[alexshye]

I went out on the faculty job market 1.5 years (the second year I wasn't as serious about it so I'll count it as .5). The first year was 60+ applications, the second was less than 10 if I remember correctly. All of that resulted in 7 interviews, 1 offer that I didn't end up accepting, and a whole lot of rejections.

My advice to anyone applying out for faculty jobs is just to expect a ton of rejections. I stopped reading the letters/emails after I knew they were rejections. Reading more doesn't do any good and it's not like it is a personal letter anyways. One of the things that made it easier was that I was once involved in a faculty job search. 400-500 applications were whittled down to about ~40 that looked good. The process of whittling those down to the 7-8 we interviewed seemed very arbitrary; many of those we didn't interview looked very good. After the interviews, you could have made clear arguments for a few candidates. In the end, one got an offer. So, after seeing the number of applications involved, and the randomness involved in the process, it's pretty easy to just know there will be a lot of rejections.