Running a DH Mock Interview

One thing that helped me a lot as a graduate student was the Scholars’ Lab’s willingness to aid me in preparing for job interviews. I had no idea what to expect, so the practice was hugely beneficial for me—as was the coaching in what a mock interview might look like at all. Now that I’m on the other side of the table and offering them myself, I thought I would document how I run mock interviews in case the information is useful for others.

The Process

You’ll first want to assemble 1-2 other interviewers for your mock committee. Part of the strangeness of interviews is the discomfort of managing a one-sided conversation. You’ll want to mirror that for students if you can. Since interview—and, accordingly, mock interview—requests come up very last minute, it’s helpful to know who in your community might be interested in participating in the process. I often find staff are very happy to accommodate these last-minute requests once they have done them once, but giving them a bit of a heads up that they are in the pool of potential interviewers can help encourage participation in the future. I also try to select people likely to be familiar with the kind of job in question, so pre-gathering a pool of participants can help you identify areas in which you could use some help.

Once you have the group together, share the following documents with them ahead of time:

• the position description
• the student’s job materials
• the plan for the mock interview (including questions to ask)

In an ideal world the committee will familiarize themselves with all the relevant materials, though since these things are often scheduled last minute I never assume this is the case. I usually plan to convey a lot of the information verbally when we meet as a committee.

Schedule 90 minutes for the mock interview, though 60 minutes will work if necessary. I typically use this format:

• 10 minutes to brief on the plan for the session and give general interview thoughts
• 60 minutes for the mock interview
• 20 minutes to debrief, give feedback, and discuss

From there you should be ready to carry out the mock. More guidance follows about how to facilitate each specific part of the interview process for your student and your collaborators.

Part 1 of the Interview: Discussion of the Mock Plan

Since most students come to us without much experience at all interviewing, let alone for the subset of alt-ac or DH positions, I typically open with just a few minutes discussing interviews in general. I often note that these types of positions are not quite full academic positions and not quite standard tech jobs. Discussing the posting ahead of time might help to give students some sense of what they can expect, as each position is unique. For example, postdoctoral positions come in many flavors. Some might be more like pre-faculty fellowships, with a heavy focus on personal research in addition to staff responsibilities. Others might be more flavored as pre-staff positions with limited research time. Temper expectations accordingly with a bit of context about the position.

Plan to mirror the format of the interview—phone, Zoom, or in-person. It’s important to practice as though it were the real thing. Each format is awful in ways that can’t be anticipated ahead of time. I typically discuss the particular weirdness of the selected format with the student quite frankly. I have seen pretty shocking things in the background of zoom interviews before. It happens. Best not to be thrown but also keep in mind how you can minimize the risks of such things for yourself.

Many formal searches have HR requirements that require interviewers to ask the same questions of each candidate. These rules carry a lot of ramifications. Committee members might ask follow-up questions, but back and forth conversation is likely to be minimal. Interviewers might aggressively be taking notes while you talk. The committee will typically move person by person down the line and each read questions from a prepared list. These procedures can give the feeling that you have no real rapport with the people in the room because you get little response visually or verbally to much of what you say. All of this is to say: the awkwardness is not you. It is almost always a reflection of the format, where people are trying to figure out who should go when, who should say what, what to do next, etc. Expect it.

I usually close by asking the student to take the mock as seriously as they would a real interview, up to and including trying their best to stumble through answers as they would for the real thing. This means avoiding the temptation to pass on any one question with a response like “well I should probably think about that more.” Just do your best—we can discuss later.

Part 2 of the Interview: The Mock Itself

The bulk of the mock is spent on the actual interview. I usually offer a few options for the mock committee. Questions can be drawn from experience and made up on the spot if they like, but I also provide a bank of examples based around different topics for my colleagues to use if necessary. During the mock, we alternate who is asking questions to mimic the odd experience of interviewing by committee. And we try to draw from across a spectrum of topics. What follows is an example list of questions I have shared with colleagues in the past. Note the first and last questions common to each mock, followed by a series of different categories we can move among at will.

