying again in 2013 may be, I can't find it in myself to blame districts who turn me down (at least not the ones who are classy about it) because I probably would too.  Factors far beyond anything I or these hiring districts can do are shaping the job market, and I'm stuck playing on terms dictated by the powers that be (screw you, Wall Street).

I thought the interview this afternoon went very well.  I liked the principal and teachers I spoke with, I thought I had good answers for all of their questions, and I think the school and community would be good fits for me.  They even explicitly said that I had a very strong application packet, which alleviates the second-guessing I mentioned earlier.  Every signal I'm receiving says that I would do very well there.  And yet I'm still more or less expecting to get a call on Wednesday informing me that the school has chosen to offer the position to another candidate who has more teaching experience.

And I'll be back to square one, spamming applications and hoping find an opening to which nobody applies with more of the E-word than me.