First of all, hi. I'm Robert Talbert, and I'm one of a group of folks asked to blog for YMN on a variety of subjects. I finished my PhD eleven years ago and have been (mostly) gainfully employed by small liberal arts colleges ever since. I'll be blogging at least once a week here on stuff I think might be useful to young(-er) mathematicians. I also blog about math, education, and technology at my main blog, Casting Out Nines. Since mid-October is the beginning of the job search season for mathematicians, I thought I'd share some thoughts about how the colleges view the hiring process, having been on two or three search committees in the past.
Let's do a little math first. Suppose that a young mathematician is hired in at age 30 to a tenure-track position. And let's assume further that all goes well, the new hire loves working at that college and ends up getting tenure and sticking around. This means that the new hire could conceivably be at this college for up to 40 years (!) or even more. (We recently had a member of our department retire who had been at the college for 50 years -- he got tenure the year I was born, as I like constantly to remind him -- so this does happen.)
A question that many new job-seekers don't think about is, how much is it going to cost the college to hire me and keep me around for that long? Well, according to at least one source, the median annual salary in the US for associate professors of mathematics (the rank usually associated with having gotten tenure) is about $62,000. If you get tenure in your seventh year of employment and stay at the college for another 33 years, that figure would be a conservative underestimate of your average salary over your entire career. That comes to 40*62000 = $2,480,000.
Two and a half million dollars. And that figure doesn't include benefits, which add thousands of more dollars per year to the outlay of money that the college is making to hire and retain you. And remember, the $62K/year figure is also an underestimate; many profs, even at small liberal arts colleges start at or near this figure as assistant professors and approach or even cross the six-figure level for salaries as they gain more rank and seniority.
And not only is the college paying a huge sum of money for you, by granting tenure, the college is making you a formative element in the life and character of the college now and for possibly decades after you retire. If you end up being "formative" in a negative way -- failing to be productive or to contribute in a positive way to the college after tenure -- then the cost of retaining you is incalculable, and it's harder to get rid of tenured professors than a lot of people realize.
The point is that the cost of putting somebody on a tenure track is potentially extremely expensive for the college. Therefore, the main task before all the stakeholders in the hiring process -- the search committee, the departmental colleagues not on the search committee, the VPAA, the president -- is to make very, very sure that the benefit outweighs the cost. It's OK to engage in a very expensive decision provided that the decision pays off in the end.
But of course, nobody knows for sure whether a hire is going to work out at the time she is hired. A very promising candidate might end up being a "bust"; another might receive only lukewarm responses from the search committee but end up being a fantastic addition to the college. There is much uncertainty in the hiring process. And so to a large degree, the search committee's job is not so much to find the "best" candidate based solely on his application materials, but to find the candidate who is most likely to be worth the cost in the end. In other words, the search committee has to engage in risk management first and foremost.
It's not enough for a job applicant to submit an application that has a compelling and well-written teaching statement, a lengthy list of publications, expensive cotton paper, and whatnot. Those are all well and good, but they are only in the candidate's favor to the extent that they reduce the perceived risk of hiring him or her. That's the main reason search committees ask for references -- to be able to get external opinions on the candidate and therefore reduce risk. And it seems to me, having read literally entire boxes of applications in the past on search committees, that many candidates would do well to conceive of their applications as a means not only of applying for the job but also reducing perceived risk.
Applicants can do a lot, explicitly, in their applications to accomplish this.
- Research the colleges to which you are applying very carefully to understand the overall ethos of the college and the department, and explain in your cover letter exactly how you fit that ethos. Having lots of experience in teaching or a long list of publications doesn't reduce risk in the eyes of the search committee if the college wants one thing and you clearly want another.
- Don't spend your entire statement of teaching philosophy doing nothing but philosophizing. Search committees aren't very interested in abstraction; they want to know what you have done in the classroom, in real life, not hypothetically you would do in the classroom. (This advice carries over to interviews as well; always be concrete and specific.)
- Ask your references specifically to include descriptions of actual events in your reference letters that illustrate your fitness for the job.
This list could go on, but the main point is that specific, concrete items in an application -- if they are positive in nature -- will reduce perceived risk and make you a more attractive candidate, if for no other reason than you make the search committee less likely to make an extremely expensive mistake. And likewise, it increases the certainty level for you that you'll get hired in just the kind of place that you'd want to spend 40 years working. 