• First Question
  • What drew you to this position? Why this place?
• Position-specific Questions:
  • We are really concerned about X problem local to us. How would you address it? (I often research for five minutes and come up with something ahead of time.)
  • We want to get more undergrads involved. How would you do that?
  • How do you get faculty to collaborate meaningfully with staff?
  • Do you want to use this as a faculty steppingstone (ideally yes or no depending on the position)? How can we help?
• Research Questions
  • Describe your research and what you think of as your primary intervention.
  • How does your dissertation engage in digital humanities?
  • If you had to construct a through line for your work—dissertation through extra-curricular activities—what would it be?
  • What is your next big project? (might be book, a DH project, etc.)
• Teaching Questions
  • What is your vision for pedagogy (especially re: DH) and how we might integrate it here?
  • How might that be translated to a curriculum or minor?
  • How does DH inform your approach to teaching?
  • What DH teaching have you done?
  • If you were to teach a DH course for us what would it be?
  • What kind of support do you need for teaching?
• Community Questions
  • How do you approach collaboration? (push to talk about both technical and project management strategies)
  • What experience do you have with grant writing? One problem we have is that when we write grants then the money ends. What do you do about that? How could you have this position help us (and you) grow?
  • How do you bring students into your program when you’re a multidisciplinary org like ours?
  • How do you build community and visibility on campus?
• Technical Questions
  • We are interested in how you would begin to design a digital archive. Talk us through it.
  • Hand a list of dates that have been formatted differently - What do you see here? Why does this matter? How would you address it? (an actual interview question I had once!)
  • What did you learn from your biggest technical failure?
• Last Question
  • Do you have any questions for us?

I could go on and on, but these are just meant as a starting point. I typically flavor the questions a bit towards the specific job in question. For example, a DH Developer mock might have more technical questions than an interview for a DH Specialist. But I do think giving a broad spectrum of questions, difficulties, and topics can be helpful for students as they try to figure out what they can expect. Often just seeing a big list of example questions like this can be enough to spark a student’s imagination as they continue to prep on their own.

Part 3 of the Interview: The Mock Debrief

Perhaps the most helpful piece of the mock is the feedback that students will receive from the committee. Each person will have their own things that they noticed, but I often find that there are a few points that students might especially need to hear advice on.

Because students often feel like imposters, it can be easy to overwhelm them with feedback. So, we often open debrief sessions simply by encouraging them. They survived. They can do this. Be careful to consider—and frame—your advice in the context of the circumstances. If the actual interview is the next day, a student cannot expect to change their personality wholesale based on your feedback—and advice to do so might just make the student panic. Instead, emphasize those things that feel doable and learnable in the time allotted.

One way to do this is to start with the good that you noticed in the mock performance. Were there specific questions they responded well to? Can you help them to extrapolate that performance to a more generalized approach? Were there responses where they felt particularly light on their feet? It’s easy to focus on the bad, so the students might need your help seeing their strengths. And opening with these moments can offer a healthy frame for the conversation to follow.

Students often lack confidence in their own experiences and their ability to speak from them to the job at hand. I always encourage students to think about their current identities as students as a kind of superpower. Staff and faculty putting together DH programming often have to work hard to reach out to students just like them. They’re living it! It’s just a matter of reframing their own experiences as expertise. What has worked for them in their own DH education? What has not? What lessons could they take elsewhere? They often know more than they might think!

I could offer much more in the way of specific advice that comes up repeatedly for students interviewing for DH jobs: contextualizing themselves as a PhD graduate applying for library work, saying enough for a particular question, saying too much, recognizing those questions that feel like traps, etc. But really I would just trust yourself and your students. In the same way that your students are capable of shining but might need the help to see it, I am confident that someone who has read this far in a post on this topic will have good instincts about what to share with a student about their interview performance.

Share all notes, guides, and questions (including those you didn’t ask) after the fact with the students for their own prep work. Follow up with the student close to the date and afterwards, both to encourage them and to find out how to better mirror the mock format to what they saw in reality.

Last Caveats

Some advice for readers of this post: know your own limits. I only have participated in so many kinds of search committees. Those I have served on primarily pertained to digital humanities, alt-ac, or library jobs. Other institutional contexts and types of positions will look different, in ways I cannot know. When I get a request for something more out of my wheelhouse—like a faculty position or an industry gig—I will try to pull in folks with experience in those contexts. Your university might also have a career center that could offer some advice on certain kinds of positions. Graduate students might not be their usual clientele, though, so they might need some orientation to the kinds of positions as well. I am always transparent with students about the limitations of my own experience and where they might need to look for advice from others.

Even with this final warning to recognize the limitations of your experiences and resources, I would encourage you to think expansively about how you can gather what you do have into useful professional development experiences for students. Students need all the help they can get as they try to apply for a broad range of opportunities in a toxic and unsettled job market. Your students will benefit from the effort you put into helping them prepare, especially for alt-ac or digital humanities positions that might feel a bit unusual for those less familiar with them.