The Job Talk

The job talk is perhaps one of the most stressful moments in the interviewing process. During it, the candidate is trying to balance erudition and accessibility, depth and breadth, anxiety and the need to appear in control. The following is a summary of advice on this topic given by Professors Sonya Rose (History, Sociology), Jana Nidiffer (School of Education), Susan Nolen-Hoeksema (Psychology), and Jarrod Hayes (Romance Languages) at the Academic Job Search Symposium held on September 22, 2000. You should check it with members of your own department to confirm its applicability to your discipline.

General advice

• At this point in the application process, a candidate can easily feel that the interviewing department holds all the power, but in fact this is not the case. The department really wants to acquire a new colleague who will fill a gap they have, and at the campus visit, they are usually just as eager to impress a candidate as the candidate is to impress them.

• Try to find out before hand who is likely to make up your audience. Will there be people from other departments? Will there be undergraduates?
  In thinking about how to appeal to an audience that is broader than your disciplinary colleagues, you might consider crafting a talk that answers the "so what?" question - one that tells your audience why your work is important in the broader scheme of things.

• When you provide a writing sample to the search committee, keep the job talk in mind. You might not want to give away all of your best chapters but rather keep one in reserve for the job talk.

• Speak on a topic with which you are very familiar. This is not the place to try out new or unfinished research. During the question period, you want to feel confident of your responses.

• Don't try to summarize your entire dissertation in one job talk. You might introduce your talk by describing your dissertation in broad terms (i.e., the questions and problems it addressed), and then move on to discuss one specific aspect of it. If you do attempt to cover the entire dissertation in your talk, be sure that the overview is not so diffuse and general that people do not get an idea of how you think, what methods you used, what kinds of analysis you engaged in, and what you found.

• The job talk is a one-item test. One-item tests are notoriously unreliable, but that's what the job talk is. It is crucial to be well-prepared. A number of people in the department who will have a say in hiring you will only see you at your job talk and will make their decision regarding your future based on that performance.

• If, during the campus interview, someone takes you on a tour of the department or school, ask to be taken by the room where you will give your job talk so you can get a sense of it.

• Be aware of how what you eat and drink can affect your performance during the job talk. Before it, be careful not to drink a great deal more alcohol than you are accustomed to or to drink caffeinated coffee at a time of day that you are not used to. Either of these things can throw off your performance in small ways that can have bigger consequences in terms of your confidence and poise.

• Don't make the slides, overheads, or handouts you use during your talk too complicated. A general rule of thumb is to never have more than 7 pieces of information on a slide (and that includes the title). Don't dumb your work down, but you do want it to be as simple and visually accessible as you can make it. That means making sure nothing is too small to be seen from the back row and changing dense tables of information to graphs or charts whenever possible. When you are practicing your job talk, ask friends and colleagues for feedback on the accessibility and utility of your visuals as well.

• Be sure to have a backup plan in case the technology (Powerpoint presentation, slide carousel, etc.) you intend to use either is not available or breaks down. If you use slides, you might bring overheads just in case, and you might bring photocopies (or a paper version to photocopy) to back up the overheads. Be prepared for the worst case scenario.

• Be sure your title makes it clear exactly what your talk is about. Should the department's members meet two or three weeks after your visit, you want the mention of your title to immediately bring its content to their minds.

• Be absolutely certain to stay within the department's time limits. In doing so, you demonstrate that you respect your audience's time.

Preparation
 

• One way to learn how to give a good job talk is to observe those of others. Go hear the job talks in your department or similar departments and then listen to how faculty evaluate the talk afterwards. Try to figure out what succeeded and what failed. Observation also helps you to figure out what your discipline expects from a job talk (i.e., how much focus should you place on methodology, etc.).

• Practice your job talk endlessly. First, give it to your mirror, your dog, your cat. Then persuade your friends and family to listen and give you feedback. Then, if possible, try to give it to colleagues or your adviser and get their feedback. Practice, practice, practice.

• The question period following the talk is nearly as important as the talk itself. Professors often put a lot of weight on how well you can think on your feet. You should practice responding to questions just as much as you practice your job talk. Get your friends to ask you the most obnoxious and difficult questions they can think of and practice responding to them.

• The question period provides faculty members a sense of how you might act both as a colleague and as a teacher. It is imperative that you take every question seriously, no matter how uninformed or far-fetched or plain stupid it seems to you. Answer it in the most direct and sophisticated way that you can.

Evaluation

• Perhaps the most challenging aspect of the job talk is that you are being evaluated on at least three criteria simultaneously. You are being judged as a scholar, as a colleague, and as a teacher.

• Departments are looking for colleagues who are interested in what they do, who do interesting work themselves, and who want to make a contribution to the department. Be sure to seem like you are happy to be there giving your job talk and that you are looking forward to having the audience get to know you and your work better. You want to communicate that you are likeable. Make an effort to prevent any nervousness you might be feeling from affecting the tone of your voice, and particularly from turning it into a monotone or making it inaudible.

• Be sure to present your material in a coherent and thoughtful fashion that tells a story or makes an argument and demonstrates the originality of your thought. Young scholars often make the mistake of presenting their research in a chronological order or giving their talk as the story of their intellectual encounter with the material.

• Your talk to be sure to communicate how you think, what methods you used in your research, what kinds of analysis you pursued in your dissertation, and what your conclusions were.

• Be sure to speak clearly and speak logically. Bring some slides or overheads if they would help to make things more clear. Practice speaking at moderate volume and speed (not too much or too little), and be careful not to overuse jargon. Your audience should find your points easy to understand, since if they cannot do so they will surely conclude that undergraduates have little hope of doing so.

• It may be appropriate to have a more teaching-oriented job talk to use at schools where teaching is emphasized. This talk might be slightly less formal and in it you might discuss some issues of teaching that are related to the research you have just presented. You might discuss the challenges of teaching some of these issues to undergraduates and how you might overcome them or the relationship between your research agenda and your teaching interests.

• Click here for advice about giving the job talk at small liberal arts (or other teaching-focused) colleges.