Job interviews
Job interviews for Australian universities will generally involve an applicant being interviewed by a panel of academic staff.
Panels can be as small as three people and I’ve heard of panels of six people. Most commonly the panel will be four people, and you will generally be informed of these before the panel begins. Panellists are generally composed of the direct report (i.e. the person responsible for your employment who is likely to chair the meeting); a disciplinary peer within the school, department, or lab; a panellist from a seperate school or faculty. These panellists may overlap with specific executive roles such as school or faculty-level research or education administration duties, or may represent other interests such as leadership, disciplinary alignment, grant or supervision concerns, and so on. Finally, they may simply be included to meet policy requirements around affirming the quality and consistency of the interviews across candidates. There may also be an HR representative, who is simply there to take notes and ensure policy compliance; they shouldn’t ask you questions - although they may answer questions from the panel around policy matters.
The formal structure of the interview will generally be given to you in advance.
You may be asked to present something, so make sure you read the invite email carefullly. If presenting in person and wish to use slides you should check whether you can use these in advance. If you absolutely need slides and have to present in person, and do not know if you can use them, then consider printing these out. Try and keep your slides relatively simple, categorise your information and try and keep materials tabular.
Each panellist will have a line of questioning for you. If a panellist has adminsitrative duties then this will be useful for determining the kinds of questions they are likely to ask you. In other words, the Education Director is likely to ask you about education and teaching matters, just as the Associate Dean of Research is likely to ask you about research. If you don’t know what roles these individuals have then you may be able to infer from staff directories. This isn’t crucial information to know, as the questions will be guided towards the competencies you need to address from the PD.
Questions may be built from materials in position description, especially the Key Selection Criteria and Key Responsibilities (or equivalent sections). However, these are unlikely to be verbatim, and your interviewers may modify their questions in order to focus on specific competencies. You’re allowed to ask for clarification, and this might be useful for you to work out what the question is ‘really’ about.
If you are presenting in the interview, just confirm the instructions you’ve received with the chair - i.e. “I’ve been asked to present on X, is this in line with your expectations?”